Re 1, are you suggesting salary cap? Because I seriously find it insane that there’s no salary cap on soccer. It makes the highest levels of the sport a complete joke. Only 5 teams have won the EPL since 2004, and if you go to 6 teams you get to 1995. That’s not a healthy competitive environment.
IMO offside should use running photo finish rules. The forward most part of one player’s torso needs to be behind the forward most part of the other player’s torso. It’s the most simple and intuitive method, IMO.
A salary cap can’t work in sports. I simply dont see how that could ever work. For example look at the IPL (Indian cricket) where players are paid off the books using sponsors etc.
I know the competition is an issue in football but what has solved it is actually the clubs that aren’t restricted lol. PSG, Man City, Chelsea are 3 oof the clubs that have won the UCL recently.
I think multi club models should be banned, I think you should be forced to have 20% of the ownership be in the hands of socios or fans. Germany does 51%.
Ofc loopholes will always be found in any rule, just ask Chelsea. So I’m not convinced any rule would improve the economics or competition.
Look at laliga who put preemptive salary caps over revenue percentage. Barca avoid any repercussions. Meanwhile almeria, an ambitious club, a club owned by one of the richest mem in Spain is relegated bc they couldn’t invest asuchbas they would’ve liked (although I smell smth shady there too).
Next issue is that different competitions are held by different associations so spanish fa rules for laliga meanwhile uefa rules for the UCL. There is no centralisation as there is in american sports. And then the cwc now with Fifa rules. Plus who makes these rules is another problem.
There are voting blocks created and a lot of politics by dinosaurs (the world cup hosting rights are a good example of what always happens).
Then theres balloon payments I’m the EPL, relegated clubs get more money than other championship teams for a while. Fairness questions are ridiculous bc fairness is impossible.
People dislike oil money but is it worse than other sources? Worse than old money?
As for competition, teams in the UCL will always make more money, either you do the ESL and remove the leagues do all the mammoths fcacd each other on equal grounds or you accept it as is.
Sorry for the rambling I typed while eating and my brain and hands were a mess.
Uhh, wrong? Like, provably, obviously wrong, from all the sports that do successfully implement it. There isn’t a single Australian league of note without a salary cap, including the soccer A League and T20 cricket Big Bash. American sports also largely have salary caps.
You’re not wrong that there are problems and loopholes that need to be carefully addressed, but that is not a reason not to do it at all. It’s a reason to look to examples elsewhere and learn from their successes and mistakes, and improve upon them.
It’s a matter of fairness and good competition. A team with huge pockets being able to win half the time is grossly unfair and against the spirit of sport. And it’s not fun as a fan or spectator when the same few teams win over and over again.
People dislike oil money but is it worse than other sources? Worse than old money?
I don’t think this is necessarily relevant to a salary cap discussion. Maybe a team gets its funding from Old Money. Maybe it gets them from oil. But with a salary cap, the impact of either of those is much less, since a much higher percentage of funding will be directly from revenue generated by the team itself, and the league more generally.
Fwiw though my answer is yes. Old Money did crimes decades and centuries ago. And that’s obviously less bad than ongoing crimes today. By analogy: if you had to pick, which is better: to put someone in gaol for a murder they committed 40 years ago, or prevent someone else from being able to commit murder later this year? For me the answer is obvious.
It works in american sports bc there is no promotion or relegation. Can’t work in a sport with it. I know the big bash has no more teams than the few that participate and cricket economic model is even worse.
American sports play under one federation. Who do you want enforcing the rules? Uefa? Fifa? The national fa? The national league? Other national sporting authorities? Other European sporting authorities? Other global sporting authorities?
Who’s laws do they follow? National? Continental? International? Regional? How do you create an even field when some teams are getting UCL money and dominating local leagues?
Do you make man city give their UCL winnings tk Southampton? How do you account for the Italian tax system?
Again its not possible in football. Not that no financial law is possible, just that the salary cap won’t work. Bc the revenue of teams can never be the same.
Barca can spend 40% of their revenue on sporting expenses and so can Cadiz. They just have different revenues.
How do Cadiz get the big revenue? Either outside investment like psg etc or long term European football (nearly impossible and only viable for a couple of clubs in every league).
So the uneven nature will exist so long as:
Teams play in more than one competition.
Promotion and relegation exist.
