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.
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