Subject: Flat Start For Handball

Presumably handball will have a similar league structure and pyramid to that of soccer and hockey, and teams will start with some raw teenage talent and no facilities.

So instead of giving some teams advantages based on division assignment, start all teams at the same level. D.V would probably be enough to handle all teams.

At the end of the 1st season promote the teams with the best records to D.IV. Perhaps there could be some minimum quality level (say top 60% of teams) with a limit of 64 leagues. For smaller countries there could be a minimum of 4 leagues worth of advancers.

The second season repeat the process with the top teams advancing to D.III, with a maximum of 16 leagues created, and a minimum of 3 leagues.

After season 3 and 4, the 2nd then top division would be filled.

Once the pyramid is filled, there could be a switch to conventional promotion/relegation.

+1 but probably impossible with the current code base.

It should be simple enough to create a 5-level pyramid with all teams placed in D.V leagues. They would automatically have D.V economics.

They would be ordinary leagues so the regular season would proceed like normal, including any cup competition.

Let's assume a playoff structure like hockey, which could be used without change, with the relegation playoff round used to determine final teams that promote.

The actual promotion to D.IV would be different, but straightforward. Any code that actually swaps teams between leagues can be used. It is only the special code to determine which teams promote and where.

I think this idea has some merit. A concern would be the amount of time and effort required to make it function correctly. That time and effort might be better spent fixing bugs and tuning the game engines in all 3 sports. It would depend on how long the programmers would estimate the coding process would take. Also, some countries (Czech Republic and Slovakia) currently have VI leagues, so that would probably have to be the base league. This would also imply that there would be no Champion's League until there were actually I.1 leagues. Some users on here would definitely appreciate the non-existence of a Champion's League for the first few seasons.

There are 7456 handball signups from Poland, which is about the combined Czech Republic and Slovakia. Signups, which might have happened 3 years ago, won't all convert to teams (there are more handball signups than soccer or hockey teams). But some managers who have a soccer or hockey team will go ahead and start a handball club.

Let's assume 20-team leagues like in Hockey. That would result in 372 leagues for Poland, while D.V can only handle 256 leagues. Since the idea is to take advantage of the existing code, the extra teams could be placed in D.VI. At the end of the season, these teams would still be eligible to promote to the newly populated D.IV.

D.IV has a capacity of 1280 (64 x 20), so 17,1% if 7456 teams would promote, or about 3.43 teams per league. That is, the top 3 from all leagues would promote. The final week playoffs could be used to determine the 4th place teams which promote, or perhaps OTR could be used.

Some of the remaining D.VI teams could promote into D.V to replace the teams that moved to D.IV, and the rest would form a more conventional D.VI.

It might help to think of this as a more abstract "assigning teams to new leagues" than "pro/rel". PPM has already done this in some countries where they had huge numbers of hockey teams assigned and then dropped (Turkey and Other World). Rather than having a handful of teams in the top divisions, they moved the best teams up. They also moved teams into the Ireland league, which was from a completely different pyramid. And I think they may consolidate bottom level leagues where the number of teams varies more.

You could use OTR to determine Champion's league qualifiers. Or skip the competition until after the 4th season when the winners of the D.II leagues might qualify. And you would still have the Cup Winners Cup from season 2.