The sports teams in a league of their own

As spending on footballers soars, Stefan Szymanski asks if we could learn a lesson from the US.

He writes in today's Daily Telegraph, "Many fans are in denial, but the reality of professional sport is that money buys success: spend enough and the balance will tip in your favour. Of course, there are no guarantees, but year after year the teams that spend the most on player salaries tend to end up at the top of the league and those that spend the least end up at the bottom. This is not only true for football. The New York Yankees have won baseball's World Series 26 times (the nearest rival has won it only 10 times) and no one doubts that the financial muscle of the Big Apple lies behind this feat.

But there is a limit to the ambition of the Yankees; as an American economist observed 45 years ago, their prayer must be "Oh Lord, make us good, but not that good". Without credible opposition, who wants to watch the Yankees? At times, the New Zealand All Blacks and the Australian cricket team must have pondered the same question. Unless your rivals have a reasonable chance of success you risk becoming a freak show followed only by a few diehards.

When Formula One became the Michael Schumacher Show, audience figures declined (except, of course, in Germany). Men's tennis is enjoying a revival not because of Andy Murray but because at last there are credible rivals to Roger Federer (something Pete Sampras lacked). Tiger Woods still draws the crowds to golf, but even if "freak" is not the right word, the exceptional gulf between him and almost anyone who has ever played the game puts his dominance into a special category.

A successful competition must imbue the teams with an unquenchable desire to win while denying them the means to kill off the opposition permanently. Real Madrid's president, Florentino Perez, is so concerned about the unequal contest in La Liga that he is calling for an enhanced, European super league to feed him more worthy opponents. This might work, since there are big enough teams in England, Italy and Germany to give them a game, but what if Real tried to buy its way to the top of a super league?

American leagues have faced up to this problem and introduced measures to stop teams remaining dominants. American football's NFL, the world's most lucrative sports league, boasts that "on any given Sunday, any team in this league can beat any other team". It aims to achieve this by a combination of limiting squad sizes, sharing gate and TV revenues and imposing salary caps. Most famously, it has a draft system that gives the bottom team the right to choose the best new player entering the league in the next season – an incentive to lose rather than to win. But here's the rub: the NFL is a business, a socialist business run by billionaire capitalists who make a fortune since their restraints also hold down salaries. What's more, they don't allow any competition to play at their level: there is no promotion and relegation. They call this "leaguethink". Every team owner is devoted to upholding the interests of the NFL first, their franchise second.

Ironically, it is European football that is the torch bearer of rampant capitalistic individualism, while America espouses sporting socialism. But that is because the Americans are not playing for fun, they are playing for money, and they know the rules of that game better than anyone else."

An interesting analogy, but what perhaps is most interesting are the reader comments here

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