To Find More Balance, Premiership Can Learn From NFL, MLB

The sale of Manchester City soccer club to the Abu Dhabi United Group, an investment consortium lead by the fabulously wealthy (the group’s net worth is estimated at approximately $1 trillion) 31-year-old Dr. Sulaiman Al-Fahim, has set off alarm bells in England. The fear is that the new owners, who have promised to buy a laundry list of star players and assemble a dream team, will topple the Premier League establishment. Forget about newly promoted teams like Stoke, Hull, or West Brom, even Man City’s local rivals Manchester United and other members of England’s Big Four can’t possibly be expected to compete with the expected tidal wave of money.Besides assuring Emirati glory, surely the outcome will be negative in the form of reduced competition and less drama. To be fair, the league was already headed in this direction, with Manchester United and Chelsea dominating the last four seasons. Aside from those two and Arsenal, no other team has won the league in 13 years.Now that the established Big Four — Liverpool plus the three title-winning teams — could find their interests aligned with the other clubs in the Premier League, the time has come to implement needed changes to improve competitive balance. Before it is too late, the Premier League should level the playing field.Currently, in terms of regulations to foster financial equality, the Premier League is something of a blank slate. This means that Man City’s new owners, with a bottomless pit of money to call on, can assemble the world’s best talent. Worse still for the other clubs struggling to keep up is that transfer fees and player salaries will be greatly inflated as clubs and players try to get Manchester City to pay a fortune each time they show interest in a player.But the impetus for change is greater now than it’s ever been. Many ideas for reform that were never seriously entertained before are being dusted off. One of the most prevalent is placing greater restrictions on club ownership, perhaps even going so far as to ban foreign owners. But in the EPL, this would be closing the barn door after the cows had gotten out. Of the 20 clubs currently in the top flight, half are already majority-owned by foreigners. There is no going back to local ownership.Another way to address the lack of competition and the creeping foreign influence has already been implemented by the Union of European Football Associations, Europe’s soccer governing body for the pan-European competitions, the Champions League and the association’s own UEFA cups. Once fully implemented, the plan imposes minimum numbers for homegrown players — at least four that a team trains itself and at least four more that were developed in the country, for a total of eight local players on each 25-man roster. The idea of the local requirement is to force teams to develop young talent instead of just buying players abroad. The rule is controversial, and while it was carefully crafted to comply with European labor laws, it may still have difficultly surviving legal challenges.Both of these ideas are vaguely xenophobic — if not entirely so — and do nothing to address the real problem: the incredible gulf in financial resources between the richest and poorest clubs in the Premier League. Rather than restricting foreign owners and players, England should be looking to foreign leagues for ideas to level the competitive balance of the Premier league. Specifically, the NFL and Major League Baseball here in America.One new guideline, loosely modeled on an NFL rule, would mandate that clubs keep annual spending, combined between player salaries and transfer fees to no more than 75% of their annual revenues. If owners want more to spend on players, they will need to increase attendance or sell more merchandise. The rule does not enforce the same budget upon all teams, but rather ensures sound financial principles are applied and reduces the incentive for clubs to sell out to a rich foreign owner.A second idea comes from MLB and involves greater revenue sharing. A luxury tax would be imposed on the teams with the biggest budgets. If the richest teams’ spending went above the determined threshold, they would pay a percentage of each dollar over the limit into a “luxury tax” fund that would get distributed to the lower-revenue teams. This would provide additional funds for the small-market teams to invest in players and create a drag on the richest team’s spending. Again, this would not bring every team’s budgets into alignment, but it would shrink the gap between the highest spenders and the lowest spenders.England’s Premier League is the most popular and richest league in the world. Much of its success can be attributed to foreign influence: wealthy owners investing in the clubs, star players improving the soccer on the field, and a worldwide television audience that helps pay the escalating player salaries. Solutions to the competitive balance must respect the positive influence foreigners have had. With that said, Manchester City’s wealthy new owners provide the impetus for changes that frankly should have been implemented when the Premier League was formed back in 1992.The idea is not to make all teams equal on financial terms. Far from it. But the current situation where the Big Four exponentially outspend other teams is not ideal either. A middle ground where ManU, Chelsea, and now Man City still spend more, but not exponentially so, would greatly enhance the competitiveness of the league and subsequently fan interest. The path is clear: Don’t ban foreigners, borrow their good ideas.samsternjones@gmail.com

To Find More Balance, Premiership Can Learn From NFL, MLB

To Find More Balance, Premiership Can Learn From NFL, MLB

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