Relegation makes grown men cry. Promotion ignites city-wide celebrations. Relegation battles are as exciting as title races and the prospect of promotion to a higher level becomes an issue of civic pride. In the U.S., we are denied the drama of a system that sees bottom-finishing major league teams exchange places with the top finishers of the lower division. Here, major league survival is a only matter of money. A team plays at the top level as long as its owners can afford it. Elsewhere, the top division of pro soccer is linked to various lower division. A Sixth Division amateur team in Germany can dream of working its way to the very top. Unlikely? Just slightly. In England, Elton John injected his support into a modest Fourth Division club, Watford, and watched it climb to the top. We’ll never see a promotion-relegation system in MLS — nobody will invest in a team that might be minor-league within a year — but American players have long played roles promotion-relegation battles. Eric Wynalda spent four season in Germany and was relegated twice. John Harkes helped Sheffield Wednesday jump from the second to the first tier, and Kasey Keller helped Leicester stay up. Alexi Lalas helped Padova win a playoff against Genoa to stay in the Serie A. John Doyle and Juergen Sommer couldn’t prevent their teams’ slide. Since the bigger, richer clubs are less likely to buy Americans, U.S. players often find themselves on teams teetering between the divisions. Wolfsburg is a German city of only 125,000 whose club spent the 1980s in the Third Division. Chad Deering helped it reach the First Division in 1997 for the first time. Then Claudio Reyna joined it and the American duo now fights to keep it in the First Division, where some eight teams are fighting to stay out of the doomed bottom three. Meanwhile in the U.S., last place just means last place.