justsomebloke
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There's an article in The Guardian today where Jason Stockwood (Chairman of Grimsby Town) argues the case for a salary cap in English football:
Time for a salary cap to keep leagues competitive and reduce agents’ influence | Football League | The Guardian
It raises an interesting debate. The arguments Stockwood marshals include a fairer distribution of resources, removal of conflicts of interest, reducing agents' proportion of the take and ensuring competitive balance through the pyramid. The MLS cap is invoked as an example to follow.
For me, the big question is the viability of a cap in an environment where many leagues of roughly comparable quality and pulling power are competing for the same resources. It works for leagues like NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB because they are effectively unchallenged at the top of the global pyramid, and will be able to attract the top global talent in any case. This is not the case for anyone in football, and the example of the MLS hardly suggests that this arrangement is something that strengthens the competitiveness of the league against other leagues? Stockwood vaguely suggests this could be solved by "benchmarking" the cap against other leagues to ensure competitiveness, but that does not seem very persuasive.
There are further problems too. The salary cap is not a stand-alone element - it is essentially one element in a balanced system designed to foster parity in the league. It is linked to a controlled skewed access to talent through the draft, and not least to guaranteed contracts, and also required minimum spending on wages by teams. Without those, a cap would simply be a way to dramatically and systematically reduce the players' share of the income. And it presupposes a hugely more equal level of spending on wages by all clubs in the league than what is the case in the PL today.
Given that, I don't see how it could work to just take one element of the NA system, and plug it into a situation where so many of the basic factors are radically different. Square plug, round hole.
Time for a salary cap to keep leagues competitive and reduce agents’ influence | Football League | The Guardian
It raises an interesting debate. The arguments Stockwood marshals include a fairer distribution of resources, removal of conflicts of interest, reducing agents' proportion of the take and ensuring competitive balance through the pyramid. The MLS cap is invoked as an example to follow.
For me, the big question is the viability of a cap in an environment where many leagues of roughly comparable quality and pulling power are competing for the same resources. It works for leagues like NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB because they are effectively unchallenged at the top of the global pyramid, and will be able to attract the top global talent in any case. This is not the case for anyone in football, and the example of the MLS hardly suggests that this arrangement is something that strengthens the competitiveness of the league against other leagues? Stockwood vaguely suggests this could be solved by "benchmarking" the cap against other leagues to ensure competitiveness, but that does not seem very persuasive.
There are further problems too. The salary cap is not a stand-alone element - it is essentially one element in a balanced system designed to foster parity in the league. It is linked to a controlled skewed access to talent through the draft, and not least to guaranteed contracts, and also required minimum spending on wages by teams. Without those, a cap would simply be a way to dramatically and systematically reduce the players' share of the income. And it presupposes a hugely more equal level of spending on wages by all clubs in the league than what is the case in the PL today.
Given that, I don't see how it could work to just take one element of the NA system, and plug it into a situation where so many of the basic factors are radically different. Square plug, round hole.