Wigan Athletic chairman Dave Whelan revealed in a BBC documentary with Lord Sugar that informal discussions over a wage cap have been started.
“Bolton, Blackburn, Wigan, Wolves all got together. The first thing you talk about is wages. We thought between us we should impose a salary cap. We said that we clubs within the smaller section of the Premier League, we shouldn’t pay any more than two players above £20,000 a week. It sounded to me very sensible.
“Throughout all four leagues we have got to impose a salary scheme where each league or each club pay so much in wages.”
Idealistic, but surely madness? Whelan’s proposal seems to be based on a sound piece of logic. How fair is it that certain teams are able to entrench their dominance through being able to pay higher wages for the best players? The Champions League and the huge sums of money generated through this entrench the dominance of the best. UEFA’s financial fair play rules are an admirable but insufficient step forward. They are a good step, but they will entrench the dominance of teams like Arsenal and Manchester United, whose turnover is greater than their rivals due to greater money taken through ticket sales (with bigger stadiums and more expensive tickets).
How do you define the cap? Is it even fair? How liberal is it to prevent an individual making the most of his or her talents? Political philosophy teaches us that liberty is about the equal start in life, not the equal end. A player whose marketable value is in the millions should not be prevented from making the most of that, should they?
And then what about the impact on financial systems? What sense does it make to implement a salary cap which would reduce the amount of money footballers can make, and therefore pay, into the tax coffers of our government? Wayne Rooney may not be worth £200,000 a week really, but we shouldn’t forget that in effect some £80,000 of that goes to HMRC, and that he pays enough tax per month to fund the annual salaries of about 20 nurses.
Bringing it back to football, if we had a salary cap, there would be an inevitable consequence. Players who want the biggest salaries would move overseas. And secondly, allowing clubs to pay two players more than the cap would lead to teams being structured around the individual, rather than the collective. What sense does this make?
Seemingly none.
But there is an argument to be made in defence of the salary cap. It is the one way in which you can enforce some kind of equality between clubs and thus ensure teams aren’t hampered by unfair financial disadvantages.
To avoid players simply swanning off to Spain or Italy, this must be a global thing. It has to come from FIFA. The salary cap has to be worldwide, otherwise its effects will be counter productive.
Secondly, sport is not business, despite what we are told. A club’s priority is to win trophies above all else. Profit comes second. Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Chelsea. The world’s most successful clubs of recent years are clubs in millions of pounds worth of debt.
In the world of business, investment banks, large corporations and other major businesses make profits. When was the last time Tesco made a loss? When the banking sector started recording losses, it led to a collapse in world financial markets and the credit crunch. In business, I would never support financial equality as it removes the competitive need which drives the world economy. Football, and sport in general, is different.
Unlike in the wider world of business, ensuring rough financial equality will not have an adverse impact on competition for this very reason. Sport plays to different rules. Football teams want to win for the sake of winning, whereas businesses want to win for the sake of profits. It is for this reason that a salary cap could be sensible if applied uniformly. With such a cap, would that mean a Christiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi would not grow up and dream of playing the game? Of course it wouldn’t. The best players would still arise, clubs would still be able to train them to high standards because TV money would not drop. In fact, clubs would have more money, as TV would continue to fund the game because its entertainment value is not dependent on player wages.
It runs counter to the principle of sport to allow certain teams to build up an inbuilt advantage. The great thing about sport is that anyone from anywhere can take someone on and beat them regardless. That only a select few teams can possibly win most European leagues is contradictory to the values of sport. Money changes that. Football, despite what some say, is not business. Barcelona and Real Madrid prove that the best teams do not place profit before success on the pitch. But financial inequality entrenches the dominance of teams like them. A salary cap could be the only way to reverse this trend.
