In my previous blog, I selected 32 teams to join my fantasy ‘Elite UK Premier League’ (as you can tell, I did not spend time on the name!) A new league which will follow the US model of divisions, conferences and a knockout-style ‘playoff’ approach.
I used a range of criteria including past performance, revenue. value, size of the market and geographical location to determine the final 32 teams that made the cut.
You can read how I selected these teams in my previous post below.
What would the English Premier League look like if it moved to a franchise model? Part 1
Divisions and conferences
In the USA, divisions are primarily based on location. For instance, the NBA has two conferences (East and West) and then 3 divisions within each, representing a geographical region in the east or west of the country.
The NHL follows a similar approach, also having an eastern and western conference with sub-divisions within them. The MLS has two conferences but no sub-divisions. The NFL and MLB have a different structure for the conference (American and National instead of East and West) but a geographical approach for the divisions within them.
Following the regional divisions’ approach
My plan from the beginning was to follow the regional approach to conferences and divisions in the UK Premier League too.
Here’s how the league would look if it were to be sorted (as best as possible) by location.
Anyone that has ever followed football will notice immediately that the north-west division is stacked with quality. It includes 4 of the top 6 teams of all time based on points total and accounts for 53 league titles since the creation of the Football League in 1888, and 17 Premier League titles. The South — Central division isn’t too bad either!
On the other hand, it would create particularly weak western division in the Southern Conference, with no current English Premier League teams.
Although the purpose of a franchise league is to create parity in the long term, the gap between the likes of Ipswich and Manchester City is enormous and may be unassailable.
I will reveal now that 2 teams from each division will make the playoffs each year. That means that at least one of Manchester City, Liverpool, and Manchester United will miss the playoffs each year and two of Bristol, Cardiff, Stoke and Swansea will be in.
This is tempting to encourage parity, but losing such a big name every year would reduce the value and appeal of the competition globally so I think I need to reconsider this approach.
The second factor that makes this approach questionable is that the UK is tiny in comparison to the US, with the furthest distance between two teams in the new UK Premier League being 436 miles (Brighton’s Amex Stadium to Rangers’ Ibrox). In the NFL, the Seattle Seahawks’ CenturyLink Field and the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium are almost 3,300miles apart — that’s an 8-hour flight!
Based on these two factors I’m going to reject the location-based approach divisions and instead do the opposite and create divisions with teams providing a spread of locations around the country.
As I have decided to move away from the regional split of divisions, I can’t see the benefit of splitting the league into conferences either. Doing so would reduce the potential playoff matchups significantly, so I will stick with 8 divisions of 4 teams.
Determining the divisions
The fairest way to create balanced divisions is to sort the teams into 4 ranked ‘pots’ according to their current ability, so that’s how I started this.
I used a combination of historic and recent performance in the league to determine which teams were in which pots. The first two pots are made up entirely of current Premier League teams. As new entrants whose ability is hard to determine due to playing in the much weaker Scottish Premiership, Celtic and Rangers are in pots 3 and 4 respectively.
The draw
Along with the pots I also wanted to ensure there weren’t too many teams from one region in the same division, and equally that each division has a good spread across the country.
Anyone familiar with the UEFA Champions League round of 16 draws will know how complicated this can get. In the Champions League, teams from the same group cannot play each other in the round of 16, nor can teams from the same country. It means that many permutations have to be accounted for.
I took a simpler approach — I used a random number generator and simply re-drew if it failed my criteria.
Firstly I randomly allocated each pot 1 team to a division. No issues there.
I then randomly allocated each pot 2 team with the same approach.
For pot 3 and then pot 4, I started to bring into play my rules, so if one division was too centred around one location I would redraw. In divisions D I drew Birmingham City as the fourth team, which would have meant 3 Birmingham teams in one division! So I redrew and picked Portsmouth.
So there you have it — the 8 divisions of the new UK Elite Premier League. If you’re wondering how on earth the fixtures will work for this new league and if your team will still get to play their fiercest rivals, read on, it’s coming up next.
The Playoffs
I’m going to do this slightly backwards and explain the playoff structure first as it will help set the overall structure of the league out.
Two teams from each division will make the playoffs each year — a total of 16 teams.
I rejected the option of doing a complex playoff structure involving bye-rounds for top teams or a mini-knockout round of the lower teams.
