Salary Caps next season

I can't see how this can work. What happens if a club spends more than 60%, especially if they can't help it? - i.e. lower than expected crowds. Does the cap apply pre-season or afterwards? For example Yeovil will be in the league next season for the first time. They can only guess at what their revenue will be next season. What if they are wrong (either way)? Will the cap be adjusted?

Personally I'd much rather see a better distribution of SKY's £12 million per club TV money. The FA, who must rake in millions from SKY, could easily give payments to other divisions, but choose not to. The fact that a Nationwide league club would need to pull in nearly 60,000 a week to generate the same revenue as a mediocre premier league team is wrong, and in the long run is harming the premier league as a competition as it needs variety to keep it interesting.

 

I would assume that it would have to be 60% of last years total turnover.

 

I know that salary caps have been tried in other UK sports, e.g. Rugby League.

It seems to be notorious that the big clubs will find away around it. Wigan RLFC (which is sponsored by JJB) has the best-paid shop assistants in the UK! The player signs for a moderate salary, but the wife/partner is employed by a sponsoring company for a huge wage, while not having to do any work.

It seems that the RL authorities are reluctant to try and enforce it properly, as far as the big clubs are concerned (although they have hit some easier targets).

I would be interested in a lawyer's view on whether it could be enforced against a club which disregarded it - could it be "restraint of trade"?

 

Good luck, it seems like an intelligent response.

As far as loopholes...they should consult with the NFL. That's a tough cap.

 

Seek out the FINANCIAL EXPERTS in the NFL.

Manchester United - Europe's most valuable sporting brand

http://www.countrylife.co.uk/worldsoccer/newsfeb01/news_manu1902.html

Model of consistency: NFL sets pace for all sports leagues

http://cbs.sportsline.com/b/page/pressbox/0,1328,5675892,00.html

Most Significant Developments this Century: No. 4, Pete Rozelle becomes NFL commissioner

http://tsn.sportingnews.com/archives/sports2000/moments/155198.html

United, They Sell?

DC's Soccer Team Was on the Block for Months When a Deal Fell Through. The Question Is: How Much Is a Struggling Club Worth?

http://www.bizforward.com/wdc/issues/2000-10/deals/

Long On Football

http://www.forbes.com/2002/08/15/0815nflassets.html

ESPN deal gives U.S. fans the gift of World Cups, weekend games.

http://www.soccertimes.com/mls/2002/jan02.htm

"The NFL is the best run sports league in the world. Its 8 billion dollar TV deal ensures all 32 teams will have adequate financial resources for the next decade. Player salaries are on the rise, but so is revenue. The key to its success is that it has one TV deal that all teams share equally. No other sports league has such an arrangement."

http://members.aol.com/arnoldevns/sports.html

Garber pushes for continued stadium development
"If they get that stadium built, I would imagine that we'd be in Rochester"

http://www.cybersoccernews.com/mls/020320garber2.shtml

 

What I want to know is how they expect to get this in place without the agreement of the Players.

The European commission has been casting a very heavy eye on football recently as far as anti competitive behaviour goes.
e.g. Bosman, the recent ruling on transfer windows.
There are even rumours that they will ban league wide tv deals as being anti competitive. i.e. every club will have to sign thieir own deals.

All it would take is for one player to complain and this would surely be seen as a cartel like action.

 

Probably no other league has a TV deal sewn up for a decade, but TV revenue sharing is hardly a radical idea. I think the words "in the US" were missed out of your last sentence.

I think the theme of relevance was sadly missing from the rest of your post.

For the record it's only the TV deal that makes the NFL so strong. The big leagues of europe were still the big leagues, even when TV money was a pittance.
Take the TV money away from the champions league and the national championships would be more important again.

I just can't see how wage capping would work, there are too many loopholes. Trying to get every country in europe (because it would need to be every country) to agree to, let alone police, wage-capping would be nigh on impossible.

 

NOTE: Please ignore anything Mr. Cam has to say about the NFL. And please don't blame the good, decent, upstanding American people for his rants. Thank you, and good night.

 

Despite the fact thet you were responding to our resident NFL fanatic I have to disagree with you here.
The key difference between the NFL & European leages is that the money is split totally equally.
In the UK there is a certain amount of the TV money ( I think around about 1/2) which is split equally.
The rest goes to teams dependant on the number of times they are shown on Sky & their final league position.
This means that Man U makes millions more from the Sky deal than Southhampton, thus keeping a competitive advantage.
Also in the NFL, merchandising, sponsorship & even a portion of the gate money is all distributed equally amongst teams.

This is far from the case in the Premiere League.

Having said that , you will never get any agreement to share revenue, when the cost of failure is relegation & the reward for success is the Champions League.
Each of these gives so much or less money that any advantage derived from a more competitive league generating more money is negligible.

