Something needs to change.
I am not convinced a straight forward salary cap is all that’s needed though. Let’s say we have 3 clubs:
Accrington: Revenue £2 million
Lincoln: Revenue £4 million
Sunderland: £8 million
Made those revenue figures up for those clubs, but you get the idea. Let’s say a wage cap is introduced of £3.5 million.
Your mid sized league 1 club, us in the case, could probably go close to that cap and be able to survive.
But your smaller club, in this case Accrington, well they can’t afford it. But actually, I fear what a cap could do here is give them an incentive to gamble. ‘Big clubs can only spend £3.5 million, we’ve got a good manager we believe in, let’s borrow £1.5 million, match the big clubs and go for it!’ - therefore I think there should be a set cap plus a maximum % of revenue that can be spent, whichever is less. For example, if we said a cap £3.5 million or 80% of revenue, whichever is least, this would stop this potential problem. In that case Accrington could not spend more than £1.6 million.
But then what about Sunderland in this example? They are being penalised for generating a lot of revenue which is there’s to spend really. Perhaps we should just say clubs can spend 80% of revenue? But we have seen how this can be manipulated, for example through owners paying in sponsorship money. So again, I think something different should be done here. Again, not using exact figures, more informed people would need to decide on actual figures, but I think something like this would work this way: ‘A wage cap of £3.5 million plus 25% of revenue over £5 million’. This means clubs who generate plenty of revenue see some sort of reward in their playing budget. But if owners want to try and find loopholes to put revenue in to their club, well they can, but would need to put in a million to generate 250K in the playing budget.
So overall a wage cap with two provisions:
1. A maximum of 80% of revenue can only be spent where this is less than the wage cap.
2. Where a clubs revenue exceeds a certain amount they can spend a certain percentage of this in addition to the wage cap.
There is then still a lot to think about in terms of relegated clubs!
I am not convinced a straight forward salary cap is all that’s needed though. Let’s say we have 3 clubs:
Accrington: Revenue £2 million
Lincoln: Revenue £4 million
Sunderland: £8 million
Made those revenue figures up for those clubs, but you get the idea. Let’s say a wage cap is introduced of £3.5 million.
Your mid sized league 1 club, us in the case, could probably go close to that cap and be able to survive.
But your smaller club, in this case Accrington, well they can’t afford it. But actually, I fear what a cap could do here is give them an incentive to gamble. ‘Big clubs can only spend £3.5 million, we’ve got a good manager we believe in, let’s borrow £1.5 million, match the big clubs and go for it!’ - therefore I think there should be a set cap plus a maximum % of revenue that can be spent, whichever is less. For example, if we said a cap £3.5 million or 80% of revenue, whichever is least, this would stop this potential problem. In that case Accrington could not spend more than £1.6 million.
But then what about Sunderland in this example? They are being penalised for generating a lot of revenue which is there’s to spend really. Perhaps we should just say clubs can spend 80% of revenue? But we have seen how this can be manipulated, for example through owners paying in sponsorship money. So again, I think something different should be done here. Again, not using exact figures, more informed people would need to decide on actual figures, but I think something like this would work this way: ‘A wage cap of £3.5 million plus 25% of revenue over £5 million’. This means clubs who generate plenty of revenue see some sort of reward in their playing budget. But if owners want to try and find loopholes to put revenue in to their club, well they can, but would need to put in a million to generate 250K in the playing budget.
So overall a wage cap with two provisions:
1. A maximum of 80% of revenue can only be spent where this is less than the wage cap.
2. Where a clubs revenue exceeds a certain amount they can spend a certain percentage of this in addition to the wage cap.
There is then still a lot to think about in terms of relegated clubs!