Tony Montana wrote:
Timothy wrote:
In what sense? What do you make of the NFL or the NRL model?
NFL model is a fairer system. More socialist which is weird for USA.
It's horses for courses. Draft and cap models make sense for sports with attritional scoring and low variance of results.
Among popular sports, football has very high variance of results, meaning upsets are still very possible for clubs with an order of magnitude less financial resources.
Meanwhile, the slow-moving ordering of the leagues contributes to a sense of identity and drama among supporters that has become quite absent from draft and cap sports.
For example, the preferential draft picks for weaker clubs in the AFL mean it's common for today's cellar dwellers to talk about the "five year cycle" after which a string of favourable draft picks will make them competitive again … and by the same token it's nearly impossible for a currently strong club to establish a dynasty of success.
This churning cycle is downright tedious to me, but you couldn't remove draft and cap from AFL, because the small margins required for comprehensive dominance would quickly make the league unwatchably predictable.
Although cash doping can be a shit, football doesn't quite have that extreme financial determinism yet—which means we get the colour and shade, the riches and poverty that make the sport entertaining, even if we have to gnash our teeth at the petro-clubs (or the old money Arsenals).
At the moment we're all on a post-2005 journey with Arsenal that has shaped all of our lives, in which all of the club's financial efforts over the last decade may be about to accumulate to the point, a climax at which we return to winning major trophies. It's the stuff of a good novel, unlike three or four bureaucratic third round draft picks.
With the money that's been floating around in recent years distorting things quite a bit, I'm now hoping FFP is the right set of measures to keep those narrative virtues going longer term.
@Tony It's no coincidence that the US understands socialist principles of justice and fairness perfectly when organising its sports, but conveniently forgets them when ordering its society! I'd prefer things to be the other way around myself.
