Great news- Championship salary cap to be rejected!

[CirclePoint 200]

1 hour ago, Haus said:

It wont work here for the reasons stated, but in places where it does work it is fantastic - the NFL has 32 teams and there is a much more even playing field, with the bigger teams not just able to snap everyone up.  

Every team genuinely has a chance to compete to win it. 

Absolutely....but no American system of sport has a promotion/relegation dynamic. Further, the American systems have a ‘draft’ that allows the worst teams from the previous season to pick the best new talent. This helps prevents the better/richer teams from monopolizing the system.
 

This is a strong reason why the sports systems in America work with the salary cap system.

Edited January 20, 2021 by CirclePoint

[Thirsty Lizard 3,164]

15 minutes ago, CirclePoint said:

Absolutely....but no American system of sport has a promotion/relegation dynamic. Further, the American systems have a ‘draft’ that allows the worst teams from the previous season to pick the best new talent. This helps prevents the better/richer teams from monopolizing the system.
 

This is a strong reason why the sports systems in America work with the salary cap system.

Yes, it is one of life's ironies that in the home of free market capitalism one of the nation's major sports leagues is ruthlessly centrally controlled along lines which could almost be described as Communist. 

[sgncfc 1,227]

The NFL salary cap this year is almost $200m per playing squad of a maximum of 55 individuals. In addition, some of the payments (including the base salaries) can be spread over the length of the player contract in calculating the spend, or paid upfront. The players also earn millions with endorsements. It's not really much of a salary cap and certainly doesn't allow fair and even competition - the draft is a great idea but ultimately the best players still find their way to the best and most high profile teams.

This is a sport which allows team owners to move their teams from city to city in order to maximise their income.

Be careful what you wish for.

[king canary 7,605]

22 minutes ago, sgncfc said:

The NFL salary cap this year is almost $200m per playing squad of a maximum of 55 individuals. In addition, some of the payments (including the base salaries) can be spread over the length of the player contract in calculating the spend, or paid upfront. The players also earn millions with endorsements. It's not really much of a salary cap and certainly doesn't allow fair and even competition - the draft is a great idea but ultimately the best players still find their way to the best and most high profile teams.

This is a sport which allows team owners to move their teams from city to city in order to maximise their income.

Be careful what you wish for.

It certainly creates a much more even competition than football does right now. Since the year 2000 13 different teams have won the Superbowl. Since the Premier League, compared to 6 teams having won the Premier League. Similarly, 4 different teams have won Serie A, 5 teams have won the Bundesliga and 5 teams have won La Liga. 

Sure teams can find ways to game the salary cap a bit, push some money back, roll some cap over etc etc but overall it creates a playing field where teams are rewarded for drafting well, spending their cap wisely and long term team building. It also ensures teams are generally profitable enterprises and don't go bust. 

Your point about players all finding their ways to the best teams is just not true though- arguably the highest profile player in the entire NFL is Patrick Mahomes, who plays for a team that hadn't won a superbowl since 1969. The Jacksonville Jaguars are likely to draft Trevor Lawrence first in the next draft- if he works out to be the quarterback everyone thinks he can be there is very little chance he ever plays for anyone else.

Finally, the part about franchises moving from city to city isn't really relevant- that and a salary cap don't go hand in hand.

 

[sgncfc 1,227]

All good points (though moving franchises is relevant in terms of attracting players, if you're not allowed to pay them more). I agree that the salary cap is not in itself an evil thing but equally it doesn't on its own produce a sport which is somehow fair and provides a level playing field. The NFL is a stand alone league with specific rules to that league. The college system and regional team system which sits below it is (generally) amateur, and almost no other country plays that sport to an elite level.

Rugby is similar in that very few countries have elite level leagues. Also cricket and pretty much every other sport you look at.

Football is a unique sport in terms of the number of countries which have elite leagues and the vast numbers of amateur players, with pathways up and between those levels from amateur to expenses only, to various levels of semi-pro, to full professional to elite . A salary restriction could only have any real impact if it is top down - if the EPL did that, as someone else has said, the best players would go to countries with no cap, whatever the cap was So it therefore has to be imposed worldwide throughout the sport. There would need to be some kind of standardisation first - is the second division in Germany better than the Turkish first, or the South American third etc.

The only practical way would be for the EPL itself to almost go it alone and say they won't pay more than x in wages to any one player - that falls foul of competition laws and is effectively what Jimmy Hill and others fought against in 1961. So the PFA won't (and can't) go back there. So, the only other option is to impose the cap overall as the NFL do and as Rugby Union have done - that hasn't gone too well.

The best players are already being paid £400k a week, so around £20m a year. A 25 man top six EPL squad might average £80k a week (or more). So if you impose a £125m salary cap to a playing squad, in order to allow each team to have two or three really good players, a few good ones and a lot of not very good ones, does that mean Delia and Michael can still own a football club? Our turnover even with Sky money is about £140m - we still can't compete. Nor can any club without a ground big enough for 60,000 and worldwide supporters clubs generating a £3-400m turnover.

And if you're Spurs and have just spent years building your new ground and sacrificing potential success, and generating massive income by being good at what you do, why should Norwich be allowed to compete with you on a level playing field anyway, unless they do all that work? Leicester have done it so it is possible. 

Apart from all of that, people will always find ways of getting around salary caps. Brian Clough and Harry Redknapp did it (allegedly) and I suspect it still goes on all the time.