ON NOVEMBER 13th the New York Cosmos won the North American Soccer League (NASL) title, beating the Indy Eleven on penalty kicks in the final. In every other football-playing country in the world, their triumph would have been cause for outright jubilation: the champions of the second division invariably rise up to the top tier the following season, where they benefit both from the challenge of facing the toughest competition and from the windfall profits associated with higher gate, broadcast and merchandise income. But no such pot of gold awaits the Cosmos, who also claimed the NASL title in 2015, 2013 and 2012. Because Major League Soccer (MLS), the first division, maintains a closed-league structure—de rigueur for American team sports, but unique in the context of global football—all the Cosmos have to look forward to is another year of mediocre opposition and ho-hum revenues. Similarly, no matter how poorly the worst team in MLS performs, its slot in the league is never in doubt.

In recent years a small groundswell of advocates have mounted an increasingly vocal campaign for football in the United States to adopt the global standard of promotion and relegation (P&R)—or “pro/rel”, as it is often abbreviated on Twitter. The movement includes journalists at both traditional print and digitaloutfits, an online umbrella group and Jurgen Klinsmann, the recently sacked coach of America’s national men’s team. The chorus grew louder on November 21st, when Deloitte, a professional-services network, released both a report making the case for an “open pyramid” in the United States and a poll showing overwhelming support among fans for the proposal.

The arguments for P&R are familiar and straightforward. First, the system vastly increases the share of matches at all levels where something meaningful is at stake: many of the most-watched contests in P&R leagues involve losing teams desperately flailing to fend off relegation. In a closed-league environment, by contrast, clubs out of contention for a title dutifully “play out the string”, or even play to lose (“tanking”) in order to benefit from a higher amateur-draft pick the following year. P&R also gives minor-league clubs something valuable to play for. Every so often, it can yield a Cinderella story like that of the English Premier League’s Leicester City, who moved all the way up from the third division in 2009 to win the championship this year. Finally, by sharply increasing the number of genuinely competitive clubs, P&R would augment opportunities for young American talent to receive top-notch instruction. Today, MLS recruits mostly from universities; making the lower tiers of the pyramid genuinely competitive would create hundreds of new slots for dedicated training. But nonetheless, even as ever-more voices are calling for the adoption of P&R, America’s professional leagues themselves are moving in the opposite direction.

The ongoing debate over the organisation of football in the United States reflects the sport’s awkward status in the world’s largest economy. There may be some underlying, structural factors that help explain why P&R never caught on in America. First and foremost, travel distances are far greater than in European domestic leagues, which increases the risk that large areas of the country full of free-spending fans could be left without a top-division club under a P&R scheme. Nonetheless, the biggest reason for the discrepancy is probably simple historical path-dependence.

The early days of professional baseball, America’s first mass spectator sport, were wracked by clubs poaching each other’s players. In response, team owners banded together to respect their rivals’ contracts—and also to prevent players from voluntarily switching employers even when their deals had expired. This rule in turn created an opportunity for upstart leagues to sprout up and pay market wages. But the clubs that had agreed to form Major League Baseball (MLB) successfully deployed every tool at their disposal to squelch such challengers and preserve their joint monopoly.

Only once did a competitor—the American League (AL), founded in 1901—become so strong that the incumbents could not suffocate it. For two seasons, they battled bitterly for players and fans. But in 1903, the older National League (NL) begrudgingly recognised the AL as a co-equal circuit, and signed a “peace agreement” that established the World Series as a post-season championship contest between the victors of the two major leagues. Once the Supreme Court ruled in 1922 that federal antitrust law did not apply to MLB, there was no way any of the members of either half of this highly profitable and now legally-protected club would accept a system that put them at risk of demotion.

The dawn of English football was similarly chaotic. Although the country’s Football Association first permitted professionalism in 1885, there was no regular schedule of league matches until the advent of the Football League three years later. Just like the battle between baseball’s AL and NL, a rival league, the Football Alliance, sprouted up just one year later. But whereas the AL and NL were roughly evenly matched economically, the Football Alliance was clearly the weaker sibling. So when the two circuits joined forces in 1892, they agreed to form a second division consisting primarily (but not exclusively) of Alliance clubs, who would have the opportunity to ascend to the top if their performance warranted it. Six years later, the merged leagues implemented automatic P&R, laying the groundwork for the system that would be replicated in football around the world to this day.