 

If this does hit the Premiership then it could make things quite ticky for a number of teams. Towards the end of 2002 there was an article on the BBC website which claimed only 4 top-flight teams currently met this requirement of 60% of turnover as a maximum salary level (Man Utd, Newcastle, Blackburn and Middlesbrough if I remember correctly).

 

The boldness of Solzhenitsyn, the clarity of Camus, and the wit of Dorothy Parker. Indeed, a one-man Algonquin Roundtable is our Mr. Cam.

Back to RichardL's initial point, what's the likelihood of TV money being distributed to the Nationwide leagues?

 

TV rights and wage caps are like Northern Ireland. Everyone seems to have an opinion but we'll still be debating it until the cows come home.

I'll take a penny off you for my thoughts:

Can England really support 92 professional teams? Thats just rhetoric, I'm not expecting answers on a postcard I'm just bringing the question to light. Correct me if I'm wrong but how often do you here about a Confernece team in financial trouble or a Ryamns/Dr. Martins side for that matter. Most big European countries have 2 fully professional leagues and then semi-pro beneath them.

If the money was to be split between just 2 divisions we wouldn't see Div. 1 sides in ruin after dropping out of the premiership.

So here's my fantasy solution and while I'm at it I'll solve the Scottish issue as that boils down to TV money aswell. So, in kerpow world there would be:

British Premier League, probably EPL with Celtic and Rangers 18-20 clubs(Professional)
|
|
British Secondary League South (To include English and Welsh teams - probably Div. 1 plus Cardiff, Swansea and Wrexham) & British Secondary League North (Scotland and N. Irealnd - probably Sc Div 1 plus Glentoran and a couple of others) both having 20-24 teams (Professional)
|
|
English National League & Welsh National League & N. Ireland National League & Scottish National League (Semi Pro)
|
|
Various Amateur Leagues

Pretty radical huh. Would be good though I think.

 

taking the points backwards (and why not), yes conference and rymans (etc) clubs do get into financial trouble, badly. You don't hear about it because the clubs are not big enough to make the news.

Having a quick browse through the non league pages of an old rothmans yearbook, the following clubs have all had serious problems in the last 10 years or so
Maidstone (folded)
Kettering
Runcorn
Welling
Enfield
Chorley
Stafford
Weymouth
Witton
South Liverpool (folded)
Dartford (folded)
Gosport (folded?)
Bromsgrove
Gloucester
Chelmsford
Poole (folded)
Slough
Kingstonian (folded)
Wokingham (almost dead)
Woking

There are undoubtedly far more than I've listed.

As to your first point, can England support 92 clubs? Well, yes. One reason it can is that although most other countries only have 2 pro divisions, the crowds in those second pro divisions are pretty much at the same level as division 3 anyway. Serie B crowds are often lower. There's nowhere in the world that has a second tier averaging 16,000 like there is in England.
It's often said that the reason clubs are hard up is because there are too many clubs, i.e. they are over-fishing the waters, but if you look into it, it's almost always calamitous management (sometimes criminally negligent) that lies behind clubs problems - Doncaster and Brighton being fine examples. Huddersfield's debts are not due to poor crowds. York, seriously in trouble, are about 40 miles from the nearest club.
It often gets overlooked in the lust for glory that the premiership has become, but the lower divisions have been something of a success story in the last 15 years or so, with crowds pretty much doubling in that period. A decent sized Div 3 club probably pulls in through gate receipts about the same amount of cash as a lower-end Dutch top division side (most people don't realise how cheap it is to watch football across the channel - I saw NEC Nijmegen last season, a seat was £7.50 - it cost more to stand at an Aldershot (Rymans league) game I saw a couple of weeks ago).

 

Well as it is England supports more than 92 professional teams, and that is without counting Cardiff, Wrexham and Swansea. And with Telford and Dagenham potentially going full time next season, with Shrewsbury staying that way, it looks set to increase. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the two professional teams yet to play in the League (Yeovil and Morecambe) would rank amongst the best run financially.

We came back into the League back in 1998, with what at the time was a well run club with good intentions. Following a change of management (which was inevitable) and some quite truly appalling financial decisions leads to the predicament experienced over the past few years. And this to a club that was affected the least by ITV Digitals collapse (we knew we'd lose the money and started planning well before the event).

As for a wage cap being introduced, I'm not entirely in favour. Aside from people trying to weasel their way round it (enough examples above)it seems to be an admission that the status quo should remain. I also don't like the one division only experiment. Other professional teams (both above and below) aren't constrained by this. If any division would appear to require it at the moment, the 1st would seem a good candidate.

Whilst good financial management should be encouraged. Indeed even enforced (although not as salary caps).

Personally I'd much rather see a more even distribution of wealth throughout the game, and seeing people following teams from the grounds, not those seen on TV. Although those ain't going to happen.

Richard: Have Kingstonain actaully folded now? A sad week if they have.

As for Enfield, they can really blame the board for that one, given their fans (and their new club Enfield Town) were a large inspiration to those of Wimbledon.

