February 3rd, 2005

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Why the Premiership Needs a Salary Cap

Via a lazy column by The Province’s Ed Willes, I discovered this interesting analysis of England’s top soccer league:

Funny then that those same goddamn Yanks are the ones enjoying a national football league which manages to be fair, exciting, challenging, interesting, competitive - in short, everything football over here is not.

I’ve never seen a league more unbalanced league by have and have-not teams than
the Premiership. In the last 15 years, only four different teams have won, and only one of those teams (the Blackburn Rovers, who won only once) could be described as a have-not team. The rest–Manchester United, Arsenal and (I suspect) Leeds–are all big spenders.

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem that might apply here: did Manchester develop good players, become more successful, earn and subsequently spend more money? Who can blame then for doing that? I’m sure my Irish friend and fellow Liverpool fan John Keyes will have an opinion on this subject.

Still, the NFL is a remarkable example of what smart fiscal management can get you in a major league sport. Meanwhile, the asshats running the NHL and NHLPA can’t figure out a fair way to divide their billions.

Comments: 6 Responses so far

Mark
February 3rd, 2005
9:21 pm

Related: this Slate article from last year. I wonder if this is a “grass is always greener” type of thing.

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in the know
February 4th, 2005
3:30 am

Just one correction Darren. Blackburn spent a large ammount of money in 1994 to win them that title . Their owner, Jack Walker pumped tons of money in to the club to buy a squad of elite players. It was a short term win, he got tired “investing” money with no financial rewards in the horizon and they went down.

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John Keyes
February 4th, 2005
4:02 am

I agree there should be a salary cap. A friend of mine (another Darren) told me about a very interesting section in Roy Keane’s Manchester Utd. contract. It guarantees that he will be the highest paid player in the club. Clever man.

Leeds spent so much money they are close to extinction now. Only three years ago Leeds Utd were in the semi-final of the Champions League. Now they are 11th in the second divison (now called ‘The Championship’, go figure?), have been bought by Ken Bates (the man who owned Chelsea before our Russian friend), and are very close to going under.

If the salary cap was only introduced in England, less foreign players would move there and it would benefit the 5 national teams of the U.K. and Ireland as more young players from these countries would get a chance. So goes the theory anyway.

The problem with less foreign players could be a reduction in television money , but this would be offset by the lower wage bills of the clubs anyway.

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Dean
February 4th, 2005
7:49 am

I’m a poor judge of these things, as I have never watched a single NFL game, and I only watch hockey when I’m either exceptionally bored or during the Stanley Cup finals, but it seems to me that both baseball and hockey have done a lot of damage to their sport in the minds of the fans with this financial bickering.

If *I* were running things, I’d do everything I could to keep player’s salaries out of the news. Hockey, after all, is a the working man’s sport in Canada, and in parts of the US. It is difficult for the average guy to connect to a player who makes more for a single game than he does for a year’s work.

Hockey may well wind up being the sport that shows that a bad business model (the adversarial management-union relationship, which I personally think is bad in ANY business) can ruin even a lucrative market.

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harp
February 4th, 2005
10:00 am

salary caps in the Premier League (or other big football countries like Italy, Spain) wouldn’t work in my opinion. There’s signing-on fees that can be implemented as well as all sorts of ways of paying of players’ agents, etc…

I think Chel$ki are killing the game, the transfer market was getting calmed down before the big money investments came into that side. Other teams had to spend more to compensate. Plus, there’s always flops like Man Ure’s 24 million buy of Juan Sebastian Veron, who was a plank. For every case of spending, there’s teams with little money (Porto last year, as well as Valencia) who get the big trophies.

When it all comes down to it, it’s 11 men kicking a ball and anything can happen on the day. Ask the Greeks!

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Steve2
February 4th, 2005
2:25 pm

It’s not the salary cap that keeps the NFL competitive, but the revenue sharing. The huge pot of money from the television networks is split evenly among the teams. The worst team gets the same amount of money as the best. This, combined with a draft that gives the worst team the first pick, prevents the rich-get-richer dynamic present in baseball.

Personally, I never understood the need for a salary cap. If the owners don’t want to pay the players more, they shouldn’t. It seems to me that the cheap owners want a way to avoid being held accountable by the fans for such decisions.

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