![]() Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan has a similar history, with the Central League and Pacific League not founded together.ĭue to this naming custom, it is common to use slightly different terms to discuss MLB. Finally, until 2000, they were actually separate legal entities, unlike the conferences of other leagues. Thus the two leagues played mostly separate competitions within the larger framework of MLB. In addition, the leagues played no interlocking schedule of any kind until 1995, and then added only a small amount of interleague play, with the main AL-NL competition occurring between their champions in the World Series. The National League predates the American by 25 years and was considered a "major" league in comparison to its early competitors, and in a sense it simply extended this recognition to the AL, the only league of similar financial clout. They are titled leagues rather than conferences for several reasons. These are geographically based, and teams play their divisional opponents more than any others, and then play the other clubs in their conference more than their non-conference opponents.īaseball has a unique nomenclature, with " Major League Baseball" (MLB) the name of the overall grouping of 30 teams in two "major leagues", the American League (AL) and the older National League (NL). The conferences in the NFL, NBA, and NHL are further divided into subsets, all of which are called divisions. Both the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Hockey League (NHL) are divided into Eastern and Western Conferences. For example, the National Football League (NFL) is divided into the National Football Conference and American Football Conference the latter conference was formed largely from the remnants of the American Football League after it merged with the NFL, though it now contains three original NFL teams and three expansion teams. ![]() ![]() These may be referred to as conferences or divisions. In many of these closed-model leagues in Canada and the United States, they are divided into subdivisions on historical or geographical lines. There is no team movement between the higher major league and the lower minor leagues. ![]() For example, in English association football, the English Football League (EFL) is a league system, while the term "National League" refers both to the league immediately below the EFL in the English pyramid and to its associated league system.Īn alternate system of league organization which is used primarily in Australia, Canada, and the United States is a closed model which always has the same teams playing, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams. Under this system, "league" may 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. Many groups use promotion and relegation, where the best-ranked team(s) in the lower division are promoted to the higher division for the next season, and the worst-ranked team(s) in the higher division are relegated to the lower division for the next season. "League" and its synonyms may be used to encompass either a single competition or a related group of competitions. The term "league" is also sometimes applicable to competitions that would more traditionally be called tournaments, such as the UEFA Champions League, which is organized with multiple small round-robin competitions followed by a single elimination tournament to choose an overall winner. This is especially common in individual sports, although the term "league" is sometimes used in amateur individual sports such as golf. In many cases, organizations that function as leagues are described using a different term, such as association, conference, division, leaderboard, or series. A sport competition owned and controlled other than by its participant players, teams or clubs is not a league. Many uses of the term league in sports and for sports organizations are misnomers as the term league relates specifically to the form of organization, requiring persons or bodies to be in league together. 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. ( discuss) ( January 2020)Ī sports league is a group of individual athletes, sports teams or clubs who form a league to compete against each other and gain points in a specific sport. It has been suggested that this article should be split into articles titled Sports league and Amateur league.
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