For the old money thing. All profit and the money of capitalists is exploited and the surplus value of labour of the workers. All investors are the same. They can’t have money now if they aren’t exploiting someone now.
But let’s drop this argument, it never goesnto a natural conclusion.
It works in american sports bc there is no promotion or relegation. Can’t work in a sport with it. I know the big bash has no more teams than the few that participate and cricket economic model is even worse.
That’s certainly part of it. It is also relevant that American leagues are a legal cartels that can control player movement subject only to collective bargaining with the players unions, as this removes the unbalancing effect of external compensation. They are also generally the highest level of their sport (though sometimes by default because only Americans care), meaning the threat of losing players to outside entities is minimal, though until they accepted significant revenue sharing (generally runs close to 50% of revenues), the emergence of competitors was always possible.
The weird outlier in the US is MLS, which must compete in the global market. They benefit from (1) having a squishy-AF salary caps, and (2) playing in the middle depths of the global market for professional footballers, meaning that skillful organizations can replace talent more or less like-for-like. As an aside, MLS franchises are much better at doing this than they used to be, and there are as many players passing through on their way up as down.
Yeah I don’t know enough about american sports to talk as in depth as I have about other matters here.
But yes thats the point I was trying to make too. I agree with basically all you said.
Now i know a lil about the mls. And I tried to understand their player registration rules and its all a mind fuck. Absolute mind fuck. So many ridiculous rules that need to be fulfilled making squad building an absolute headache. Still a lotta money in the mls which makes them valuable. And the college system helps too.
Fair enough. Pro-Rel has certain direct consequences that make a salary cap untenable, but I can see how it’s the whole system of a pyramid that includes pro-rel that you were getting at. I am actually fairly protective of the American system as a completely alternative system of professionalization that emerged fairly organically here and actually has some advantages to go with its disadvantages, but you can’t just pick and choose pieces of them to insert into the other. A salary cap in UEFA is laughable. FFP is already eye-rollingly abused.
Absolute mind fuck.
Yeah, it’s absolutely byzantine. The legal structure of MLS is bizarre as well. Technically, it’s still a single entity, though de factor the “investor operators” now work almost as independently as traditional American franchise owners, but the roster rules absolutely reflect their legal origin as intracompany transfers and “funny money” credits, all filtered through a traditional US-sports collective bargaining agreement, and goosed whenever a sufficiently big star wants to play out a few years here.
And the college system helps too.
The number of players coming up to MLS through college has shrunk quite a bit over the years, and the number of impactful players doing so has cratered in the men’s game. It’s basically now a place to fill out a few spots on the bottom of the roster and the reserve team, and as an occasional pleasant surprise among the late developers whose prop prospects at 18 were bleak enough that a college degree seemed the prudent choice. Once MLS realized they could make player development pay for itself with academies sitting on top of the already lucrative American youth setups college soccer was doomed to be an also-ran. Really only American football and men’s and women’s basketball depend heavily on the College system, where those sports are financially self-sustaining, so in exchange for not getting players brought up in your own style of play, the pro leagues get 100% free player development, including bearing the risk for injuries. Baseball too, though to a lesser extent and “minor league baseball” as a development path for teenaged players from across baseball-playing countries is still perfectly viable. I am less well-versed in Ice Hockey, but it seems like a hybrid system of independent youth clubs, some college, and European clubs.
Yeah I can’t imagine a world where financial rules can make anyone happy in Europe.
Imn notncaught up on the history of the mls as a structure. Will check that sometime.
Again not very caught up on american sports enough to make a comment here. But that is insightful. I know the Spanish system inside and out but this is interesting (in a bad way)
The EPL would enforce it for the EPL. La Liga would enforce it for La Liga, etc.
The unusual stratification of soccer leagues lends itself some difficulty in obtaining consistency, but that is not a good enough reason not to try. Especially for EPL, which really is professional (non-international) soccer for most of the world. People in Vietnam or Namibia know about and often pick a side in the Liverpool–ManU feud. Far fewer could tell you about Bundesliga teams.
Relegation also causes difficulty, but again, shouldn’t be insurmountable. A sort of “grandfather” clause to allow players in teams that get relegated to not have to immediately take a big pay cut (assuming lower leagues would have a lower salary cap), similar to how BBL allows international players exemptions and A-league already allows each team one player who can simply ignore the salary cap entirely.
