History
Prior to 2004, promotions and relegations involved the two bottom J1 clubs (15th place & 16th place) and two top J2 club (1st & 2nd places). At the end of the 2004 season, J1 expanded from 16 clubs to 18 clubs. Due to the expansion, the league promoted the top two teams in J2 to J1 without any relegations. The league also instituted a new playoff game that allowed the 3rd-place J2 club to challenge the 16th (and at the time, last- ) placed J1 club for a berth in J1 in the 2005 season. This was the start of this Promotion/Relegation Series. After the expansion, the league went back to their standard promotion and relegation system (17th & 18th in J1 switching places with 1st & 2nd in J2), but the Promotion/Relegation Series continued. The final series is the 2008 edition, as this is the final year J2 will have been composed of fewer than 18 teams. From 2009, direct promotion and relegation will be in place for three clubs of each division.
The irekae-sen concept is not new; it was a feature of the original Japan Soccer League, when, until 1980, it was usual that the bottom two team(s) in the First Division played off against the winner and runner-up of the All Japan Senior Football Championship and, after 1972, the Second Division's top two. After 1980 only the second-from-bottom team played against the Second Division runner-up.
In 2012 the irekae-sen concept will be revived for the purpose of promotion and relegation between J2 and the Japan Football League, but it will be conditional on JFL clubs having J. League Associate Membership.
Read more about this topic: J. League Promotion/Relegation Series
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)