The League

 I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing about football/soccer. Having derbies without jockeys or horses is just something I’ll never understand. 

But between the overdramatic ‘injuries’ and players picking rubbish road cars, there’s one thing that fascinates me. The league structure of the sport. 

We all know how leagues work I think. The team at the top of the league gets promoted in to the higher league, whilst the bottom team gets demoted to the lower league, and this happens in every league, so at the end of the season there’s always plenty of movement in the sport. 

So what does this have to do with racing? Let me explain. 

Why do we not have a league system in motorsports? Drivers would get promoted and demoted based on their skill and every league/championship would be ultra closely contested. 

Imagine, in a single-seater career path, using Formula 3 as an example. The champion driver would then progress to Formula 2, whilst the bottom driver of the championship gets demoted back to Formula 4. This would happen all the way up the Formula’s, Formula 3, Formula 2 and finally Formula One. The Formula 1 title winning driver would truly be the best driver in the world. 

The end of the season for all championships would be truly exciting to see which drivers are moving up and down to different leagues and what Formula they’ll be driving in. 

One of the major problems with this though is teams in some Formulas will always want to be able to choose their drivers. This could be because of sponsors, nationality, and sometimes connections to other teams or manufacturers. Also, which team takes the promoted or demoted driver? Any team that wants them? What if no team wants to sign them? I guess the logical thing would be the top team takes the demoted driver, as if a driver is demoted from Formula 2 to Formula 3, they’d have already raced in Formula 3 and have been a Formula 3 champion. The driver promoted to Formula 2 from F3 starts from the bottom placed team. 

With sports leagues though, it’s the teams that go up and down rather than the players and this is where the idea becomes even more impractical. How does a winning kart team make a jump in to Formula 4 if they don’t have the funds? What does a demoted Formula One team do with all their assets, factory etc? Sell them on only to win the F2 championship a couple of years later? 

Both teams and drivers being in a league based championship poses impossible dead ends which mainly revolves around money (and hey, what doesn’t). 

It would be great to see a league based championship, although it’s extremely unlikely to happen.