I’m not pretending it’s simple. Just that the problems a salary cap is designed to fix are huge problems with the integrity of the sport, and the difficulty of implementing it is far outweighed by the benefit that would be obtained.
For example, in the NRL, since 2004, there have been 11 or 12 winners (depending on whether you count the Eels winning after the Storm were found to have broken the salary cap, and had their Premiership taken from them retroactively). In the AFL it’s 10. BBL has only existed since 2011, and it already surpasses EPL’s 2004 total with 6 unique winners, despite also only having 9 teams compared to EPL’s 20.
Now I’m not an expert in these leagues. But i know a lil about the bbl atleast.
I predict the NRL has no relegation? And teams only play in the NRL? I also guess the worst team has first pick in drafts or whatever?
With the BBL, its ridiculous. One year your best players get called up to national teams and you’re done for. Its a joke the way cricket leagues are run. Similarly no relegation.
BBL has some rules regarding players expected to miss a significant amount of time due to international tours. I don’t know the details of them, and maybe some tweaking of those rules would help. I don’t think it’s an obstacle so terrible the idea of salary caps should be thrown out.
NRL has a similar problem, on a lesser scale. Three weeks every year is State of Origin, where many teams lose their best players to an inter-state competition. And there’s the occasional international test, but that’s much less common (and less commonly during the league season).
NRL does not have a draft in the style of American sports. Instead, players usually graduate up from playing in lesser state and regional leagues through the junior system.
AFL does have a draft, with a bunch of carve-outs like the “father-son” rule, and priority access to local players especially for teams in places where AFL is less popular.
Say youre a bbl team that loses Hazelwood plus head for example. (Dont remember who plays where, just an example)
Who the hell can replace them.
A player from the same category. But your international spots are probably already picked and the other decent local players are gone too. The drop off from your ream would be insane.
On point 3, that doesn’t solve the issue, it just moves it a yard or so back. The linesmen and women will still have to make the exact same judgement about what was in line with what.
The purpose is not to make the call easier, although by research from the Chinese second division it does (I’m not sure if om correct here, this is by memory)
The actual purpose is to increase goals per match. Sitting deep would become less practical for getafe like teams.
Football:
Re 1, are you suggesting salary cap? Because I seriously find it insane that there’s no salary cap on soccer. It makes the highest levels of the sport a complete joke. Only 5 teams have won the EPL since 2004, and if you go to 6 teams you get to 1995. That’s not a healthy competitive environment.
IMO offside should use running photo finish rules. The forward most part of one player’s torso needs to be behind the forward most part of the other player’s torso. It’s the most simple and intuitive method, IMO.
A salary cap can’t work in sports. I simply dont see how that could ever work. For example look at the IPL (Indian cricket) where players are paid off the books using sponsors etc.
I know the competition is an issue in football but what has solved it is actually the clubs that aren’t restricted lol. PSG, Man City, Chelsea are 3 oof the clubs that have won the UCL recently.
I think multi club models should be banned, I think you should be forced to have 20% of the ownership be in the hands of socios or fans. Germany does 51%.
Ofc loopholes will always be found in any rule, just ask Chelsea. So I’m not convinced any rule would improve the economics or competition.
Look at laliga who put preemptive salary caps over revenue percentage. Barca avoid any repercussions. Meanwhile almeria, an ambitious club, a club owned by one of the richest mem in Spain is relegated bc they couldn’t invest asuchbas they would’ve liked (although I smell smth shady there too).
Next issue is that different competitions are held by different associations so spanish fa rules for laliga meanwhile uefa rules for the UCL. There is no centralisation as there is in american sports. And then the cwc now with Fifa rules. Plus who makes these rules is another problem.
There are voting blocks created and a lot of politics by dinosaurs (the world cup hosting rights are a good example of what always happens).
Then theres balloon payments I’m the EPL, relegated clubs get more money than other championship teams for a while. Fairness questions are ridiculous bc fairness is impossible.
People dislike oil money but is it worse than other sources? Worse than old money?
As for competition, teams in the UCL will always make more money, either you do the ESL and remove the leagues do all the mammoths fcacd each other on equal grounds or you accept it as is.
Sorry for the rambling I typed while eating and my brain and hands were a mess.
Uhh, wrong? Like, provably, obviously wrong, from all the sports that do successfully implement it. There isn’t a single Australian league of note without a salary cap, including the soccer A League and T20 cricket Big Bash. American sports also largely have salary caps.