 

I think the basis of England's financial problem is that there are too many teams and not enough revenue. A lot of teams are right next to each other. Merge half of the teams would the solve the problem. The league as a whole would only have half the payroll and half the stadium cost.

 

Great idea, we'll combine Everton and Liverpool, United and City. What about Sunderland and Newcastle, they're all geordies aren't they? I'm sure we could even have Spurs/Arsenal/Chelsea/Fulham/WestHam/Charlton/Watford/Luton/Orient/Brentford rolled into one if we tried hard enough.

Go back to your MLS forums you fool.

 

I made the post 2 posts previous to yours purely for the fun of it, but just to recap, there's no connection at all between clubs getting seriously into financial trouble and their closeness to other teams. Chelsea's (for example) debts have nothing at all to do with the closeness of Fulham, QPR and Brentford - it's to do with a massive gamble called the Chelsea village which hasn't paid off. They fill their stadium every week, as does every other in -debt premiership team, so lack of support isn't an issue.
Without risking another interesting Mr Cam interlude, if you took the NFL teams and cut their TV revenue by 90% (as happened to Div 1 clubs) then they'd be in trouble too. Stadium building is also a big issue. Bradford, Leicester and Ipswich's problems were all largely caused by the cost of gambling on staying in the premiership to repay building costs.
The American model of big city teams works well because the US has a lot of big cities. The urban make up of England just isn't like that, unless you think having a league made from nothing but half a dozen big city teams would be great.

 

Owners approve revenue-sharing plan

http://www.onlineathens.com/stories/011801/spo_0118010019.shtml

Salary cap not a solution for baseball, but revenue sharing is
w.post-gazette.com/sports/columnists/20000723stan5.asp

Pay for Play
Baseball can learn from the free market.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lewis040102.asp

Roots, Roots, Roots for the Home Team

http://www.newrules.org/resources/rootroots.html

The Imbalance Sheet: Rebuttal: Revenue-Sharing

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/20000907imbalance.html

ABSTRACT:
Although initially developed as cartels of independently owened and operated clubs joining to produce a sports product for spectator consumption, professional sports leagues have emerged as monopolies wielding significant economic power. By increasing revenue-sharing practices, and thus attempting to align owner interests, leagues have become single-business entities that maximize wealth for the league as a whole. Over the past four decades, the National Football League has implemented such practices to become the most popular team sport in North America. Using agency theory, this paper examines how the NFL's former commissioner, Pete Rozelle, and the League Executive Committee used these practices in order to increase League revenues and decrease opportunistic behavior by team owners. However, certain owners continue to act entrepreneurially, to the detriment of the League as a whole. This behavior is congruent with the tenets of agency theory, which content that interests will diverge within a principal-agent relationship (e.g., the NFL-NFL teams). Until such time that team owners realize that the welfare of the other League clubs, along with their competitive equality, is paramount in retaining interest in the producing the League product, professional sports leagues will continue to be plagued with problems such as unnecessary franchise relocations and other acts of maverick owners.

http://www.getcited.org/pub/103334962

Packers get $13 million loan
Money from NFL will help renovate Lambeau

http://www.jsonline.com/packer/news/may01/nflmeet24052301.asp

Independent Manchester United Supporters Association
IMUSA Campaigns

Revenue sharing from broadcasting football

http://www.imusa.org/campaigns/television/television01.shtml

What is revenue sharing?

The NFL does share revenues such as TV and gate revenue, but does not share individual stadium revenues which puts teams with older stadiums at a severe financial disadvantage because they lack the facilities of a newer stadium.

Qualcomm Stadium's weaknesses: Inadequate bathrooms, poor sight lines, poor concession areas, outdated sound system, narrow concourses, inferior premium seating facilities and outdated media facilities.

http://www.ftballiance.org/faqs/revenue.php

Competitive balance in the NFL is currently a very interesting topic. In 1993 the NFL changed many of its policies in order to increase competitive balance. With the implementation of free agency, revenue sharing, and salary caps, came increased competition and a more even playing field across the NFL. It has been ten years since this implementation. Changes have begun to be seen within the last 5 years. There are two sides to this competitive balance issue. In many cases competitive balance has increased fan support throughout the league and even increase viewership of the games. However, there are some that feel that this new competitive balance has taken the personality out of the NFL. Regardless of which viewpoint being addressed it is difficult to ignore that the NFL has begun to pave the way for the other professional leagues looking to create competitive balance.

http://studentwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~m_bredenberg/nfl_page.html

http://216.239.33.100/search?q=cach...esenne.doc+nfl+revenue+sharing&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

REVENUE SHARING AND COMPETITIVE BALANCE
IN PROFESSIONAL TEAM SPORTS

 

And thus big clubs didn't take notice when it happened. It took a fellow big club to die a very messy death (rest in peace, Fiorentina, though my bets were on Chelsea) before they actually considered curbing spending.