With that being the case I'm curious of the incentive of these teams to continually step on the field. I couldn't imagine a sports team in the U.S playing knowing that they will NEVER EVER HAVE A CHANCE TO WIN A CHAMPIONSHIP OR MAKE THE PLAYOFFS. Teams like that generally pack up and change towns. This is one of the reasons that more than half the football teams in Europe lose money on a yearly basis or are in serious debt. Manchester United is close to a billion in debt. Chelsea lost 300 million last year. Leeds is in bankruptcy. Ridiculous. This is why American business men are starting to buy premiership teams. They are going to show you how to make money and field a winning team at the same time. And considering the fact that EVERY SPORTS TEAM IN A MAJOR LEAGUE IN THE US TURNS A MAJOR PROFIT YEARLY, I think they'll do alright. SOCCER NEEDS A SALARY CAP!!!!!
true, ideally clubs probably would rather spend it on other things. The problem comes that if you are trying to sign a player, and someone out there is offering more, you have to either offer the same of look elsewhere. Some clubs seem more than happy to pay the higher wages. Of course if clubs did spend more on youth development then they might be able to bring players through rather than buy players in. Personally I'm happy that my club have decided not to splash the cash, just because we could, but I won't know until the end of the season whether it's a false economy or not.
...err...do you know why? It's not running costs. They were in the black until an american owner took the club over. And Chelsea are losing money because the owner is happy to spend his own money buying success. It's not as if it's an accident. You could put a chimp in charge of an NFL team and make a profit, as they are able to limit salaries to roughly half of the league's turnover without any fear of losing players to rival leagues.
They all are? Only one team can win the title, so more than one American owner is going to be disappointed.
Because they always have? Because being a football club is about so much more than being a successful sports team? That remains to be seen. Certainly, there is no direct parallel between the way in which sports business is done in the US and how it's done in Europe (and particularly in the UK). RichardL has already highlighted the major difference. American owners of EPL clubs are going to have to learn how to survive in an open market fast, or they'll crash and burn if all they can bring to the table is their ability to turn a buck in the quasi-communist environs of American professional sports. A major part of the success people like Glazer, Hicks, Gillett and Lerner will have bringing US sports marketing skills over here will be them first learning from us, not the other way around. That's the real reason why none of these arrivals are projecting a quick profit to their investors.
Chelsea was over 200 million in debt before Abromovich took over and paid it off. And yet they still have never turned a profit while he's owned the team.
Winning a title and fielding a winning team aren't the same thing. Didn't know that I needed to explain that.
Yes, but as has already been pointed out countless times in this thread, Chelsea are a total exception to this debate. He doesn't have to "turn a profit", he's arguably not in it to turn a profit. He bought Chelsea like he buys super yachts - they're not supposed to "turn a profit" either. Bringing Chelsea in to support your point demonstrates that you don't have a point. It is in the UK. First is first and second is nowhere.
Except it's not always been like this, teams of smaller resources in the past have been able to challenge at the top. That is no longer possible.
There are many football clubs that are privately owned and well run. I don't see why they should be punished because of what Leeds or Chelsea do. Publically listed companies can be irresponsible and go bust.
That'd be a clever trick, considering only one team can win the league at a time. How will they make money and be competitive when other teams spend more on their wagebills than their own team's entire revenue? How will they reduce spending without seeing the best players all go abroad? How will an American attract the top players to Blackburn, Bolton or Fulham? And how would said teams pay for them considering their small fanbases and tight resources? Salary caps only work in leagues where every team is in a huge market. The smallest NFL market is about five million people, the size of Scotland, they play in front of 73k people a week. That's what the NFL considers a small market. In order for the smallest market in England to equal that, approximately everyone in Wigan would have to go to every Wigan home match. Including the majority of egg-chasers who hate football, and all the women, children and pensioners. How would a salary cap work in a league where some teams are playing in front of 20k, whilst others play in front of 80k? What about a league where most of the armchair fans only support a small few teams? The Washington Redskins get more people in their stadium than the entire population of Wigan. Many towns with Premiership teams are full of people who support neighbouring big teams. That won't be undone by a small team winning the odd trophy, that support goes back decades and is hereditary. All the reds in Bolton or Wigan won't stop watching United just because Bolton or Wigan win the odd cup. NFL-style rules might work in the Champions League, but not in small domestic markets which contain at most a few large cities and lots of small towns, which is pretty much every European country.
It only takes one rogue club to be financially irresponsible to force all the others to do the same. It's hard to keep wages at a sensible level when even relegation candidates like West Ham are throwing stupid money around. Considering how even the best academies have limited output, you could spend as much on an academy to produce a player as it would cost just to buy one in. Even United's famous academy has dried up. West Ham, who used to produce all sorts of decent players have resorted to flashing the chequebook. People were praising Man City's academy before, but as soon as Sven came in he bought in practically a whole new team. People are tipping Bolton for the drop because we've only spent a couple of million. Even though on average that's probably less than Allardyce spent per year over his reign. Personally I think it would be a good thing for football if Chelsea went tits up, West Ham were relegated, and Arsenal fell out of the Champions League despite having a wage bill twice as high as the teams just below them.
