When Manchester City won the Premier League title a month ago, the club was rewarded with a whopping $54.4 million from the league's gargantuan postseason bonus pool.
Runner-up Arsenal received $51.7 million, third-place Manchester United $49 million — all the way down to cellar-dwelling Southampton at $2.7 million.
(British soccer also "relegates" the bottom three teams from the Premier League every year to the oddly-named Championship League, to be replaced by the top three teams from the latter. Don't give its American baseball counterparts any ideas!).
Now imagine if this was done in Major League Baseball.
Would teams like the A's and the Royals be not even trying to improve their rosters, instead content to simply pocket their guaranteed revenue sharing money?
(Of course some would point out that MLB survived the 52-110 Arizona Diamondbacks of 2021 and the 51-111 Diamondbacks of 2004, along with the toothless Tigers of 2003, whose 43-119 record that year left them one game shy of the modern record for most losses in a season established by the 1962 Mets).
And so far as the A's and their quest to move to Las Vegas is concerned, this is why MLB needs to nip this sort of thing in the bud — even though the NFL's Raiders also abandoned Oakland (population 440,646 as of 2020) for Las Vegas (population 641,903) in 2020.
What would be the most effective way to do that?
The answer is with expansion, which will prevent a team from moving to a city that is desperate enough for a major-league team that it is willing to pay for a stadium for them to play in.
If a city wants to play this game, let them start at the bottom, with an expansion team.
The players can also be guaranteed a share of what each club receives from the aforementioned pool, including those clubs which did not make the playoffs. This will keep everyone honest — and with nearly every team playing each other an odd number of times under universal interleague play, the season series will break almost all ties.
(Say this for baseball though: unlike in the NFL, MLB teams have no incentive to tank games to get a higher pick in the ensuing draft, or get an easier schedule the following season — especially now due to the 17-game schedule, which gives teams in the same division three non-common opponents instead of the former two: for example, the Vikings will have to play the Bengals, Eagles, and 49ers in 2023, while the Bears get to play the Browns, Commanders, and Cardinals).
With every team trying to finish as high as they can, this will also stimulate fan interest — and lead to upsets at the end of the regular season as teams that are out of postseason contention will try to actively play a spoiler's role in an effort to improve their own position, and give the owner of their local team more money to spend on players in the upcoming offseason (remember that not all owners are equally rich).
Certainly adding two more teams, creating two 16-team leagues, divided into four 4-team divisions, is hardly too much to ask — and then eliminating the wild cards and having only the eight division champions make the playoffs can be seriously considered.
Baseball's postseason has historically been the most difficult to get into: at present, 20 out of the NBA's 30 teams get in, 16 out of 32 in the NHL, and 14 out of 32 in the NFL.
Eight out of 32 sounds about right for the most traditionalist of our four sports.
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