The League Fantasy, On Repeat
The more I dig into professional track & field, the more I keep running into the same pattern. Every few years, someone looks at the chaos and says: “Easy. Let’s build a league.”
The sport nods politely, takes the pitch deck, posts the promo graphics, and goes right back to doing what it’s always done: prioritizing championships, outsourcing risk to promoters, and letting the pro season operate like a freelance marketplace.
People call that “broken,” but I don’t. In my humble opinion, Track & Field (aka Athletics) is behaving exactly how it was designed to behave.
From what I've gathered, Athletics is really two overlapping systems with two different goals: a championship system that rewards peaking at the right moment, and a circuit economy that rewards one-off event economics.
Those systems coexist, sometimes peacefully, but most times like roommates who hate each other. The friction between them creates a massive identity crisis for the sport, largely because we can't even agree on what to call the house they live in.
Everything Isn't a "League"
A lot of the confusion starts with language. “League” is often used as a catch-all marketing term, but in practice, these structures are fundamentally different:
League: a centralized schedule, enforceable participation, and a unified media product. A league controls its inventory. It can promise matchups, build season-long stakes, and create narrative continuity that survives a single star missing a week.
Circuit: a set of loosely linked meets where participation is optional and economics are event-by-event. Promoters carry their own risk. Athletes operate like independent contractors. The incentive system is simple: pay enough and the stars show up.
Championship system: a prestige ladder dominated by Worlds and the Olympics. This system rewards peaking at specific moments, not weekly continuity. It sets the calendar gravity that everything else has to orbit.
This language matters because once you name what you’re actually looking at, a lot of so-called “failures” stop looking like failure and start becoming predictable outcomes due to the sport's structure..............or lack thereof.
Track Was Built to Crown Champions, Not Sell Seasons
Most professional sports are built to sell a season; Athletics is built to crown a champion. That difference sounds subtle until you follow the incentives. Trials funnel into championships, which funnel into the global stage. This ladder shapes everything from training cycles to an athlete's tolerance for risk.
That kind of setup makes a week-to-week pro season optional. Athletes treat it as something to fit around championship prep, not something the sport can demand as the main event.
In addition to this weird split, there’s a second constraint sitting right behind that incentive ladder: governance.
World Athletics (WA) decides what counts—rules, eligibility, and the official calendar—but it doesn't pay the daily bills. This creates a permanent friction: the entity that decides who is "legitimate" isn't the same entity providing the day-to-day earning opportunities.
That separation matters because it creates control without accountability. WA can police what counts, but it can’t run the pro season like a single product, since the money and the enforcement are held by different players.
How Meets Became the Center of Gravity
To understand why track struggles to “just become a league,” it helps to look at when the modern pro economy took shape. It wasn't built top-down by a commissioner; it was built bottom-up by independent promoters who controlled dates, budgets, and athlete fields.
In 1993, four European meetings, Zurich, Brussels, Oslo, and Berlin, formed what became known as the Golden Four. They got together with a jackpot concept for athletes who won across the series. It operated inside the broader International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) world, but it created its own incentives outside of direct federation control.
This was the turning point: track’s pro economy started organizing itself without a single league office. The Golden Four showed that independent meets could link their events, concentrate star talent, and create a storyline the market would follow, even if the federation wasn’t running the business side.
The IAAF’s response was to formalize and scale that template. In late 1997, Primo Nebiolo announced the Golden League, framing it as a way to rein in “over-inflated” appearance fees by putting more emphasis on winning and a season-long jackpot.
The point wasn’t charity. It was a defensive power move to pull the summer circuit back under the federation’s umbrella, dilute the promoters collective leverage, and stop the sports most valuable assets—the athletes—from breaking away for good.
Stick around for part 2, where things get current. I’m going to walk through what the Wanda Diamond League actually is (spoiler alert: its not even an actual league), why it can’t do league things even if everyone wants it to, and why the sport keeps cycling through “new leagues” like that’s going to solve a structural problem.