By J Hutcherson – WASHINGTON, DC (Apr 13, 2015) US Soccer Players – The reason season tickets are still so important in professional sports is that it obligate fans to pay for every game. Obvious enough, with the season ticket base guaranteeing tickets sell regardless of the opponent. Selling season tickets at a discount makes business sense because of that obligation. Without it, the quality of the opponent becomes much more important.
It’s how professional sports deal with bad teams and a lack of parity. Even lousy teams are a road draw against the best teams because people are desperate to see a league’s elite.
All of Europe’s major leagues contain major mismatches. Every game isn’t a meeting of rivals or even equals. Some barely make competitive sense. It’s not a new point that the elite of Europe spend well past requirements to compete domestically. The super club version of parity is always about the bigger picture, the broader market.
In theory, MLS believes its version of soccer parity will eventually replace Europe’s super club system. A product of American pro sports business strategy, MLS took ridiculous steps to make it improbable that their teams could spend their way to success. Even in the designated player era, MLS will point to teams built on the cheap making it to the MLS Cup final with some of those teams lifting the trophy.
Fans of MLS know the real story. These examples normally aren’t marches to victory worthy of documentaries. The MLS season contains more than enough boring games between teams happy to cancel each other out. Quality and parity aren’t the same things, something that in fairness every league struggles with. The NFL, America’s market leader for pro sports, also severely restricts its payroll. It recognizes there’s a push/pull between those limits and the quality of its games. That’s true for any team setting artificial limits.
For European soccer, their leagues are just at the point of recognizing a limited future. That’s not the same thing as accepting that there need to be limits. Plenty of European clubs are waiting for UEFA’s Financial Fair Play regulations to fail. There’s enough evidence already to see how UEFA’s top down approach applied to every soccer league in Europe is a potential misstep. Rather than leaving it to the leagues, UEFA dictated a policy that may or may not make things better.
UEFA’s point in introducing Financial Fair Play was a way to introduce competitive balance, if not parity. If teams that want to spend face revenue limits, there’s a sense that fair play will take hold. That European version of fair play is limited and specific. With a professional sport, fairness is an odd concept when it comes to limiting the ability to spend. If a professional team has the money and it exists in a structure without clear limitations, that changes the meaning of fair.
Like every other major league in Europe, the Premier League has no choice but to accept Financial Fair Play if their clubs want to play in the Champions League or the Europa League. That’s the carrot for UEFA to get its way. What’s clear to all involved is that Financial Fair Play still favors the big clubs, those most able to generate the kind of revenue that allows them to spend within the new regulations.
What this isn’t is an NFL style hard cap or the luxury tax system used in other North American leagues. It’s a European answer to the pro sports parity problem, missing what builds leagues. After all, UEFA isn’t just trying to fix one single league. They’re applying a change across a region where even the biggest leagues don’t necessarily have much in common.
Parity itself has never been a laudable aim of European soccer leagues. Almost without exception, the biggest leagues in Europe are about producing dynasties, the better to carry their brand into Europe and succeed at Champions League level. The Premier League isn’t about creating a structure so it’s fair for all involved. It’s about creating a revenue system so that it’s lucrative for all involved.
Cost control will be the primary benefit of Financial Fair Play, likely leaving many clubs and fans wondering why they need it if their teams have ways of paying the bills.
UEFA may have inadvertently raised the parity question without the ability to provide a meaningful answer. The new European professional soccer model might restrain the benefactors that spend on a club without considering turnover, but that won’t create parity. Neither will making sure that all clubs are operating within the limits of a new financial system that still gives the lucrative clubs a major advantage. In the biggest sense, nothing will change.
J Hutcherson started covering soccer in 1999 and has worked as the general manager of the US National Soccer Team Players Association since 2002. Contact him atjhutcherson@usnstpa.com.
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