If 4 teams are relegated who is going down?

Veterans League

I am grateful to the Alan Hobson who reminded me this week that I should stop referring to relegation places in the 10-Man League as being just the bottom two in each division. He reminded me that the Veterans League Management Committee had gone into print and told all clubs that they would look to balance the divisions for the 2024 season and advise that this could lead up to four teams being relegated from one or more divisions for next season.

This followed the debacle of this year when it took three attempts to get a structure finalised and fixtures produced with a £400 bribe also to take into consideration. At that time the Management Committee stated that they would be 'balancing up the divisions which was an association objective' and they would look to achieve that for the 2024 season.

The final numbers will depend on team withdrawals and any new teams recruited but clubs should prepare themselves for major changes at that time. So assuming that the Management Committee means what it says this time and that the team numbers in the 10-Man League stay at 60 then the obvious rebalancing would lead to 5 divisions of 12 teams in each. So just out of interest I have taken the tables as they were at the end of June as the half-way point of the season and applied the League Rules to promote the top two teams in each division then relegate sufficient numbers to produce the 5 of divisions of 12 then this would be the outcome as in the table below. With this cock-eyed split of teams in divisions it leads to a situation where the half-way point of the season will not include all teams at the same time but I still produce the following league tables as a guide as to what could happen.

The Division 3 teams relegated in this exercise who had played less games than teams above them and safe should bear with me on this occasion - this isn't really happening. If this was for real then all the teams in red would face relegation for the 2024 season and I will try to remember to factor that into future reports when I talk about the number of teams being relegated at the end of the current season.

So under this exercise model 3 teams would be relegated from Divisions 1 and 4. Then 4 teams would be relegated from each of Divisions 2 and 3.