Bodø/Glimt and why open competition is important
FK Bodø/Glimt is a Norwegian football team that most football fans had never heard of until this season. They come from a town of Bodø with a population of roughly 42 000 people. They have been a powerhouse of Norwegian football for almost a decade finishing either first or second every year since their promotion to the top league Eliteserien for the 2018 season.
They are also one of the most exciting football stories of this football season thanks to their magnificent performance in the UEFA Champions League where they beat top teams like Manchester City and Atlético Madrid and reaching ties against Borussia Dortmund and Tottenham Hotspur to reach the playoff stage. Their games have been the most fun to watch in this season's UCL group stage.
There are generally two ways to build sports leagues and tournaments: you can either have predetermined teams who get to participate or you can have an open system based on relegations, promotions and qualifiers.
For many team sports, there's a drastic difference between the systems in North America and Europe. I don't follow other continents' sports closely enough to know about their systems so I'm sticking to the two contrasting ones I'm familiar with.
In the US, leagues like NHL, NFL, MLS, MLB and NBA operate on a closed system. There's no "Division 1" to win to gain a place in the major league. The only way for a new team to get there is through money and politics and it's almost always a completely new team in a new market instead of an existing team when it happens.
In Europe, it's more common to have multi-league systems where you have the highest level domestic league followed by multiple levels of other leagues and these leagues are either directly open (best X teams are promoted from below while worst X are relegated from above) or through qualifiers (best X play against worst X and winners are promoted), even though there are exceptions.
The English Football Pyramid is a great example of this: Premier League is the top league with the best 20 teams playing there but there are more than 7000 teams in the system. And while not practically possible, in theory any of them could rise to the top and win the Premier League given enough time and resources.
In Europe, there's also continental cups like UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Conference League where best teams from across the continental domestic leagues compete against each other. While there's definitely politics in play for which countries have how many spots to compete, generally it can be said that if you play well enough in domestic league and qualifiers, you can hoist the cup at the end of the season.
As a sidenote, Finnish hockey system has been an ugly exception to this as it's been played in a closed system for decades with teams being promoted to the highest league Liiga through cabinets, ie. through business and politics and not through sports achievements. For the previous season, they finally opened it up for promotion qualifiers and then rolled it back to closed system for this season again.
Every now and then, in different sports and regions these systems are being challenged. Almost always by moving towards closed leagues and tournaments. In ice hockey, IIHF's World Championships and the Winter Olympics have been played with an open system through different levels with promotions and relegations or through qualifiers respectively.
However, NHL wants to have their own "best of best" national tournament and they want to control who gets to play there. Most recently, in 2025 it was ran under the name of 4 Nations Face-Off and only featured Canada, USA, Finland and Sweden. Before that, it was called World Cup of Hockey and in 2016 featured teams from Canada, Czechia, Finland, Russia, Sweden, USA, "Europe" and "North American U-23". I hated both of these tournaments because when you take away the opportunity to gain access through sports, you take away the opportunity for new stories and growth of sport in those countries.
Currently, Finland is one of the top teams in ice hockey in the world. But that's quite a new thing: the rise to the top has started in the last 1980s. We won the first IIHF World Championship in 1995 — and the second in 2011. If there had been a closed system ran by NHL in the 1990s, we probably would have never made it to those events.
European Super League was a 2021 proposal by some of the largest European football teams to start their own, closed league. Luckily, there was immediate huge backlash from the football community: fans, clubs, associations and players, and teams one after another saved their face by withdrawing themselves from the proposal. It's not going to be the last time we're gonna see something like this though but hopefully they will never come to happen. A key in that proposed league was that the 15 founding teams would become permanent teams, removing even theoretical competition and threat of relegation.
A similar problem was with the Champions Hockey League which was founded as the cross-European cup competition similar to UEFA Champions League in football. In the early years, the founding teams had a spot in the league regardless of how bad they performed in the domestic leagues. For example, in the first year, my local team TPS had a guaranteed spot for years despite being one of the worst teams in the Finnish Liiga at the moment. It's a mockery of the idea of sport that in the tournament advertised as the tournament to crown the best in Europe has teams that don't even make it to playoffs in their local leagues.
Relegation, promotion and the ability to qualify for different tournaments and leagues based on sporting merit — or simply put: competition — is the core DNA of sports. As we saw in the UEFA Champions League with Bodø/Glimt this year, it keeps the "big teams" humble and reminds them that they need to take it seriously and put their best performance on the field. It gives local fans unforgettable experiences and Cinderella stories that only sports can provide.