The winners of each division will be determined based on their points total (then head to head record against the runner up, then goal difference, then goals scored, if necessary) and will be seeded from 1–8 and the runners up will be seeded 9–16 based on their records.
A division runner up can be at highest the 9th seed, even if their points total is higher than a division winner in another division
In this model, the 1 seed plays the 16 seed, 2 plays 15, and so on. The 1st and 2nd seed are guaranteed not to meet until the grand final.
The round of 16, quarter-final and semi-final will be over two legs, with the higher seed playing the second leg at home.
The final will be played on neutral territory so, at this stage, the only benefit of being number 1 seed is that you have had an easier run to the final. Oh, and in the event of a kit clash, you get to choose which kit you wear!
There will be 29 playoff games for fans to watch and a team will need to navigate through 7 games to win it all.
The addition of knockout football will add an exciting new element to the league and with big rivals sitting in separate divisions, it presents plenty of opportunity for knockout rivalry matches.
The regular season
Here’s where it gets a little more complicated, so bear with me!
I want to reduce the number of games per team to increase the meaning of each game, keep the quality high, allow for a winter break, and provide favourable scheduling to UK teams around European games.
There are four types of regular season fixtures on the schedule. I’ll go through them all now.
Intra-division
Every team will play the other 3 teams in their division both at home and away, giving every team 6 intra-division fixtures per season.
Despite being kept apart from their traditional rivals, intra-division games will mean more as teams vie for playoff places, resulting in many ‘6-pointers’ between teams. Wolves and Celtic or Sheffield United and Swansea might not seem like it, but they will become bitter rivals with each other due to the importance of their fixtures.
As only the top two of each division go through to the playoffs, wins against those in your division are more important than games outside of it, as your points total is only important relative to others in your division.
Rivalry
The next set of fixtures is the one I’m most excited about — the rivalry games.
Oldest rivalry — Second City (Birmingham vs Aston Villa) — 1879
Most games — Old Firm (Glasgow vs Celtic) — 420
Most even — Tyne-Wear (Sunderland vs Newcastle) — 53 wins each
Most one-sided — West London (Fulham vs Chelsea — 56% Chelsea win percentage
Each team will be designated a mutual rival and they will play each other at home and away every season, taking the running total of fixtures up to 8 per team.
I went through the teams in the league and paired up the top rivalries. There’s some seriously exciting matchups in there, with almost 2500 total games played between them already.
After determining the 14 most obvious rivalries, I was left with 4 ‘spare’ teams — West Ham, Leeds, Bristol and Stoke.
As regular top division teams, Leeds and West Ham have played the most games against each other (98) of the 6 fixture combinations. Leeds and West Ham are also both suffixed by ‘United’ and Bristol and Stoke are both suffixed with ‘City’. If that’s not a good enough reason to make them rivals, I don’t know what is.
So I’ve added the ‘United Derby’ and the ‘M6 + M5 Derby’ (the route from Stoke to Bristol, and a terrible play on the Brighton-Crystal Palace derby name).
That’s an extra 2 games per team sorted.
Inter-division
This is a concept taken right out of the NFL. Each division will be selected to play 4 other divisions once a season — two at home and two away. This will be selected randomly for the first season and then following seasons it will rotate so that a division never goes more than one season without a matchup against another division.
This is a further 16 games per team, taking the total for the season up to 24.
The equaliser
A franchised league is supposed to be unfair: favouring the weaker teams to encourage a more competitive league.
This fixture, which I’ve dramatically named ‘the equaliser’ will see each team play the teams from the final 3 divisions (the ones they aren’t selected to play under the ‘inter-division’ scheduling) that finished in the same position as them the season before (or by seeding for season 1).
Which games are at which grounds will be determined by a complex set of scheduling rules, but the idea is that no team has more than 2 away games out of the 3.
Staying with the Manchester United example, using the current seedings, Man United would also play Chelsea, Tottenham, and a third game against Man City.
This presents yet more high-quality through closely matched games.
This gives a regular season of 27 games and a post-season of up to 7 games: 34 in total.
So that’s how the new league is going to be set up!* What do you think? Do you like the idea of an equaliser or not? What about the rivalry games?
Let me know, I’d love to hear from you!
*This will never happen. The big caveat there to end.