HIF wrote:Sedale Threatt wrote:Mamba81p wrote:
they have to stop this massive unsustainable inflation. If City can spend whatever they want, then the other teams will try to catch up even if they can't really do it, and they will eventually end up in bankruptcy.
I don't even know how you can get on top of it given all the leagues and different governing bodies. Or even if there is much of a will to get on top of it. As has been noted, if the Premier League might even be invested in their teams fudging rules to continue amassing talent and attention, there doesn't seem like much of a chance it will happen. Salary caps generally (but not always) work wonders in US leagues, but they also have zero competition for talent.
Football is just a weird sport to follow. Arsenal is a massive, massive club and they spend an
enormous amount of money, and for the better part of two decades now it's felt like even they don't even have the resources to compete. When it's gotten to that point, something seems fundamentally broken.
And then you watch the FA cup or Leicester win the league or Brighton/West Ham challenge for Europe.
The FA Cup is a single-elimination tournament. Anything can happen in any given game, just like last weekend where for one afternoon second-to-last Everton was better than first-place Arsenal. You see the same thing every year in the NCAA hoops tournament, which is why it’s so massively popular — especially with gamblers. Play that match 38 times for a full league season and Arsenal beats them by 20 or 30 points at a minimum.
And that’s exactly why the Leicester title was so mind-boggling: it was quite literally a once-in-a-lifetime event. I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of European football, but since the money started really pouring in and the leagues stratified, how often has an upset like that happened? And how often can you count on that happening? Way, way, way, way more often than not, it’s going to be the same small group of elite wealthy clubs contending.
Every sport around the world has its flaws, independent of the raw entertainment value itself of sitting down to watch single games (which is obviously high in this instance or none of us would be here), and that is football’s: your ability to realistically contend for the league basically comes down to how much money you have. That’s hardly a controversial statement. I’ve been reading serious complaints about this for 20-plus years now, much of it coming from your country.
