Different major governing organizations attempt to achieve financial and/or competitive parity in different ways. For example, the
National Football League (NFL) in the US has established the shared revenue plan in which all teams equally benefit from television revenue and sales of NFL franchised goods. All major leagues of
North America use a
draft system to ensure that the best prospects are allocated to the teams that are the most in need of them. Ensuring parity is what American football fans are referring to when they often say that anyone can win or lose on any given Sunday. In much of the world outside North America, parity is enforced through
promotion and relegation: the weakest teams in a league are forcibly expelled from the league and switch places with the best teams in a lower league. An example of this is the
B.League in Japan, which has two divisions, B1 and B2. As of the 2020s, empirical evidence increasingly pointed to the conclusion that promotion and relegation, standing alone, was insufficient to ensure adequate parity in any given game. In the 2020s, because their lack of
salary caps was causing too many games to end in blowouts,
association football leagues were collectively bringing in annually only about two times the revenue of the National Football League (
the wealthiest sports league in the world), even though association football had eight times the number of fans worldwide as
American football. As of 2025, different NBA teams have won the championship since 2019 due to these rules, including teams from smaller markets. == Expansion teams ==