In American baseball, without P&R, minor leagues still flourished in the first half of the 20th century—as did the Negro Leagues for black players that MLB teams refused to employ. However, MLB clubs collected so much more revenue than their minor-league counterparts that they could always buy up the most talented young players, just as modern European football teams help themselves to rising stars from Latin America and Africa. And in the 1930s, Branch Rickey, an innovative major-league general manager, formalised this hierarchy by consolidating control of several minor-league clubs at different levels and using them exclusively for the purpose of developing talent for his MLB roster. In short order, all MLB clubs set up similar “farm systems”. The success of this model was quickly adopted by the National Hockey League, whose teams signed affiliate agreements with franchises in the lower-tier American Hockey League to train players for development. (American football and basketball, the other two leading team sports on the continent, had no need to set up or take control of minor leagues, since their professional circuits developed long after university leagues did. They have always relied on colleges to train their players.)

For nearly a century, this historical happenstance persisted in a divide among both countries and sports: football leagues around the world used P&R, while in the United States, where football was mostly an afterthought, closed leagues prevailed. But as part of America’s successful bid to host the 1994 World Cup, the United States set up a long-overdue top-tier professional football league. The organisers of MLS, both in deference to local tradition and in order to rustle up financing, adopted the American closed-league model, with a novel twist: rather than buying specific franchises, investors would take a stake in the league as a whole, which in turn controlled all the teams. Although existing clubs have subsequently been accepted into MLS, these additions have been made exclusively on a business basis, with no regard for on-field play in lower divisions.

MLS is resolutely opposed to adopting P&R. Its owners have subsidised the growth of the sport in America for years on the understanding they were buying into a protected club; were they suddenly to face the risk of relegation, those investments would likely come to naught. Moreover, few lower-division clubs have the necessary infrastructure, from academies and training grounds to home stadiums, to support top-level football. P&R would also require a major reorganisation of the sport’s annual schedule, and would spark fierce opposition from university clubs, who would lose many of their athletes to professional ones.

But without either a P&R model or a baseball-style farm system, minor-league football in America is a free-for-all that harks back to the chaos of the 19th century. Its near-collapse began in 2009, when Nike, a footwear company, announced plans to sell its stake in the organising body of lower-tier football on the continent to an outside buyer. In response, nine clubs announced they would jump ship and establish the rival NASL, named for an earlier league that played from 1968-84. The teams left behind eventually consolidated into the United Soccer League (USL), which is now the official third division.

Shortly after the NASL began play, it hired a commissioner, Bill Peterson, who sought to challenge MLS’s sole possession of division-one sanctioning in the United States. The league expanded into New York, a market with an existing MLS team, and which would add a second MLS club shortly after. An NASL team owned by basketball star Carmelo Anthony opened in Puerto Rico, and the league signed national television deals. It announced plans to grow to at least 18 franchises, and unsuccessfully applied to the United States Soccer Federation for top-division status. The NASL even threatened to file an antitrust lawsuit against MLS.

So far, however, the NASL’s struggles to keep its own house in order have prevented it from making MLS break a sweat. Of its 12 teams, at least three will not be back in 2017; Minnesota United is heading to MLS, while the Ottawa Fury and Tampa Bay Rowdies are moving to the USL, with the latter threatening legal action on its way out the door. The Fort Lauderdale Strikers have been so thoroughly mismanaged that players went unpaid for parts of this year. And the financial situation at Rayo Oklahoma City became so farcical that one of its minority owners seized the pitch—as in, he literally absconded with part of the playing surface, because he feared it would otherwise be auctioned off to cover operating costs. The lone expansion team for 2017, the oddly named San Francisco Deltas, count one of the former Fort Lauderdale owners in their upper management. And the Cosmos, easily the NASL’s most successful club, have failed to dent the market share of MLS’s New York City FC and Red Bull New York.

In fact, it is the NASL, rather than MLS, that faces a mortal threat from below. The rump USL has expanded into potentially valuable NASL markets, such as Cincinnati, Reno and San Antonio. And by signing a deal in 2013 to allow MLS reserve teams to participate, the USL now has a reliable source of talent and revenue, which the NASL lacks. Today, most MLS franchises have a USL affiliate or reserve club for the purposes of player development. They are also strengthening alliances with clubs in the fourth-tier Premier Development League, a semi-pro circuit where most of the players are under 23. In other words, the lower divisions of football in the United States look increasingly like farm teams for a closed top-tier league—more like other American sports, and less like global football.

None of this means that the dream of instituting P&R in the United States is dead for good. In theory, there are plenty of work-arounds that could address the concerns raised by MLS. The league could easily establish a minimum market size to qualify for promotion. And it could extend its centralised ownership structure to lower divisions, so that income from all tiers would always be pooled among MLS shareholders to insulate them from relegation-related losses. But it will take more than a blossoming internet movement to get the league to budge. As the tumultuous births of both MLB and England’s Football League demonstrate, only when faced with a credible threat to its monopoly will a major league entertain the possibility of reform.