You’re not wrong that there are problems and loopholes that need to be carefully addressed, but that is not a reason not to do it at all. It’s a reason to look to examples elsewhere and learn from their successes and mistakes, and improve upon them.
It’s a matter of fairness and good competition. A team with huge pockets being able to win half the time is grossly unfair and against the spirit of sport. And it’s not fun as a fan or spectator when the same few teams win over and over again.
I don’t think this is necessarily relevant to a salary cap discussion. Maybe a team gets its funding from Old Money. Maybe it gets them from oil. But with a salary cap, the impact of either of those is much less, since a much higher percentage of funding will be directly from revenue generated by the team itself, and the league more generally.
Fwiw though my answer is yes. Old Money did crimes decades and centuries ago. And that’s obviously less bad than ongoing crimes today. By analogy: if you had to pick, which is better: to put someone in gaol for a murder they committed 40 years ago, or prevent someone else from being able to commit murder later this year? For me the answer is obvious.
It works in american sports bc there is no promotion or relegation. Can’t work in a sport with it. I know the big bash has no more teams than the few that participate and cricket economic model is even worse.
American sports play under one federation. Who do you want enforcing the rules? Uefa? Fifa? The national fa? The national league? Other national sporting authorities? Other European sporting authorities? Other global sporting authorities?
Who’s laws do they follow? National? Continental? International? Regional? How do you create an even field when some teams are getting UCL money and dominating local leagues?
Do you make man city give their UCL winnings tk Southampton? How do you account for the Italian tax system?
Again its not possible in football. Not that no financial law is possible, just that the salary cap won’t work. Bc the revenue of teams can never be the same.
Barca can spend 40% of their revenue on sporting expenses and so can Cadiz. They just have different revenues.
How do Cadiz get the big revenue? Either outside investment like psg etc or long term European football (nearly impossible and only viable for a couple of clubs in every league).
So the uneven nature will exist so long as:
For the old money thing. All profit and the money of capitalists is exploited and the surplus value of labour of the workers. All investors are the same. They can’t have money now if they aren’t exploiting someone now.
But let’s drop this argument, it never goesnto a natural conclusion.
That’s certainly part of it. It is also relevant that American leagues are a legal cartels that can control player movement subject only to collective bargaining with the players unions, as this removes the unbalancing effect of external compensation. They are also generally the highest level of their sport (though sometimes by default because only Americans care), meaning the threat of losing players to outside entities is minimal, though until they accepted significant revenue sharing (generally runs close to 50% of revenues), the emergence of competitors was always possible.
The weird outlier in the US is MLS, which must compete in the global market. They benefit from (1) having a squishy-AF salary caps, and (2) playing in the middle depths of the global market for professional footballers, meaning that skillful organizations can replace talent more or less like-for-like. As an aside, MLS franchises are much better at doing this than they used to be, and there are as many players passing through on their way up as down.
Yeah I don’t know enough about american sports to talk as in depth as I have about other matters here.
But yes thats the point I was trying to make too. I agree with basically all you said.
Now i know a lil about the mls. And I tried to understand their player registration rules and its all a mind fuck. Absolute mind fuck. So many ridiculous rules that need to be fulfilled making squad building an absolute headache. Still a lotta money in the mls which makes them valuable. And the college system helps too.
Fair enough. Pro-Rel has certain direct consequences that make a salary cap untenable, but I can see how it’s the whole system of a pyramid that includes pro-rel that you were getting at. I am actually fairly protective of the American system as a completely alternative system of professionalization that emerged fairly organically here and actually has some advantages to go with its disadvantages, but you can’t just pick and choose pieces of them to insert into the other. A salary cap in UEFA is laughable. FFP is already eye-rollingly abused.
Yeah, it’s absolutely byzantine. The legal structure of MLS is bizarre as well. Technically, it’s still a single entity, though de factor the “investor operators” now work almost as independently as traditional American franchise owners, but the roster rules absolutely reflect their legal origin as intracompany transfers and “funny money” credits, all filtered through a traditional US-sports collective bargaining agreement, and goosed whenever a sufficiently big star wants to play out a few years here.
