Why Premier League, European football is anything but fair،
Are you an NBA fan? (Otherwise, feel free to skip the next two paragraphs.)
Would you like a league where a team fielded a starting five of Luka Doncic, Steph Curry, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic, with, say, Joel Embiid, Kevin Durant, Jimmy Butler, Rudy Gobert, Damian Lillard, Devin Booker and Ja Morant coming off the bench? How fun would it be to see them face another team whose starting five included Tyrese Haliburton, Austin Reaves, Caleb Martin, Harrison Barnes and Nic Claxton, with a bunch of no-names coming off the bench?
I guess once the novelty value wears off, probably not. But this is what the NBA could look like if the ratio of the highest-paid team to the lowest-paid team matched the salary distribution of the Premier League. In basketball, such an imbalance of resources would not last; in football, that’s pretty much the norm. And most accept it.
When change happens gradually, we tend not to notice it. What is strangely abnormal – or abjectly unfair – is accepted because damn it, that’s all we know and we don’t remember the way things used to be. This is true for society as a whole, and it is certainly true for football.
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Last month, football finance newsletter Swiss Ramble published the wage bill for every club in Europe’s top five leagues for the 2021-22 season, the most recent for which we have full accounts. This confirms what we already know: some clubs spend much more on salaries than others, and because salaries are strongly correlated with on-field success, the same clubs win again and again.
Not surprising, right? However, what you may not realize is the extent of inequality within each league. In the 2021-22 season, the highest wage bill in the Premier League – by far the most equal (or, more accurately, the least unequal) of Europe’s Big Five – belonged to Manchester United, whose total was 5.65 times higher. as high as the club with the lowest salaries, Brentford.
The gap is even more extreme in other leagues. In Serie A it was around 9.5 times (from Juventus at the top to Spezia at the bottom), the Bundesliga was around 15.5 times (from Bayern to Greuther Fürth), La Liga recorded a time of 18.5 (from Real Madrid to Rayo Vallecano) and in France, it was a ridiculous 41.5 (Paris Saint-Germain to Clermont Foot).
Stop and think about it for a minute. Have we lost any expectation of what could constitute a fair fight? Do we like watching a Lamborghini race on a unicycle? Well, we do, apparently, and not just in football.
In Formula 1, the same team has won 16 of 17 Grands Prix this season — the same guy, Max Verstappen, has won 14 of 17, which is why he’s world champion… just like last year and the year before — with almost a quarter of the season remaining. And F1, let’s not forget, has a cost cap. So if Red Bull dominates, it’s not just because they spend more – they simply spend better, whether it’s better wind tunnels, better drivers, better engineers and mechanics or whatever.
In football, the only cost controls that exist – when enforced and not circumvented by accounting shenanigans or dodgy, inflated sponsorships – have to do with sustainability, because no one wants clubs to go bankrupt. Their goal is to ensure that you don’t spend more than a certain percentage of your income on players (salaries and transfer fees), not to ensure that teams spend comparable amounts. In terms of equal opportunities, this does absolutely nothing. That’s like telling Taylor Swift and Joe Schmo filling up their gas tank at your local gas station that they can’t spend more than 10% of their annual income on personal transportation.
Economist Stefan Szymanski showed around 20 years ago how closely performance and wage spending are linked, and since then others have followed. The gap between the elites and the rest of the world has widened. In the Premier League, seven teams have broken the 90 points mark (2.37 points per game) over the past decade. Compare this with the English top flight of the 1980s: not only did no team reach the same number of points per game, the equivalent of 90 points, but only two broke the 80 points mark.
It’s a similar story across Europe. The six highest points in Bundesliga history have all been achieved in the last 11 years, while seven of the eight highest in Serie A have come in the last decade.
What stops this from being a Max Verstappen-style procession is the nature of the sport. Scores are low, strange things happen, there is variation and even with the overwhelming advantages afforded to elite clubs, upsets happen. And yes, taking the 2021-22 season from which the Swiss Ramble data is taken, you will notice that Brentford finished only six positions lower than Manchester United, Spezia avoided relegation while Juve finished fourth , Rayo was in the middle of the table and Clermont avoided relegation. drop. This is what keeps these leagues from being extremely predictable, but the direction of travel is obvious and there’s no reason to think the situation will improve.
Rich clubs are not just rich; they are powerful too. Perhaps not powerful enough to create a breakaway Super League, but more than powerful enough to not only maintain the status quo, but also exacerbate the gap. Given the globalization of the game, the flow of money and the very notion of eye-catching superstars, those who believe football needs superclubs and punching bags to maximize revenue may be right.
This fact may or may not depress you. As for me? I would be grateful if we remembered from time to time that what we are observing – a team with five, ten and even 40 times more resources than its opponents – is not only unfair. It also doesn’t fit the history of the sport.
