A-League held back by restrictive salary cap

Leave the salary cap to the (globally insignificant) eggball codes! It has no place in Football! We did not invent Football, we embraced and imported the game from Europe, we play under the FIFA rules, the game is run successfully WITHOUT salary cap in Europe and pretty much anywhere in the world I believe. So why are we playing smartas.... here down under? Are we trying to show the rest of the world how to run a Football comp???...Are we entitled to do that??? Can we show evidence of huge worldwide sporting success based on salary cap practice??? AFL and NRL have salary caps. How popular/successful are these codes in the world? NEXT TO NONE! So can The World Game learn anything from AFL and RL? NO! ZERO! So WHO has to learn here on how to run a worldwide hugely successful sport? Does Europe have to learn from Australia or Australia from Europe? Can Football learn from eggball or eggball from Football? The answers are logic.

I'm a big fan of Ayn Rand myself and as someone who believed in the benevolent dictatorship I would have that that she would support the cap. Nord...if we are still having this conversation in 10 yrs time you will be 150% correct.....but surely it's time to accept that we need to play the long game right now.

Totally disagree with your assessment, football worldwide is anything but a free market. The barriers to entry a massive, all domestic competitions are closed cartels, you can't simply rock up start a team and play, they are all licensed. Revenue is controlled by the Governing body, many countries also have a limitation on the number of Foreign players and players of certain ages a team is able to field. So it is the antithesis of a free market.

The cap keeps the League sustainable. WSW fans are experiencing for the first time what the rest of us have had to put up with for the past 8 years.

I don't want a football league where, if you are a supporter of a club, you know going into every season, your team has zero chance of winning it. That's what the NSL was, that's what EPL, Serie A, Spainish League etc is, and that's a shite league to have if you follow a "minnow" team.

Football is most places is actually very "free market" ...very capitalist and more dynamic and interesting to follow than sports here. (And in general "free market" is actually more geared to the absence of hard, restrictive theories or assumptions. Thats the whole point. Your understanding of it conceptually....like most strayans....is actually quite poor.)

no sports anywhere are, hence why free market thinking does not work, because economic theories assumptions do not hold true for professional sports

Thats why u open up the bottom of the league to competition....promotion and relegation is superior to your cartel style strayan league. Another overlooked option by the eggball brigade..."we just dont do that here"...end debate;)

Because they are a failed league :) They wouldn't be if they didnt *have* to !

The fact that the Nix could win says bad things about the standard of the league! The fact that teams near the bottom can climb to the top is a negative not a positive. It shows the top teams are not that great and certainly not improving enough on a year to year basis. Top teams should be getting better and better every year, not being held back by "equity" arguments.

Look beyond the laugh :) There's a smart bloke hiding behind the clown routine....

At club level yes...would love to see these trophy CEOs running clubs rather than league admin. The A-L will be doing well when people like Gallop or Dodd etc want to run clubs, not leagues or associations.

Actually they cant spend as little as they want as their is a wage floor and minimum wage. And franchises here are only viable with subsidy from either owners or the league coming in to mop up when they bail. The teams here are in bad shape financially even with the regulations in place. Remove them and they have the option of being far more viable then now. Of course that will conflict with your "equity" argument...which i might add excludes many potential teams who can never afford to reach the level playing field. So equity only for those inside the tent.

As opposed to leagues running roughshod over supporters by: a) closing or relocating teams unable to meet the high bar set by a level playing field b) never even considering most clubs for entry into their cartel league for the above reason.

But then beyond that, year to year it does have an effect on long term recruting because from my understanding when u cut a player they stay on the books, cap wise?

Well actually even with the restrictions the clubs are not viable without subsidy or breaking even bar one or two at best. So your cap and floor is not working so well as it stands. Misplaced faith.... Remove restrictions and let some spend less, some more. Would make for a much more accessible league for more than just ten teams. In fact the whole football pyramid could aspire to climb up and be involved some day. Look at even the successful capped sports here, and many clubs are still financial basket cases. The bar is set way too high for any type of truly competitive, non cartel league. Its not me thats lacking understanding:) And for post-hoc...i am aware that its not in any way a free market in this country, yes...

Marcel, for nordster it is a political philosophy, he is a follower of Ayn Rand, but doesn't quiet understand that the HAL is not a free market, it doesn't operate in that way, sports administration is not a free market in any way shape or form, so those economic theories do not transfer

Seriously dude....for someone who craps on about this topic constantly you have an astonishing lack of understanding about the true nature of the salary cap.. I'm entirely certain that without these restrictions the league would have already imploded by now.

You can make the case for keeping the cap and for getting rid of it. It all depends on your own point of view and what you view as important. For a start I would eventually like to see the cap removed but I would still like some sort of mechanism that only allows clubs to spend what they can actually afford. I think that is one of the good things about the cap is that it forces club to spend wisely and not overspend and put their clubs in jeopardy. At the same time bigger clubs would feel a level of frustration at not being able to compete in the ACL or not being able to keep their best players. At the end of the day whether you agree with a cap or not I feel the most important overriding theme is that clubs need to be run as profitably as possible and they need to be run in a responsible way. Would getting rid of the cap actually lead to clubs spending like crazy and over paying players. I am not sure it would. Sure some clubs might be tempted in "buying a championship", but again, is this something that will help or hinder the club in the longer term. A club might win a championship but if they got that team but putting the club in debt then they will quickly be found out and eventually slip down the A-league food chain. There just seems to be this mass hysteria that we are going to see clubs going berserk and paying through the nose for players. For me at the end of the day if you want your club competing at a good level then you need good people running the clubs in a sustainable and responsible way. If you can get that part right you are half way there.

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