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What is the purpose of salary cap, salary floor and draft systems and is it good for sport?
This is not an article I ever planned to write but the significant response generated in my European football hypocrites article has forced my hand.
It was impossible to engage with the all comments on the article, particularly with enough depth to justify the direction the debate was headed.
The article was written in response to predictable and tiresome jibes from Manchester United or Liverpool, for example, fans towards those supporting those sides new to success, such as Manchester City or Chelsea perhaps.
Essentially I was highlighting the hypocrisy of these detached fans that support sides purely because they are or were successful or have or had the best players.
Eventually the debate became focused on the absence of ‘socialist’ sporting policies in European football. This ‘free market’ is in stark contrast to Australian domestic sporting competitions, in which varying degrees of restrictions are imposed on our sporting sides.
As with any difference of system, each has their own advantages and disadvantages.
If we look at the European football model a number of observations can be made.
Firstly and most significantly, it is important to point out the freedom clubs are afforded to be successful. The absence of restriction empowers clubs such as FC Barcelona and Manchester United to create global juggernauts of self-perpetuating success that just isn’t possible in Australian sport.
Barcelona is given the opportunity to create and maintain perhaps the greatest club football team in history, which Australian sport would certainly have prevented.
At the very least Pep Guardiola constructed a team to match AC Milan of the early 1990s. If we were to translate this into modern Australian sport Greg Inglis, Matt King, Jeff Lima, Adam Blair and Israel Folau would still be running out under Craig Bellamy at the Storm week in and week out.
For every Barcelona however there is a Leeds United or Portsmouth Football Club to counterbalance the potential for enormous success.
These clubs were, at different points in time, approaching the summits of English football. Leeds made the Champions League semi-finals while ‘Pompey’ won the FA Cup and qualified for Europe before the house of cards inevitably came crashing down.
It’s hard to imagine but clubs like Portsmouth have many thousands of long suffering fans that only briefly allowed themselves to enjoy a little success before poor off field management sent them plummeting down the leagues and staring at relegation to conference football.
Fundamentally the system fails to protect clubs from themselves and, in turn, fans that have done absolutely nothing wrong.
Another feature of European football is the amplification of competitive advantages that large market teams hold over smaller centre sides.
In this model, sides that have established global appeal such as Manchester United or dominate major cities such as Juventus have far greater market places from which to source income streams.
No amount of astute management will ever enable a side such as Peterborough to organically match the turnover of United.
The absence of a salary cap has, over time, turned competitions into a series of mini-competitions. The English Premier League, for example, is a competition in which three sides had a realistic shot at the title this year while another five sides fight it out for fourth place.
As you go down the table there is competition for European football and an eighth placed finish, mid table security and the inevitable relegation dogfight.
While it is true that fans of English football sides at all levels can hope and dream of some form of success (look at the resurrection of Swansea City immortalised at Wembley last week for evidence), there are very few teams and thus fans that harbour realistic chance of the ultimate prize.
Essentially sides such as Everton have become content with a sentence in eternal limbo, in which eking out top eight finishes in the Premier League is considered successful without ever seriously challenging for any silverware.
The alternative is practiced in domestic sport here in Australia, in which no NRL side has won back-to-back titles in 15 years and often grand finalists have fallen outside the top eight in 12 short months.
We can conclude the absence of artificial restrictions definitely empowers sporting teams to reach the highest of highs but the flipside of this it that enough rope is provided for which clubs can hang themselves.
Whether this is a good thing or not I will leave up to my fellow Roarers.
I thoroughly enjoy the European football model as a detached fan but while domestic models aren’t perfect, I wouldn’t be in any great rush to swap.
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