I will also add here a proposal I may have floated originally when we were setting up the HGL.
As you might recall, I used to be involved (about 35+ seasons ago) in a large Australian PL competition called the Fishbowl. Like the HGL, it started off relatively humble with 16-20 teams and quickly began to grow as more and more teams heard about it and wanted to join.
As a result, we created an upper division and a lower division (the names of these escape me as I write this). The upper division comprised of the top 16 teams and the lower division comprised of the 16 lower teams. I don't recall how we defined which team went into the upper or lower division but I think it was based on salary.
We also had a component that required a team to win or finish in the final of the lower division (for example) to be able to 'promote' to the upper division where the 2 worst performing upper division teams relegated in much the same way we do in the league currently.
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These are just musings of course as you have floated the possibility of change and, as we can predict with some accuracy, change will be required at some point in the future if the HGL continues to expand.
I appreciate sharing your views, MrJ, so please don't get tone of my earlier posts in a wrong way. Being direct and condensed in communication sometimes could leave a wrong impression.
Again, with the goal of
not starting a thorough discussion about this matter, I'll just add/repeat, that these "issues" if going into two different level divisions have been discussed in lengthy manner earlier. It does include several downsides, such as making a division among "better" and "worse" teams, which is way more pronounced compared to if we play on one, same level league (like now).
And it doesn't even make way more even leagues, as there´d still better and worse teams in each different level divisions (of which I was writing about in my reply on Homegrown Teams II-thread a tad earlier, if my memory serves me).
Also, a new team selection would be more complicated in terms of fairness, as at least personally I don't like the idea at all, that new teams would jump/walk into the highest division directly (if there would be two different level leagues), which means they would have to go through at least one season in lower level "Division 1".
This would in some cases cause seasons with perfect winning record, taking away promotion chances from other potential lower league level promotion candidates (or if two or more good teams would enter lower level league in one season, might immediately diminish promotion possibilities of other, otherwise promotion capable lower level league teams). Needless to say, this might cause motivational problems with lower level league managers (who would have been looking to promote), which would need to be tackled somehow to enable also other than newly added teams to promote.
Also, all stats/records, both team and player, (if/when made available) wouldn't be comparable, as they haven't been achieved against equal opposition (as all teams wouldn't face all teams during the season).
As MrJ noted, it's good to take a look at some possibilities beforehand, and have some discussion about them. But as has been said, this matter has also been discussed in length before, and I didn't check out those messages now to gather all my points into this one - I just wrote semi-intuitively, based on what I remember from my old writings.
This post wasn't written to start a lengthy conversation about this matter again right now (again, it takes time to delve into these kind of topics).I would also like to cordially add, that while of course I have the intention to make HGL as inviting as possible, it's not necessarily good to do that "regardless of price".
While HGL is an open league, I think it's good to keep in mind that being selected to play in HGL is a priviledge, and not a right. :)