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MLS and American playoff systems in general are not bad. From an interest standpoint, they simply move some end-of-season drama from the bottom of the table to the middle. I am glad they’re not the only model, though. Variety is the spice of life.
Closed-shop American leagues also make a debatable but not insane tradeoff of fewer fans getting top-flight sport in their towns, but more fans getting a legitimate bite at the apple for a championship.
Yeah, you’re probably right. I guess the devil is in the details with the cap that gets set, but even if most them want some cap, can’t imagine the PL owners pulling in one direction hard enough to give it much teeth, especially, as you say, with financial turmoil in Spain and Italy and only a couple of oil-money clubs in France. Throw in something fairly close to actual reasonable governance in Germany, and you start to see why this passed now.
The main issue will simply be getting outcompeted in UEFA competition by a few continental clubs who can and will outspend them. If it’s a hard cap, and it’s set high enough that the big English cups will still go far in UCL, I doubt there will be any major blowback, and it might actually be helpful for competitive balance at the top of the Premier League.
American sport has many issues of its own, but it’s always interested me how the problems and solutions go in different directions based on the early history of Association football in England and baseball in the US.
I make the point about NFL quarterbacks sometimes, because there’s only 32 full-time job openings and only maybe half that many get any respect, but it applies to professional athletes in general. Imagine if most of us were subjected to constant oversight and mockery from random strangers because we might have slipped from the top 1% of our chosen profession to the top 3%, or god forbid we were only ever among the top 5%.
Now, the obscene money reduces my overall sympathy quite a bit, but I could definitely see it weighing on somebody, especially with how it generally hits them while they’re still young and dumb and status-conscious.