SHOULD SALARY CAPS BE INTRODUCED IN SOCCER?

According to the Telegraph, Hughes spoke about Bolton Chairman Phil Gartside’s recent proposals regarding the possibility of salary caps within the Premiership and the abandonment of relegation:

“I doubt you will get a salary cap, I think European rules would forbid it”

In professional sports, a salary cap (wage cap) is a limit on the amount of money a team can spend on player salaries, either as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team’s roster (or both). Several sports leagues (NFL. NBA, MLB) have implemented salary caps, both as a method of keeping overall costs down, and to ensure parity between teams so a wealthy team cannot entrench dominance by signing many more top players than other teams. Salary caps can be a major issue in negotiations between league management and players’ unions, as they may stunt the inflation of player salaries.

One of the main reasons why there is salary cap is to ensure parity. In theory, an effective salary cap prevents wealthy teams from signing a multitude of high-paid star players to ensure they win through superior economic power. With each club having roughly the same economic power to attract players, this contributes to parity – roughly equal playing talent in each team in the league. A salary cap can also help to prevent situations in which a club will sign high-cost contracts in order to achieve immediate success, only to find themselves in financial difficulty because of it.

Leagues need to ensure a degree of parity between teams so that games are exciting for the fans and not a foregone conclusion. The leagues that have adopted salary caps generally do so because they believe letting richer teams accumulate talent affects the quality of the sporting product they want to sell. If only a handful of dominant teams are able to win consistently and challenge for the championship, many more of the contests will be blowouts by the superior team, reducing the sport’s attractiveness for fans and for television, and without any long term hope of their club winning, patrons may gravitate to other sports and leagues.

When Blatter ruled out use of video replays he also repeated his call for Europe’s richest clubs to stop buying up all the top talent and urged them to leave the field open for less affluent rivals.

FIFA is pressing ahead with a proposal to implement a so-called ‘6 plus 5′ system whereby half of a club’s starting eleven must be home-grown.

‘We believe 6 plus 5 will give more incentive to young players,’ said Blatter.

‘All the big clubs have youth departments but there is no chance for these players to play in the first team.’

Without mentioning any English clubs by name, Blatter referred to what he described as a ‘traffic jam’ of foreign players in Europe.

‘The big clubs with a lot of money can afford to buy the best players. They have 20, 25, sometimes 30 on their list but only 11 can play. What are the others doing? Waiting? Recuperating? Or taking away the chance for other teams to have a better starting eleven?
‘What these rich clubs are doing is taking the best out of market, then not letting them play.

‘Look at the results in some European leagues. Some clubs are already far away after a third of the season, the others can only play to avoid relegation, not for the title. Something is wrong about this.’

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=393895&&cc=5901

Yes, something needs to be fixed. Introduce Salary Cap.