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League is a term commonly used to describe a group of sports teams or individual athletes that compete against each other in a specific sport. At its simplest, it may be a local group of amateur athletes who form teams among themselves and compete on weekends; at its most complex, it can be an international professional league making large amounts of money and involving dozens of teams and thousands of players.

[edit] Terminology

[edit] Synonyms

In many cases, organizations that function as leagues are described using a different term, such as conference, leaderboard, or series. This is especially common in individual sports, although the term "league" is sometimes used in amateur individual sports such as golf.^[1]

The term "league" is also sometimes applied to competitions that would more traditionally be called tournaments, such as the UEFA Champions' League, which is organized with mulitple small round-robin competitions followed by a single elimination tournament to choose an overall winner.

[edit] Leagues and league systems

"League" and its synonyms may be used to encompass either a single competition or a related group of competitions. In the United States, leagues are often divided into subdivisions on historical or geographical lines; these subdivisions may also be described as "leagues," as with the National League and the American League in baseball, or may be referred to as conferences or divisions, as with the National Football Conference and American Football Conference in the National Football League. Teams then compete to be the best in their league, division or conference while also trying to be the best in the league.

In other parts of the world, and especially in Association football, where promotion and relegation is common, the term "league" may be used to refer both to a league system, a group of leagues that are tied together in a hierarchical fashion by promotion and relegation, and to the individual leagues within the league system. For example, the Football League in England and the Bundesliga in Germany are both association football league systems.

[edit] League organization

The common thread between all sports leagues is a structure that allows teams or individuals to compete against each other in a nonrandom order on a set schedule, usually called a "season," with the results of the individual competitions being used to name an overall champion.

A league championship may be contested in a number of ways. Each team may play every other team a certain number of times in a round-robin tournament. Usually, teams play equal number of games or matches at their own stadium and at other teams', because home advantage is a major factor in many sports. When teams competing for a tournament championship do not play the same teams the same number of times, it is known as an unbalanced schedule.

In such a set-up, the team with the best record becomes champion, based on either a strict win-loss-tie system or on a points system where a certain number of points are awarded for a win, loss, or tie, while bonus points might also be added for teams meeting various criteria. Many leagues also use playoffs, where after teams compete in a regular season in a league format, the top teams (possibly determined by conference or division) advance to the playoffs. In some such leagues having the best regular season record is relatively unimportant, though top-seeded teams in some leagues, such as the NFL, can gain byes to later rounds of the playoffs, and teams finishing with the best records usually have the advantage of playing the weakest teams that have advanced to the playoffs.

[edit] Alternatives to traditional league organization

While round-robin and modified round-robin cometitions are the most common form of league organization, there are a number of ways to organize a sporting competition, almost all of which may be described as a "league". Many sports organizations fall on a continuum between a total lack of organization, as in a pick-up game, and a formal league such as is common at the highest level of professional team sports.

[edit] Non-league sports

The simplest form of competition is to allow teams to play each other whenever they see fit. In some sports, such as horse racing, the main goal of the entrants is to win individual purses, and there is little or no ranking or competition outside of winning certain major races. A small amount of league organization may be imposed on these non-league sports by way of a series or tournament tying several individual events together, such as the Triple Crown.

Even in team sports that normally use a traditional league format, some teams often exist outside of any league; these teams are generally known as barnstorming teams and either schedule games against local professional or amateur competition or bring their own competition, such as the barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters did when they toured with the Washington Generals. As with the Globetrotters, barnstorming teams sometimes emphasize spectacle over athletic competition.

In England, the term non-league football is used to describe association football teams that play in organized leagues, but not in the Football League or Premier League, the two highest levels of competition in that sport in that country. Independent baseball is used similarly in the United States to describe baseball teams that play in leagues other than those sanctioned by Major League Baseball. These teams do play in leagues and should not be confused with barnstorming teams that play truly non-league schedules.

[edit] Rankings and leaderboards

Individual sports often use an alternative type of league organziation where competitors are ranked against each other. In the simplest cases, such as boxing, the rankings mean little and the major competition is to crown a champion in a title fight.

In other sports, the rankings and leaderboards gain importance when they are used in seeding tournaments. In some cases, as in NASCAR or the PGA Tour, points are assigned to individual competitions and the resulting points are used to determine a champion at the end of each season. While not usually referred to as "leagues," these season-long competitions with set events are very similar to league structures in team sports.

[edit] Conferences and informal leagues

American college sports are traditionally organized into groups of teams known as "conferences."^[2] These conferences ordinarily keep league tables and crown champions within the conference, as other sports leagues do, but the individual school also schedule a certain number of "non-conference" games that are organized independently between two schools in different conferences, or between a conference team and a non-conference team. Also, national championships in some college sports are determined by a ranking or playoff system that is independent of the individual conferences.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

Cain, Louis P. and Haddock, David D.; 2005; 'Similar Economic Histories, Different Industrial Structures: Transatlantic Contrasts in the Evolution of Professional Sports Leagues'; Journal of Economic History 65 (4); pp1116–1147

[edit] See also

[0] A Golf League of Their Own

[1] What is the Ivy League?

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