What's a winning team other than a team that wins things? This isn't America where the playoff system means even crap teams come close to winning even when they've lost half their games, and where divisions make teams look better than they really are (i.e. a team is 17th over the whole league, but third in their division and just outside the playoffs), then can have a bit of good form at the end and win the championship. Any team in Europe that doesn't play consistently brilliantly from day one will be blown out of the title race by Christmas. The Premiership is a league where a team can get to the Champions League final but never be in contential for the league because they have a wobbly start to the season. And we don't need the Americans to tell us how to win whilst maintaining a profit. Man United won league titles whilst being the most profitable team in England, if not Europe. Perhaps the Americans are expecting to make all their teams like that, but they're in for a nasty surprise. Maybe there's a reason English investors don't invest in football anymore.
the "why they haven't made a profit since" part has been taken care of - namely that Abramovich isn't trying to make a profit - he's not an investor. The other part though show you haven't really looked into this. It's not through spending too much on players. Chelsea had a very outdated stadium that needed to be completely rebuilt on three sides. This is not a cheap thing to do, and unlike in the US clubs can't get the city to build a new stadium for them. The way Chelsea chose to finance this was to build an appartment/hotel complex called "Chelsea Village", a vastly expensive thing to do, but one which would in theory pay for Stamford Bridge's redevelopment. The problem is that for whatever reason, Chelsea Village just wasn't anywhere near as popular as had been hoped, and cost more to build than anticipated, and lumbered chelsea with vast debts. And as you don't appear to know, Man Utd are horribly in debt because Malcolm Glazer took out a vast loan in the club's name to pay for his own acquisition of the club, and plans to use the profits to pay off the debt. That's kind of why the take-over was so unpopular.
Bolton tried this, lumping a hotel onto the side of the stadium. It's costing us millions. I don't know why they thought anyone would want to stay in a hotel in Horwich, let alone one which is part of a football stadium.
how exactly does arsenal have a massive wage bill leg? now henry and ljungberg have gone i cant see many players getting +50k a week what about tottenham and newcastle? think before u speak i also would love chavski to go tits up, if roman left the club would crumble to dust....it would be a proverbial black whole and complete destruction, 1 weeks wage bill would probably kill that club! and to that ignorant american who has no clue, american owners dont know shit about the game...they are here fro the tv money and marketing i bet if glazer even spoke to fergy about tactics fergy would tell him to fook off your 'soccer' system is appauling, so dont try and rectify our beautiful game
Why don't you ring and try to make a booking? My wife's company is one of many that use it for all their conferences and their company do's - Christmas parties and whatnot. It's facilities for this sort of caper are booked up months in advance.
They have the third-highest wage bill in the Premier League, at £83m annually. Only Chelsea (an absurd £114m) and United (£85m) top them.
why do you think they have all those travelodge places by motorways junctions and service stations? You don't think people are booking rooms there because they really enjoy the ambience of the area around junction 18 of the M6? I know Reading FC's hotel brings in a tidy profit - so much so that it's been expanded to nearly 160 rooms.
cant see how matt i can only see gallas on a massive wage of 80k a week plus now henry and freddie are gone i would imagine if figures are re-calculated liverpool will be higher and possibly spurs and newcastle
re: Leg Breaker You definitely could put in a salary cap in the EPL. eg. For 2008 it is 80 mil and indexed to league revenues going forward. No problem, it only affects the big teams. The smaller teams won't be able to meet the cap anyway. It wil reign in the big clubs spending to a degree and narrow the gap a bit. Of course it will not equalize the big and small clubs, though I do not feel that it should. The small clubs will have to slowly grow bigger naturally or be bought by someone with a lot of cash. Though most foreign owners will not be interested in the smaller clubs as their revenue potential is much smaller. This cap would keep wages from spiralling too high and help out smaller clubs keep somewhat competitive. Of course its not a perfect solution but there really isn't one. There will always be big and small clubs. The other reason I see a cap as being good is it makes the clubs more financially stable and helps keep "Leeds" incidents from happening. But this only happens if clubs are not only limited by a max cap like 80 mil like everybody else, but also limited to wages/transfer fees to a max % of previous years revenue. Unless they can show the league other assets, such as Abramovitch. I personally am not convinced a cap is the right thing to do, but I can see it working. Nothing complicated about setting it at 70 or 80 mil or whatever amount the EPL wants, and going from there.
Last season Villa could be considered a "winning team" as they won more games than they lost. Unfortunately, they finished 11th.
Only three teams even come close to that, so what difference would it make? Chelsea would offload a few bench-sitters, United would lose a couple of players, and...that's it. How's that going to happen, when the size of a club is largely decided by the local population? Maybe Wigan should wait until the population goes up to a million or so, then they can compete...
Well Wigan will probably never be a huge club, unless the cities pop. explodes due to some amazing economic growth. I do not think it is the EPL's mandate to make the clubs all equal. The cap would at least reign in the big clubs somewhat and make a bit of an improvement. I know it will never be equal but it would help a bit. The other way is for more revenue sharing, which is what some of the leagues in N.A. due. I know there is revenue sharing now, but it is not as equal as it could be. Of course the bigger clubs should get more as they generate more of the revenue, but they could throw more to the smaller clubs to increase their competitiveness. Well if Chelsea and ManU get rid of some of these players, smaller clubs could pick them up for less and use them and be more competitive. The Chelsea bench sitters are a lot better than some of the worst EPL teams. I'm sure Derby would love to have SWP, Diarra, etc.