Do we need salary caps in modern football?? (1 Viewer)

[ReBeL]

In the past few years, soccer enthusiasts have become used to the extravagances of the game. Salaries run into the millions. Transfers run into the tens of millions. Losses can amount to nine figures.

Now some of the sport's insiders are wondering if the madness isn't out of control. With the television rights for English soccer's top league now commanding 1.7 billion pounds ($3.15 billion), even more money will flow into the game.

Last week, Bayern Munich Chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge told the European Parliament that the financial firepower of Chelsea Football Club was ``unacceptable.''

In Britain, Dave Whelan, the multimillionaire founder of the JJB Sports Plc retail chain and the owner of the English Premier League team Wigan Athletic, called for curbs in a column in the Manchester Evening News back in September last year.

Those voices are being echoed in the soccer world. ``It is not illegal, and it can be done,'' said Dan Jones, a partner in the sports business group at accounting firm Deloitte & Touche LLP in Manchester, England. ``It is desirable if it could be enforced on a pan-European basis, and if you couldn't trust the clubs to sort it out themselves.''

True enough. A salary cap would have to be strictly policed. The leagues would have to check sign-on fees and other ruses, and they would have to deduct points for any infringements.

So what should someone who believes in free markets and enjoys watching 22 players kick some leather around make of that?

Rummenigge and Whelan are absolutely right. For its own sake, European soccer has to get a grip on the salaries paid to players -- otherwise the game will end up a contest between financiers and accountants, not ball-winners and dribblers.

Abramovich's Millions

Everyone who follows the game has noticed how money has changed soccer forever.

Take Roman Abramovich, the Russian oil billionaire who has sunk a big chunk of his fortune into making Chelsea the richest, if not yet the most successful, club in Europe.

Chelsea spends money as if it didn't matter. Last summer, the club forked out more than 53 million pounds on new players such as Michael Essien and Shaun Wright-Phillips. The top salary at the club is about 90,000 pounds a week. The total outlay on transfers since Abramovich took over the club in 2003 is about 290 million pounds. Last year, the club recorded a loss of 140 million pounds.

The result? The team has just strolled its way to a second successive league title in England. Chelsea can quite simply outspend its rivals, even Manchester United, Europe's second- richest club, which has won eight titles in the past 14 years.

Big-Money Elite

The situation isn't as extreme in other European leagues -- but it is getting close. European soccer is dominated by a big- money elite. According to statistics compiled by Deloitte, the top six clubs in Europe had annual revenue of more than 200 million euros ($255 million) each last season, led by Real Madrid, which brought in 275 million euros.

Get down to No. 20 in the list, and you find Rome-based Lazio, with revenue that is only a third of the Madrid aristocrats. It is hard to see how teams in the top 20 by income can keep up with the elite -- never mind all the others that languish outside it.

Normally, believers in free-market economics would react to the idea of salary curbs with horror. Surely we left all that behind in the 1970s? It makes about as much sense as suggesting Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Credit Suisse Group should have to pay their traders the same amount to ensure fair competition between banks? Surely, soccer players and club owners should be free to strike any remuneration deal they want?

Well, hold on. Soccer is different. Money is distorting the competition.

Chelsea Monopoly

In England, the Premiership title has effectively been bought by Chelsea, making the rest of the season a dull contest for fourth spot, the lowest qualifying ranking for entry to the prestigious pan-European Champions League. In Italy, soccer is turning into a showdown between Juventus and AC Milan.

One reason why soccer is the world's most popular sport is because it is so egalitarian. The greatest players can be short, tall, thin or chubby. You don't need any particular physique, just skill and intelligence.

The same should be true of the club competition. To survive as a sporting drama, there needs to be the possibility that any of the dozens of teams could capture its greatest prize.

Without that, it becomes a financial, not a sporting contest. Fans might as well put the marketing and sponsorship teams on the field, and watch them make their PowerPoint presentations. If the game is just about money, it loses its drama and romance.

Better Competition

Other sports have salary caps -- American football, for example, and rugby league in the U.K. The bigger clubs would still have an advantage by virtue of having a larger turnover. Yet the distortions wouldn't be so huge.

Indeed, were it successful, it might make the case for going further, and putting a total cap on wage bills at the top clubs. The best players could still earn big salaries, but no team would be able to afford more than one or two stars. They would be spread out between teams, making for a better competition.

The alternative? A narrowing contest between fewer and fewer important clubs. Soccer can't survive many more dull seasons. When an established team such as Bayern Munich, which in 2006 won the German league for the sixth time in eight years, no longer feels able to compete, something is clearly wrong.

The top clubs should get together now to introduce a voluntary system that limits wages to 70 percent of revenue. If the likes of Chelsea and Real Madrid don't want to play along, they can go and play against each other in a league of two -- and leave the rest of us to watch a proper sporting contest.

Matthew Lynn

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Well, actually I hope small clubs can compete again with the gigantic ones who are exploiting their resources into making themselves stronger and stronger regardless the competitiveness of the nice game...

 

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[Matteo..]

