A hard season ahead for Internazionale?

I viewed the result of Inter's match with Siena yesterday with a feeling of resignation. A 2-0 loss at home at San Siro to a team Inter would normally expect to beat, with all due respect to Siena, doesn't signal a great season ahead. After an extremely poor last season, where we scraped into 6^th place, there were high hopes for a return to winning ways. However, results so far haven't been great.

Way back at the start of August, things looked rosy with a 3-0 win away to Hajduk Split in the Europa League 3^rd Qualifying Round first leg, but that was followed up with a 2-0 loss at home in the second leg. Two more promising wins followed away to FC Vaslui and Pescara, but things have seemingly gone downhill since then. This month has seen a 3-1 loss at home to Roma, and although we won 2-0 at Torino in the next match, this was followed with a scraped 2-2 draw with Rubin Kazan and Sunday's 2-0 loss to Siena, both at San Siro.


During the summer the notoriously poor pitch was relaid at San Siro, in an effort to improve the playing surface. Some in Italy have said that this has caused a curse on the stadium, as both Inter and AC are yet to win a single game there in all competitions. I'm not so superstitious though, as I can understand that a period of rebuilding is happening with several former leaders of our team such as Maicon, Lucio, and Julio Cesar having left, and several young players now stepping up to try and fill their shoes; a few bumps in the road are to be expected.

On paper the team put out against Siena looked relatively strong: Samir Handanovic, a good goalkeeper who replaced Julio Cesar. Nagatomo, Rannochia, Juan, and Alvaro Pereira in defence, Cambiasso, Gargano, Guarin and Wesley Sneijder in midfield behind Diego Milito and Antonio Cassano. Nagatomo is a hard-working fullback who likes to get forward, and who scored the last minute equaliser against Rubin. Rannochia and Juan are young centrebacks with a lot of promise, who until yesterday's game were receiving praise as a centreback pairing. The midfield seems solid, with the ever-reliable Esteban Cambiasso, Walter Gargano, a tough midfielder, and Guarin supporting Wesley Sneijder and allowing him to go create for two top strikers, Diego Milito and Antonio Cassano. The match was also notable for being the first time 39 year old Javier Zanetti, or Captain Fantastic as I like to call him, was rested since December 2008.

Despite the strong team, we were caught on the break twice, with Siena scoring two counter attacks in what was an exciting and pretty open match. I was most disappointed about how disorganised the defence was for the goals, with our defenders seemingly panicking as the Siena players ran at them. Again, these players haven't played together many times, and they are young, so hopefully this will improve as the season goes on.

Inter have the chance to bounce back away at Chievo on Wednesday and despite how much they frustrate me sometimes, I'll be supporting them as usual. I remember the 90s and early 2000s, with the long period of failing to win the league, and especially the gut-wrenching Sunday afternoon in 2002 where we lost the Scudetto to Juventus on the last day of the season with a 4-2 loss to Lazio. Since 2004 it's been better days, with league wins, and the treble-winning season of 2010 where we won the Champions League again after 45 years, on my birthday. After all that success I can handle a couple of less than perfect seasons. Forza Inter.

Does football need a salary cap?

The Guardian's website reported last Thursday that the Premier League is thinking about trying to put a salary cap into place before the money from the next televison deals for 2013-2016 comes in. Footballer wages have been climbing for years, and led to a lot of discussion about whether players deserve so much money for kicking a ball on a field. As football, and the Premier League continue to expand and with TV deals getting bigger, it seems the trend will be for wages to get even higher in the future if left unchecked. With this in mind, I think a salary cap has got to be seen as a good idea.

Salary caps are used pretty successfully in North American sports, including Major League Soccer, and in rugby in England, France and Australia, with teams having a maximum amount they are allowed to pay out for player contracts each season. In 2011, the NFL salary cap was $120 million, while the NBA's 2010-11 cap was $58 million. Caps are agreed before each season, and take into account team revenues, so the cap is at a reasonable level for every team and it's level of income for that year.

Benefits of a salary cap are that, in theory, it prevents rich teams from signing a large number of highly-paid stars and dominating because they perhaps have a wealthy owner. It should also level the playing field so that leagues stay competitive, and you don't have the same teams winning everything every year. European football could probably benefit from being more competitive, with most of the top leagues now being won by the same teams that spend the most each season. The second main benefit of a salary cap is to guard against teams signing high contracts to try to gain success, then ending up with financial problems down the line; aka Leeds United syndrome. Because a cap has already been worked out based on the team's income, it can't live beyond its means and so should be relatively protected financially.

The drawbacks to bringing in a salary cap seem to mostly centre around how to go about implementing it. For the Premier League to be able to bring one in, 14 out of the 20 teams would have to agree, and as the Guardian article mentions, the teams have not seemed too interested so far. Another drawback is whether there would be any player related problems. In 2011 the NBA experienced a lockout where the start of the season was delayed from November 1 to December 25 because of a disagreement between owners and players about the salary cap. Could we see a similar thing in football?

The next drawback is deciding how salaries should be capped. Should teams have a total amount they have to be under with their entire squad like the NFL and NBA, should they have a maximum amount they can give a player, £180,000 a week for example, or should they be restricted to spending a percentage of their turnover from the previous few seasons?

The final potential drawback I can see is whether a salary cap would need to be applied by every league in Europe at once to be effective. Like governments always warn when asked to tax high earners more, there could be an exodus from England and the Premier League to other leagues without salary caps. However, even if European leagues managed to get together and agree a cap we could see players following Didier Drogba and Samuel Eto'o to places like China and Russia on huge contracts, or anywhere teams didn't have to worry about a cap. I could argue though that this could be a good thing, with talented footballers bringing up the levels of developing leagues, and adding another factor that could increase competition.

All in all, a salary cap could bring seismic changes to football, changing the game for the better in my opinion. In the NFL, the New Orleans Saints went from finishing their 2008 season with a record of 8 wins and 8 losses, not even making the playoffs, to winning the Superbowl in 2009. That sort of unpredictability would make football even more exciting, and I think a salary cap could help do it. It seems as if a cap would be extremely hard to bring in, with a lot of parties in football possibly not seeing it in their interest, but I think it would do the game a world of good.