An Sports league is a collective of sports teams or individual athletes who compete against one to earn points in one specific sport. In the simplest sense, it may be a local club of recreational athletes who form teams among themselves and compete at weekends. at its most sophisticated it could turn into an elite international league earning large amounts of money and involving dozens of teams and thousands of athletes.
Leagues and systems of leagues
League” or its equivalents may be used to describe an individual competition or a closely related group of competitions.
A variety of groups employ promotion and relegation. the top-ranked team(s) from the bottom division get promoted to the upper division for the following season, while the lowest-ranked team(s) from the division above is relegated to the lower division for the next season. According to this system “league” can refer both to an organized league system, a group of leagues that are linked with a hierarchical structure through promotion and relegation, and to the leagues in the structure of the league. For instance that in English association football it is known as the English Football League (EFL) is a system of leagues, as is the phrase “National League” refers to both the league immediately below the EFL within the English pyramid as well as to its related league system.
An alternate system of league structure that is commonly used in Australia, Canada, and the United States is a closed model which always has the same teams occasionally, and with occasional admission of expansion teams and the relocation of existing teams. There is no team movement between the higher major league in the major leagues and lower minor leagues.
In many of the closed-model leagues in Canada in Canada and United States, they are subdivided into subdivisions along geographical or historical lines. These may be referred to by the names of conference as well as divisions. For example, the National Football League (NFL) is divided into the National Football Conference and American Football Conference The latter conference was created largely out of the remains of the American Football League after it joined with the NFL however, it currently contains three initial NFL teams as well as three expansion teams. The National Basketball Association (NBA) as well as the National Hockey League (NHL) are divided in Eastern and Western Conferences. The conferences in these conferences, the NFL, NBA, and NHL are further split into subsets, all of which are referred to as divisions. They are geographically based and teams play their divisional opponents better than other team, and they then take on other clubs within their conference more frequently than non-conference counterparts.
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Baseball has its own unique nomenclature, with “Major League Baseball” (MLB) the name of the entire grouping of 30 teams in two “major leagues” which are the American League (AL) and the old National League (NL). They are known as leagues rather than conferences due a number of reasons. There are several reasons for this. National League predates the American by 25 years. It was regarded as a “major” league as compared to its earlier rivals. In some ways, it merely granted this status to the AL, the only league that has similar financial power. Additionally, the leagues played no interlocking schedule or interlocking schedules until 1995. After that, they introduced very little interleague play which was primarily an AL-NL competition occurring between their champions in the World Series. Therefore, the two leagues played mostly in separate competitions within the larger framework of MLB. Also, prior to 2000, they were distinct legal entities, in contrast to the leagues’ conferences. Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan has a similar background and has it being founded in the Central League and Pacific League not having been founded together.
Due to this naming convention in the US, it is typical to employ slightly different terms when you refer to MLB. If someone could refer to “the most talented football player of the season” and thus refer to the entire NFL the same reference of “the most effective outfielder in the league” is almost always refers to an American or National League, while “in every baseball league” or something similar is utilized to indicate the greater position. Each major league also has its own awards that acknowledge the difference between them. This is why the league has two MVPs, the two Cy Young Award winners, etc. Since its name is constructed in a different way–a description of the status of two leagues, rather than the name of one league–it’s common to hear “MLB” and not have “the” attached to it, for instance “the most home runs in MLB in the current year” because one would not refer to “the Major League Baseball”.
League organization
The most common thread in all sports leagues is the structure that allows groups or players to take on each other in a nonrandom order according to a predetermined schedule, often referred to as an season and the results of the individual competitions being used to name the overall champion.
A league championship could be won in a variety different ways. Each team could play every other team a certain number of times during a round-robin tournament. Most often, teams play the same quantity of games or matches at their home stadium as well as at other teams’, as home advantage is an important factor in a variety of sports. When teams competing in the title of tournament champions do not play with the same teams in the same amount of times that is called an uneven schedule.
With this setup, the team with the highest record is crowned champion. based on either the win-loss-tie method or on a points system where a certain number of points are given for either a loss or win or tie. Bonus points may also be added when teams meet certain requirements. Many leagues also use playoffs. After teams compete in a regular season in leagues, the teams with the highest scores (possibly determined by division or conference) are invited to play in the playoffs. In some leagues, the most successful regular season record isn’t a major factor, however top-seeded teams in some leagues, such as the NFL are able to gain exemptions to the later rounds of playoffs, and teams finishing with the highest scores usually benefit from playing against teams with the weakest records who have advanced to the playoffs.
Alternatives to traditional league organization
Round-robin and modified-round-robin competitions are the most common method of arranging a league There are a myriad possibilities to conduct an athletic competition, nearly every one of which can be classified as”leagues” “league”. There are many sports teams that fall somewhere between complete lack of organization like a pick-up match or a formal league , such as is typical at the top level of professional team sports.
Non-league sports
The most simple form of competition is to allow teams to play each other whenever they feel it is appropriate. In certain sports, such as races for horses, the main purpose of the participants is to win individual purses as there is little or no competition or ranking aside from winning certain races. A small amount of league organization may be imposed on non-league sports through a series or tournament linking a variety of events together, for example, the Triple Crown.
Even in sports for teams that generally follow a traditional league format, some teams often exist outside any league These teams are known as barnstorming teams and often schedule games against amateur or professional local competition or bring their own competition, such as their barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters did when they played along with Washington Generals. Like the Globetrotters Barnstorming teams often emphasize spectacle over athletic competition.
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In Europe the term “cup competition” is used to refer to knock-out or single elimination tournaments in which the teams’ pairings in each round is determined by draw “draw” (see to for example, for instance, the FA Cup in England) in order to differentiate it from league competition, in which every club within the division plays the other teams in a specific number of games in the course of the season, generally on an away and home basis.
Additionally to that, in England the term “non-league” football is used for historical reasons to refer to association football teams that participate in organized leagues, however it is not the English Football League or Premier League both of which are the highest levels of competition in that sport in the country.
Independent baseball is also used throughout The United States to describe baseball teams that participate in leagues different from those that are sanctioned by Major League Baseball. These teams do play in leagues, but should not be confused with barnstorming teams that have schedules that are truly non-league.
Leaderboards and Rankings
Individual sports usually use an alternative type of league in which players are ranked against one another. In the simplest cases, such as boxing, the rankings have no significance and the main competition is to crown a champion in a title fight.
In other sports, the ranking and leaderboards are more important when they are utilized in seeding tournaments.
In certain sports the points are allocated to the results of individual competitions The resulting points can be used to establish season ranking, and to determine who is the season’s champion. While not usually described as “leagues” instead, rather “tours” and “series” the seasons-long contests that have set dates are quite similar to leagues in team sports. Examples of this include motorsport tennis, golf beach volleyball, skiing and rugby sevens.
Leagues, conferences and informal games
American college sports are usually divided into teams, which are referred to by the name of conference. [3] The conferences typically maintain records of league tables and crown winners within the conference, similar to other sports leagues do, however, the individual schools also schedule a certain number of “non-conference” games held in a separate manner between two schools that belong to different conferences or between two teams from the conference and a non-conference team. In addition, the national championships of some sports of the college are determined by a ranking or playoff system which is independent of conference itself.
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