I'd like it very much if we would go back to a time where Steven Gerrard will never leave Liverpool, simply because that's "his" club.

 

[ReBeL]

I'd like it very much if we would go back to a time where Steven Gerrard will never leave Liverpool, simply because that's "his" club.

Exactly...

Helping players to be more loyal...

 

[mikhail]

Yeah. I think it wouldn't hurt. As people have suggested numerous times, limit it to a percentage of the club's turnover.

 

[Enron]

I'd like it very much if we would go back to a time where Steven Gerrard will never leave Liverpool, simply because that's "his" club.

That's probably why he won't leave this summer. And of course we do pay him well.

 

[Mr. Gol]

Loyalty is only related to money in a certain amount. I don't think it would matter if you earn 3 or 4 million a year.

 

[ReBeL]

Salary cap talk is pie in the sky as Premiership proves its worth


A salary cap for Premiership footballers? Don't make me laugh. The day the chairmen of England's top clubs sit round a table and sign a voluntary agreement not to pay any of their players more than a stipulated maximum figure will be the day forwards suffer a mass attack of conscience and stop diving for penalties while defenders voluntarily desist from wrapping their arms around opponents at corner kicks.

What the Premiership is good at, however, is making gestures - and Sunday's story that the chief executives of the leading clubs are thinking of agreeing on a maximum weekly payment of £100,000 belongs in the same category as Lord Stevens' inquiry into bungs. They have been prompted, it was said, by the alleged demands of John Terry and Frank Lampard for revised contracts matching the £130,000 received by Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack and by Cristiano Ronaldo's request for a doubling of his £60,000-a-week wage in return for ignoring the blandishments of his Spanish suitors at the Estadio Bernabéu and Camp Nou.

No doubt Chelsea's Peter Kenyon and Manchester United's David Gill would dearly like to peg their stars' salaries. But they know the impossibility, as long as television revenues continue to rise, of holding market forces at bay. The story is a bit of window dressing, never intended to result in significant action.
The financial excesses and moral limitations of football can drive its more sentient adherents to distraction but then you get something like the two exhilarating 3-3 draws that illuminated the weekend and the temptation is to think, who cares? In a way it would be nice to be able to report that the more bloated football's ego and bank balance become, the worse the product. But you would have to say that, in general, it just isn't so.

If one of the weekend's two six-goal feasts was less interesting than the other, it was only because neither Barcelona nor Real Madrid felt like bothering with even the most rudimentary forms of defence, which slightly devalued a superlative hat-trick by the wonderful Lionel Messi. In its chaotic way, however, it was still a hugely enjoyable contest.

There were no such reservations about the FA Cup fifth-round tie between Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. Both teams went out for goals, Spurs from the start and Chelsea when they had to chase the game, from a basis of respectable defensive organisation. The match was by no means error-free but it was technically and tactically sound and every gain had to be fought for, just as it would be in a decent Premiership match.

And now, for the first time, we have three Premiership sides in the quarter-finals of the Champions' League, the reason being that the English league has come to attract a majority of the world's best players. Not all of them, since for cultural reasons the South Americans still mostly prefer to emigrate to Italy or Spain - although in the near future there may be more players following the example of Denilson in making England their first port of call and fewer Messis and Higuains setting up their home away from home in the Mediterranean countries.

Anyone who loves the glamour and variety of the European Cup will be quietly wondering if it is permissible to hope that we do not see three English clubs reaching the last four. Diversity and contrast have been the glory of this particular competition - for evidence, just look what happened when three Italian clubs reached the semi-finals in 2003 and Milan and Juventus - Del Piero, Shevchenko, Trezeguet, Davids, Maldini, Seedorf, Nesta, Rui Costa, Pirlo and all - served up one of the most dismally sterile goalless finals in the history of the competition.

If there is a reason for hoping that Athens hosts an all-English final this year, it has nothing to do with patriotism. It is based on the belief that two Premiership sides would represent the best chance of a full-on contest, with no caginess or latter-day catenaccio. Europe would be denied the sight of Kaka, Totti and Villa but guaranteed an evening of warm-blooded entertainment. Finally the Premiership has reached the dominant position to which it has long aspired. And that is why, for the foreseeable future, there will be no limit to what its players can earn.

By Richard Williams

 

[tonykart]

A salary cap in football would ruin everything. Look at the NFL which is a league the fraction of the size of the World Football Leagues. The NFL has become a Hollywood driven, watered down league with no one player being able to commit for a team for any real duration of time. It is a joke.

If Football goes to a salary cap, it will be ruined forever. HORRIBLE IDEA.

 

[denco]

I dont know about salary cap for every player but there should be a limit of what someone under 25 should be getting. Rooney is reportedly on 100,000 a week, for goodness sakes how is he supposed to improve as fotballer if you are giving that kind of money right now. No wonder to many players nowadays seem to peak at 24 and just go on an even keel till they retire. Christiano Ronaldo reputedly wants 120,000 a week.
Then you come to the issue of how players in Chelsea will feel about what huge flops like Ballack and sheva are earning but so far have been hopeless.