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Touchline • Issue 16 • 23
Don’t confuse
evenness for quality...
Life’s too short to
watch some of the
matches on offer.”
The eight clubs from the list are Europe’s most successful clubs:
Juventus of Italy are basically the only club from the big leagues
of Europe who have won their league and remain outside the
top 12 spenders.
Football, in the eyes of many, has become a travesty, ruled by the
few, where the other clubs merely prop up the table. Those that
fly too close to the sun (read Leeds United and Rangers) end up
in financial chaos and possibly
even in court.
Many think that a salary cap
is the answer to this bonkers
financial system. A system that
leads to a much flatter and more
competitive league structure
would surely make football fairer.
Many professional leagues around
the world have a cap of some
kind. They take different forms
and have wildly different ceilings
and floors. But effectively, they
set a limit as to how much a rich
team can spend on players. Surely that is a good thing?
Australian Rugby League instituted a salary cap back in 1998.
Before then, the league had been shared by the big teams, such
as Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles and Parramatta Eels. In 2012,
then chief executive David Gallop said that, “The cap’s there to
make sure that pure purchasing power cannot dominate the
sport. . . It means we can genuinely say that all 16 teams . . . have
a chance. For the fan every week, every game is a contest. That’s
at the core of why rugby league is so successful.”
In fact, rugby league finds itself competing with other rugby
associations that do not have the cap. This results in player
drain, but the governing body would seemingly take the player
hit in exchange for a flatter playing field.
The net result of the cap? Seven different clubs have won the
Premiership in the last decade. Tellingly, the only club that
won it four times since 1999 was Melbourne Storm, which was
stripped of two titles in 2010 after being caught dodging the
salary cap rules. Clubs that struggle one year will be gifted
a great player the next season, who galvanises them and
turns them into a force the following season. Players whose
excellence demands a pay rise have to seek a new club, breaking
up the previous year’s winners. So it seems to be a system that
works.
Only it doesn’t. Matthew Johns, the former Kangaroos player and
pundit, launched an attack on the cap recently in The Telegraph.
He claims that having a salary cap is undermining the game.
“But don’t confuse evenness for quality,” he said in the article.
“This year we are now faced with a competition in which too
many teams and too many games lack genuine star power and
quality. . .Life’s too short to watch some of the matches on offer.”
These sentiments are shared in Victoria, the homeland of Aussie
Rules Football, where the salary cap has lead to a similar
sharing of the AFL Premiership, but similar
problems.
One of the problems with the cap is the fact that
clubs are compelled to spend over their floor,
which can be a figure of 92-95% of the ceiling
of the cap. This leaves all teams shelling out
money for players who simply aren’t worth it.
In the Footy Almanac, Barry Levinson compares
the Melbourne Demons and Geelong Cats as
examples of how the cap hurts a well-run club
and exacerbates the problems of a poorly run
club.
“A ridiculous AFL rule means the Demons’ squad
is only permitted to earn 5% less than the Cats’
squad. . . Geelong struggles each year to keep its talented playing
stocks intact, with many players opting to accept less money
than they could receive elsewhere, in return for staying at a
good club. Melbourne, on the other hand, struggles each year
to reach the 95% minimum for a squad largely consisting of
unfulfilled talent and useless hacks.”
In a way, the salary cap presents with a hobbling of excellence
and a punishment for success. Johns again: “In American sports
such as Major League Baseball, if a team is run better and is
more financial than the team down the road, then they are
allowed to spend more, it’s as simple as that.”
Some would say that sport is about being the best. No one is
suggesting Usain Bolt run the 100 metres in a lead hat. He is
simply better than the people around him. Why not let him get
on with it?
Another argument for the fact that salary caps don’t work,
returning to football, is that the sport is hardly getting less
popular. Major league baseball may be losing some of its gloss,
but the 2013 European Champions’ League Final, which is the
catwalk for all those major teams, was aired in more than 200
countries to an estimated global average audience of 150
million.
This is an argument that will keep on running. While sport
seems to tread the divide between pure business and something
more lofty, there will continue to be points made and points lost.