The number of players coming up to MLS through college has shrunk quite a bit over the years, and the number of impactful players doing so has cratered in the men’s game. It’s basically now a place to fill out a few spots on the bottom of the roster and the reserve team, and as an occasional pleasant surprise among the late developers whose prop prospects at 18 were bleak enough that a college degree seemed the prudent choice. Once MLS realized they could make player development pay for itself with academies sitting on top of the already lucrative American youth setups college soccer was doomed to be an also-ran. Really only American football and men’s and women’s basketball depend heavily on the College system, where those sports are financially self-sustaining, so in exchange for not getting players brought up in your own style of play, the pro leagues get 100% free player development, including bearing the risk for injuries. Baseball too, though to a lesser extent and “minor league baseball” as a development path for teenaged players from across baseball-playing countries is still perfectly viable. I am less well-versed in Ice Hockey, but it seems like a hybrid system of independent youth clubs, some college, and European clubs.
Yeah I can’t imagine a world where financial rules can make anyone happy in Europe.
Imn notncaught up on the history of the mls as a structure. Will check that sometime.
Again not very caught up on american sports enough to make a comment here. But that is insightful. I know the Spanish system inside and out but this is interesting (in a bad way)
The EPL would enforce it for the EPL. La Liga would enforce it for La Liga, etc.
The unusual stratification of soccer leagues lends itself some difficulty in obtaining consistency, but that is not a good enough reason not to try. Especially for EPL, which really is professional (non-international) soccer for most of the world. People in Vietnam or Namibia know about and often pick a side in the Liverpool–ManU feud. Far fewer could tell you about Bundesliga teams.
Relegation also causes difficulty, but again, shouldn’t be insurmountable. A sort of “grandfather” clause to allow players in teams that get relegated to not have to immediately take a big pay cut (assuming lower leagues would have a lower salary cap), similar to how BBL allows international players exemptions and A-league already allows each team one player who can simply ignore the salary cap entirely.
I’m not pretending it’s simple. Just that the problems a salary cap is designed to fix are huge problems with the integrity of the sport, and the difficulty of implementing it is far outweighed by the benefit that would be obtained.
Currently salary caps are based on percentage of revenue and the way to enforce em varies.
I think its as good as it gets. An objective cap is just a way of making sure players leave your league for another.
For example, in the NRL, since 2004, there have been 11 or 12 winners (depending on whether you count the Eels winning after the Storm were found to have broken the salary cap, and had their Premiership taken from them retroactively). In the AFL it’s 10. BBL has only existed since 2011, and it already surpasses EPL’s 2004 total with 6 unique winners, despite also only having 9 teams compared to EPL’s 20.
Now I’m not an expert in these leagues. But i know a lil about the bbl atleast.
I predict the NRL has no relegation? And teams only play in the NRL? I also guess the worst team has first pick in drafts or whatever?
With the BBL, its ridiculous. One year your best players get called up to national teams and you’re done for. Its a joke the way cricket leagues are run. Similarly no relegation.
BBL has some rules regarding players expected to miss a significant amount of time due to international tours. I don’t know the details of them, and maybe some tweaking of those rules would help. I don’t think it’s an obstacle so terrible the idea of salary caps should be thrown out.
NRL has a similar problem, on a lesser scale. Three weeks every year is State of Origin, where many teams lose their best players to an inter-state competition. And there’s the occasional international test, but that’s much less common (and less commonly during the league season).
NRL does not have a draft in the style of American sports. Instead, players usually graduate up from playing in lesser state and regional leagues through the junior system.
AFL does have a draft, with a bunch of carve-outs like the “father-son” rule, and priority access to local players especially for teams in places where AFL is less popular.
Say youre a bbl team that loses Hazelwood plus head for example. (Dont remember who plays where, just an example)
Who the hell can replace them.
A player from the same category. But your international spots are probably already picked and the other decent local players are gone too. The drop off from your ream would be insane.
Also depends on who becomes available.
On point 3, that doesn’t solve the issue, it just moves it a yard or so back. The linesmen and women will still have to make the exact same judgement about what was in line with what.
The purpose is not to make the call easier, although by research from the Chinese second division it does (I’m not sure if om correct here, this is by memory)
The actual purpose is to increase goals per match. Sitting deep would become less practical for getafe like teams.
Oh, I see what you mean - sorry, misunderstood which issue was being solved!
I’m still not sure about such a change, but fair enough, my argument wasn’t really pertinent.