While interesting ideas, I don't see how any of the three could realistically work in the American market.
1. Transfer rights is interesting, but whenever you hear about transferal of players, it's always about how a team from one league in one nation sells to another team in another league in another nation - such as ManU selling Ronaldo to Real Madrid. You would never see ManU selling a player to Arsenal nor Real Madrid buying from Barcelona. The problem with American sports is for the big four (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL), there are no "worldwide parallels" that would make such a deal workable. There are existing professional leagues around the world in baseball (notable Japan), basketball (all over Europe), and hockey (most notably Russia), but the problem is it's not truly parallel - MLB, NBA, and NHL are clearly the premier leagues in the world, where trying to determine whether EPL, Bundesliga, or Serie A was the world's "premier" league would most likely end up in a pissing match. And further, the NFL clearly has no equal league anywhere in the world.
2. While intra-league transferral could potentially work here in the US, in-season tournaments would not work for US sports for the very same reasons why I listed in #1. In-season tournaments are not of one national league - the successful ones (most notably, the Champions League) are multinational.
3. Relegation is the one that I would love to see applied to pro sports in the US, but once again, I'm not necessarily sure it could or would work with our pro sports setup here. The reason why I say that is because of predetermined confereces and divisions based on geography. The European soccer leagues all play in a league that is not divided up by conferences. Every single sport in the United States is broken up into conferences and divisions based on geography (while conferences aren't necessarily geographical (NBA and NHL are while MLB and NFL aren't), all of the divisions are geography-based). Now, in the given example, say the Nationals were to be relegated in favor of the Toledo Mudhens. Geographically that would be fairly in context. However, say the team to take the Nationals' place is the AAA team from Salt Lake City. Could you realistically place them in the NL East (and suffer through many of the same criticisms throughout the '80s and '90s of the Atlana Braves playing in the NL West) - or are you going to realign your conferences/divisions each and every year to allow relegation to work properly - thus doing away the very reason for having geographical-based divisions in the first place (the development and maintaining of regional rivalries)? And, throwing the regional division argument away, while it could work in MLB and NHL (due to the fact that they have AAA and AHL, respectively), it would never work for NBA and NFL (neither of them have "developmental" leagues) - and you would have to dispose of the "farm systems" that are AAA and AHL respectively because you couldn't very well potentially compete against your own farm system at the same level.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like the concepts. It just wouldn't work here in the US.
