In a franchising model, selected Clubs are guaranteed a spot in a certain sporting league for a set buy-in amount (i.e. NBA, NFL). These leagues are supported by a central organisation, typically the proprietary owners of the sport, that supports the teams within the league’s ecosystem, and excludes teams outside of it from participation.
This is as opposed to the open qualifier model, where any team has the capacity to progress to increasingly larger tournaments, including major international events, by doing well in qualifiers to those tournaments (e.g. if this model were to be implemented in the debate world, in order to get to NEADC, you would need to place top 8 at KNC, and to get to ABP, you would need to get top 8 at NEADC, so on and so forth).