Promotion and relegation

Promotion and relegation is used by sports leagues as a process where teams can move up and down among divisions in a League system, based on their performance over a season. Leagues that use promotion and relegation systems are sometimes called open leagues. In a system of promotion and relegation, the best-ranked team(s) in a lower division are promoted to a 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. During the season, teams that are high enough in the league table that they would qualify for promotion are sometimes said to be in the promotion zone, and those at the bottom are in the relegation zone (colloquially the drop zone or facing the drop).^[1]

An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises. This maintains the same teams from year to year, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams, and with no team movement between the major league and minor leagues.