Re: Re: Re: Parity in EPL vs. Parity in US Sports it might have taken a while to get there but this was my whole point. Rather than having a league of 30ish teams of roughly equal stature you will get the lop-sided effect of big teams/small teams in competition with each other. If, for arguements sake, you have 1/3 or the teams pulling 60,000+, another third getting 40000 - 60000 and the last third getting under 40000, how can you set a salary cap which will allow that last poorly supported third to be competitive? If it was set at a level which would allow them to compete then surely the bigger clubs would complain that the salary cap would be too restrictive. If it was set at a level of the mid third then the last third would be uncompetitive, and if what I've heard about American sports fans is true, nobody would be interested in teams with no chance of winning.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Parity in EPL vs. Parity in US Sports This sort of disparity already exists in the NFL. Not to this extent, quite, but it's there. Some teams get massive income from luxury boxes, some get moderate income. Plus, the players' union has been broken. The cap is low enough that it's a matter of making moderate profits and making obscene profits. Finally, why would the big teams put up with? Because they have to. Also, I don't think the range would be as big as you think it will be. A team here in Raleigh, absent competition from anything else, would definitely draw 60,000. And Durham, which is considered the same market for TV ratings purposes, would do almost as well. I mean, Chapel Hill and Durham are very close together, and between them, the two towns have two college teams that average around 75,000. One thing that you might be missing is that distance isn't as meaningful here. I would fully expect a "Raleigh" team to draw thousands and thousands of fans from Fayetteville, Greenville, Wilson, etc...a bunch of small towns over an hour away. It's like when people in the Eastern US start talking about the Western US...we have a hard time understanding that 100 miles there is like 50 miles here. I get the sense that you're not understanding that a team here would fully expect to draw fans from a 100 mile radius, so long as no other team was in that same radius.
I suppose if a large club makes a fortune from merchandising rather than just ticket sales then they really don't care if they win or not. That can't be a good thing, surely? I spent an entertaining half hour of my life churning through the American stadiums of worldstadiums.com (I must get out more) and there were 62 college teams who play in a stadium with a capacity of 50000 or over. 15 more were over 40000. Most of the rest were considerably smaller. True, stadiums could be expanded, but as impressive as 100 40000+ teams is (and it is very impressive) it is still a long way short of 168 - and it also doesn't take into account that fans wouldn't support, in North Carolina's case, Raleigh/Chapel Hill AND the Pathers as they might do now. Maybe if there wasn't another team within 100 miles the effect would be minimal, but I'd still guess if you had to place such a large number of teams then the number of teams with the luxury of an exclusive market would have to be much smaller. Maybe I don't know about the passion for (your) football that exists outside the NFL, but I'd also say that Americans don't have the experience of the economics of a sporting free market, especially how supporters are drawn to large successful teams, often over their local team. Mind you, when Wimbledon move to Milton Keynes in a few months time we'll see how well the first franchise style artificially created league club since Chelsea in 1906 do for support. It's a shame photar74(?) isn't in this discusson as he'd probably have drafted a full list of 168 possible franchises and predicted attendance figures by now.
Another lost thread? I thought this was about Parity in U.S. Sports..Did it get lost somewhere in the argument about how many folks will show up to a football super league to try to show how great America is at supporting sports. Anyways, a super league would never work-I want to root for the college team that I was raised to support (Buzz-sting'em Go Tech and to Hell with Georgia (and Wake and Duke and the stinking Clemson Tigers ). Anyway, back on the subject-I think the EPL has the parity more along the lines of MLB. Sure there are a few teams on the outside that might win it-but money talks and the higher spending teams such as the Braves and (damn) Yankees and Diamondbacks will always have much more likely chance of winning the Series (well-maybe not the Braves-they have a more likely chance of choking the series). However, money isn't everything and that is why there are teams that can spend lots of money and still be near the bottom-you need money, good player management, and good coaches to regulary be up top.