Know Your Relegated Football Side

G:TB has long advocated a soccer-style relegation system for American sports leagues, if only because it makes us sound moderately worldly. We expect Grantland to appropriate the idea any moment now. We thought it might be cool if the Padres or Royals or Orioles faced the prospect of playing in the International League. We never imagined that the Yankees would feel relegation's cruel gutpunch.

Join us then to consider then the fate of River Plate, the most storied franchise in the history of Argentina's Primera in this installment of Know Your...

Team: Club Atletico River Plate
League: Nacional B (at that makes all the difference)
Nickname: Los Millonarios

Self-Absorbed East Coast Elitist Commentary: River Plate have won 33 Primera championships in their 110-year history, far more than any other Argentinian side. In the early 2000s, the International Federation of Football History and Statistics (sort of soccer's SABR) named Los Millonarios the 9th most prominent club in history. In addition to their numerous Primera crowns, Plate have won five international club crowns, and boasted such global luminaries as Caniggia, Crespo, Batistuta, Cambiasso, and Juan Pablo Angel.

And last week, they fell 3-1 on aggregate to Belgrano, dropping them into Nacional B for the first time ever. River Plate fans (some known as Los Borrachos del Tablon, or 'the drunks in the stands') rioted and called for the head of club president Daniel Passarella. It's as if CC Sabathia was outdueled by Dontrelle Willis to send the Yankees to AAA and elevating Louisville to the show.

A man can dream, anyway.

Top-flight clubs across the world are descending upon Buenos Aires in hopes of prying River Plate's high-priced talent from the suddenly cash-poor franchise. Meanwhile, the Plate's partisans would prefer a trajectory more like that of Juventus, dropped to Italy's Serie B after a match-fixing scandal in 2006. La Vecchia Signora followed that ignominy up by winning the second division in 2006-7 to get back to Serie A, where they've remained.

The Drunks can hope, anyway.