Minor league



Minor leagues are professional sports leagues which are not regarded as the premier leagues in those sports. Minor league teams tend to play in smaller, less elaborate venues, often competing in smaller cities. This term is used in North America with regard to several organizations competing in various sports. They generally have lesser fan bases and smaller budgets.

The minor league concept is a manifestation of the franchise system used in North American sports, whereby the group of major league teams in each sport is fixed for long periods between expansions or other adjustments, which only take place with the consent of the major league owners. In England (and many other countries), the football leagues have many divisions below the top-flight as part of the football pyramid. In other parts of the world there is usually either a system of annual promotion and relegation, meaning that clubs have no fixed status in the hierarchy, or there is only one professional league per country in each sport, rendering the major/minor distinction irrelevant.

Baseball
Minor league baseball is almost as old as the professional game itself, and at first consisted of attempts to play baseball in smaller cities and towns independent of the National League, the first true major baseball league. Soon, scouts for the National League were travelling to watch minor league teams play and attempting to sign the more talented ones away. Some sports historians cite the connection between the other major league, the American League and its minor league forebear, the Western Association. Soon Major League Baseball began formal developmental agreements with some minor league teams, while others remained independent. The most prominent independent minor baseball league today is probably the Northern League.

Ice hockey
The sport with the next most extensive system of minor league teams other than baseball is ice hockey. In North America, between 1988 and 2005, 233 minor professional ice hockey teams played in a total of 160 cities in 13 minor professional leagues. The vast majority of these teams played in the United States, with only 21 of these teams based in Canadian cities. 123 of these minor professional teams played in the southern United States. One reason given for the large number of American based teams is that minor league franchises will frequently move from city to city, and even between leagues.

The American Hockey League is the most prominent of the minor hockey leagues in North America. Other minor leagues include: Most National Hockey League teams have a farm team in the American Hockey League and often share a team in the ECHL. On "the farm" the NHL team will develop young players and, occasionally, rehabilitate older players who are injured or whose quality of play has slumped. These teams, in turn, have lower-level minor leagues to draw players from and pass players down to. Minor ice hockey leagues should not be confused with Junior or Senior ice hockey leagues. They are different in that minor professional hockey leagues do not have restrictions on the age or experience levels of their players, but Junior and Senior leagues do.
 * Atlantic Coast Hockey League (ACHL)
 * Central Hockey League (CHL)
 * ECHL (formerly known as the East Coast Hockey League)
 * International Hockey League (IHL)
 * Ligue Nord-Américaine de Hockey (LNAH)
 * South East Hockey League (SEHL)
 * Southern Professional Hockey League (SPHL)
 * United Hockey League (UHL), formerly the Colonial Hockey League
 * World Hockey Association 2 (WHA2)
 * West Coast Hockey League (WCHL)
 * Western Professional Hockey League (WPHL)
 * Western Collegiate Hockey Association (WCHA)

Basketball
The National Basketball Association has an affiliated minor league, the NBA Development League (also called the "D-League"). The now-defunct Continental Basketball Association (CBA) served some of the purposes of a minor league for the NBA for many years. However, there were no direct developmental agreements between CBA and NBA teams the way that there are between Major League Baseball and National Hockey League teams and their minor league affiliates.

Association football
While Major League Soccer does not have any affiliated minor leagues, the United Soccer Leagues contains two separate divisions of professional teams, USL-1 and USL-2 (which also do not have a promotion and relegation system). These two divisions serve as the second and third levels of the American soccer pyramid. The USL also contains the Premier Development League, a semi-professional league that has some age restrictions.

American football
While there are various semi-professional football leagues, none have any affiliation with the National Football League. The NFL and its teams have had working relationships with several independent leagues in the past, including the Association of Professional Football Leagues, the Atlantic Coast Football League, and most recently, the league owned-and-operated NFL Europe League. Many considered the now-defunct Arena Football League to be a minor league, since several NFL owners had teams in it, but this is not exactly the case. Arena Football is played under very different conditions, and the AFL had survived for 22 seasons before going bankrupt in 2009; since 2000, the AFL had its own minor league, af2. When the AFL went bankrupt and af2 disbanded, the surviving teams joined a new league known as Arena Football 1, which has no NFL-tied owners and will begin play in 2010. Several other independent indoor football leagues that play a similar game exist. Similarly, the Canadian Football League, though it has developed ties with the NFL in recent years and has moved away from competing with the NFL for talent, plays a visibly different game than the American game, and the two sports favor different types of skills. Several minor and developmental leagues independent of the NFL have come and gone; there are currently three that are in development—the UNGL (purely a minor league), New USFL (complementary, major/minor intentions not yet stated), and AAFL (complementary league)-- and one, the United Football League, which began play in 2009 as a complementary top-level development league.

Other sports
Other sports organizations considered to be minor leagues are the golf Nationwide Tour, affiliated with the PGA Tour, NASCAR's Nationwide Series, Camping World Truck Series and Whelen All-American Series, and various other affiliated satellite tours of other individual sports, including the Challengers Tour of Professional Tennis.