You know, oddly enough soccer, even though it shuns competitiveness at the World Cup level, has a great way of dealing with crappy teams, at least at the English leagues level. They'll send the worst team of the season down to a lower division each season; and promote the best team of the lesser league. That's kinda cool.
I’m aware of the way English soccer demotes the worse teams teams to a lesser division every year, and replaces them with the best teams from that lesser division. I agree with you that’s a pretty good idea in theory, but, of course, it has no applicability to American team sports and leagues for a variety of reasons.
Still, the chief value of legitimate competition in team sports - from the perspective of the knowledgeable and mature fan - is the competition itself. Winning is “entertaining,” but in a different way than arts and music and comedy, etc. Losing is disappointing or even saddening or in rare instances, maddening to the losing team’s devout fans. But, barring a tie, someone has to win and someone has to lose every game.
Obviously, there is a certain “entertainment” value, which should be secondary to the competition value, built into team sports by the very nature of the contest. Little intervention from a centralized authority is needed to enhance it. In each sport, that value has qualitative differences from other sports, as the devotees of each can appreciate. Your comparison to chess is very misleading; it is a competitive game, yes, but not a sport, even though some idiotic lefty media might cover it in their sports reporting. The problem with women’s basketball is not a lack of competition or “entertainment,” merely that the public is (fortunately) discerning enough in general to see that the quality of the athletes is no where near that of men’s basketball.
“Entertainment” has several shades of meaning, although many a leftist attorney or agent thinks that professional team sport athletes are interchangeable with real entertainers. The fact is that they are in lines of employment more dissimilar than similar.