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Yep, that’s the takeaway that I hope non-sports-fans will have from this thread. The salary caps in the NFL/NBA promote parity extremely well while maintaining

Yep, that’s the takeaway that I hope non-sports-fans will have from this thread. The salary caps in the NFL/NBA promote parity extremely well while maintaining the same pay level for the vast majority of players. I’m told European soccer and MLB suffer greatly from big-market teams heavily hoarding the success.

smcl 5y ago
You're not wrong, the state of football in Europe feels quite unsustainable to me and rewards clubs who make huge financial gambles or manage to get lucrative investment from billionaires (or both!). Every now and again you'll see a flash-in-the-pan where a slightly less well-off team will succeed (Leicester a couple of years ago in the Premier League springs to mind, though they were owned by a Thai billionaire...) but overall it's pretty predictable. It's a funny situation though because having stupendous injections of cash doesn't always pay off. Paris Saint Germain have been profligate in the transfer market and have little to show for it on the European stage (and domestically they didn't even win Ligue 1 last season). And sometimes just a modest investment, raising the wage bill by shrewd signings can really upset things. There was a fairly sizeable backlash at RB Leipzig - a team bought by Red Bull which progressed through the ranks to the top level - suggesting that they'd bought their way to success. Which is true in a sense but in reality everyone who's successful has basically bought that success. Bayern's average salary is 8x that of Leipzig's[0] - as an outsider it seems they were just nervous at the idea of someone upsetting the balance. Right now Leipzig are the fourth-highest wage bill and are fourth in the Bundesliga. I kinda hope one of these big clubs has a high-profile collapse, it's a shame that it's Barcelona who have come closest because I don't feel too much disdain for them. Scots tend to have a soft-spot for Catalonia :) Interestingly we weren't without our own big-spending-investor stories, Gretna (tiny club from a town of 3,000 people) were bought by a supposed-millionaire who bankrolled them to the top-level, took a turn for the worse, withdrew his support and the club then fell to pieces. Anyway yet another ramble-y football comment from me, you can tell I hang out with people who do not like the sport :) [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/675490/average-bundesliga-salary-by-team/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/675490/average-bundeslig...

smcl 5y ago

You're not wrong, the state of football in Europe feels quite unsustainable to me and rewards clubs who make huge financial gambles or manage to get lucrative investment from billionaires (or both!). Every now and again you'll see a flash-in-the-pan where a slightly less well-off team will succeed (Leicester a couple of years ago in the Premier League springs to mind, though they were owned by a Thai billionaire...) but overall it's pretty predictable. It's a funny situation though because having stupendous injections of cash doesn't always pay off. Paris Saint Germain have been profligate in the transfer market and have little to show for it on the European stage (and domestically they didn't even win Ligue 1 last season). And sometimes just a modest investment, raising the wage bill by shrewd signings can really upset things. There was a fairly sizeable backlash at RB Leipzig - a team bought by Red Bull which progressed through the ranks to the top level - suggesting that they'd bought their way to success. Which is true in a sense but in reality everyone who's successful has basically bought that success. Bayern's average salary is 8x that of Leipzig's[0] - as an outsider it seems they were just nervous at the idea of someone upsetting the balance. Right now Leipzig are the fourth-highest wage bill and are fourth in the Bundesliga. I kinda hope one of these big clubs has a high-profile collapse, it's a shame that it's Barcelona who have come closest because I don't feel too much disdain for them. Scots tend to have a soft-spot for Catalonia :) Interestingly we weren't without our own big-spending-investor stories, Gretna (tiny club from a town of 3,000 people) were bought by a supposed-millionaire who bankrolled them to the top-level, took a turn for the worse, withdrew his support and the club then fell to pieces. Anyway yet another ramble-y football comment from me, you can tell I hang out with people who do not like the sport :) [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/675490/average-bundesliga-salary-by-team/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/675490/average-bundeslig...