English football has the commercialism of US sports without their egalitarianism
English football has the commercialism of US sports without their egalitarianism: New Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly suggested the Premier League might take from America and introduce an All-Star game to improve TV income.
Gary Neville tweeted that US investment in English football threatens the pyramid and fabric of the game. “They’re clueless and think differently.”
Many have responded that pundits like Neville owe their livelihood to the Americanization of English football: without America’s example, the modern Premier League – as a business structured around massive TV deals, as an endlessly mediatized spectacle, as a hegemonic cultural form – would not exist.
Boehly’s suggestions aim to further commercialize English football; this is not “thinking differently,” but the sport’s essence during the last three decades.
As European football spirals deeper into salary inflation, bailouts, expenditure, and debt, there’s another irony worth examining.
Professional sports
The American model of professional sports – in which expenditure is regulated by salary caps, the player acquisition is tamed by pre-season draughts, and commercialization must battle with collectivism – allows leagues to live within their means while maintaining even competition.
America, the most capitalist culture on earth, built equalizing institutions in professional sports in the middle of the past century, even as its leagues relentlessly seized every opportunity to transform athletic rivalry into profit.
In football, England embraced commercialism without American-style regulations to maintain equality of the competition. This gap has caused extraordinary cultural inversions.
America, the home of 24-hour service, caloric overload, and $10,000 emergency room visits, has had 12 different Super Bowl winners in the last 15 years.
England, the origin of socialised medicine, the local pub, and the village green, has become a footballing oligarchy with only five Premier League winners.
If the competitive balance is crucial to preserving the “pyramid and fabric” of English and European football, the Old World can learn from the New.
Uefa president Aleksander eferin, a constant if unsuccessful champion for Europe-wide salary caps, has recognised this.
Sports cultures
How have their sports cultures diverged in recent decades? The answer lies in timing and each country’s unique labor-capital interaction. The NBA, NFL, and MLB all have wage caps and luxury taxes, and all three hold draughts to distribute young talent evenly. Calling this “socialism” is one of American sportswriting’s laziest tropes.
In the second half of the 20th century, these institutions arose as an American kind of capitalism. Professional American sport owes as much to strikes, lockouts, and collective bargaining as to sponsorship, merchandising, name rights, or other dealmaking manoeuvres.
After World War II, professional sports employee unions emerged: the NBAPA was founded in 1954, and football and baseball followed in 1956 and 1966.
Sports unionism evolved in America during the postwar heyday of the labor-business agreement when union representation was strong and it was commonly assumed that the economy would function best when worker rights and owner interests were harmonised.
Marvin Miller, the inaugural head of the MLBPA, told players in 1966, “This will be an adversarial relationship.” Unions aren’t social clubs. Unions limit an employer’s actions. You’ll be unhappy if the owners like, praise, or admire me.
Though union membership in American society declined after 1980, union power and influence in sport did not, and professional sports’ organisational constitution as a shared corporate enterprise negotiated by players and owners remained intact.
NBA and NFL
The implementation of salary caps in the NBA (1983) and NFL (1993) was the product of direct negotiation between owners and unions. Collective bargaining remains a basic part of all the great American sports today, and the relationship is just as adversarial as when it began.
The PFA, led by Jimmy Hill, famously abolished the salary cap in 1961, but player unions in Europe and England lack the institutional centrality of their American counterparts.
All the big issues of modern sport — player movement, money creation and TV rights, pay sustainability, and talent allocation – were up for grabs at once.
In the postwar years, television rights were important to the long-term financial stability of professional sports. In the 1950s and 1960s, CBS, NBC, and ABC dominated American TV, which was severely regulated. In the UK, ITV was the only commercial network until the early 1980s.
NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle secured a $9.3 million, two-year deal with CBS to televise regular and postseason games.
Rozelle persuaded everybody to negotiate a single network deal and split the profit.
This arrangement catapulted professional sports in America into the contemporary age, enshrining the collective good as a top US sports administration goal.
Money – the kind only feasible in a big, competitive TV market like postwar America – also offered security to American sports, which catalyzed negotiations over other chips.
TV money sweetened salary caps and draughts, giving owner-player talks a simultaneity less visible in English and European football.
ITV
By the early 1990s, when ITV and BSkyB began negotiations over the founding of the Premier League, issues like transfer mobility and wage limitation had already been settled in the players’ favour.
There was no rich American-style tradition of player-owner bargaining to draw on.
The US handled all these concerns at once, unlike the UK. NBA players agreed to a pay ceiling in 1983 for TV income. After a series of lockouts and work stoppages, the NFL adopted a pay limit in 1993 and gave players inter-club movement.
These major deals, together with Rozelle’s CBS sale, set the tone for professional sports management in America in the decades thereafter.
Lakers president Jeanie Buss remarked in 2011 of a new NBA-wide revenue sharing arrangement, “We want economically sustainable teams so every team can compete.” It helps the league.”
America’s judiciary upholds collectivist values. Several of the first significant TV deals and collective bargaining agreements were challenged in court as anti-competitive.
American anti-trust law, rooted in the Progressive Era’s monopoly-busting crusades, allows trade constraints where required for a joint venture’s viability. The draught and wage cap are permissible because the product of professional sports is competition.
SC
In 2010, the Supreme Court said NFL limits may be justified if they promote the league’s prosperity or “competitive balance.”
Competition law was also used in English football to prohibit the “retain and transfer” method in 1963.
It’s uncertain how much protection British legislation, especially post-Brexit, will afford current competitive mechanisms. The pay cap introduced in Leagues 1 and 2 for the 2020-21 season failed a judicial challenge, however, this looked to reflect poor planning.
Strong unions, postwar comprehensive player-owner agreements, and the collectivist legacy of American competition legislation explain why America has more equitable sports institutions than England.
The contrast between the two countries is a collision of capitalism, not US-style socialism and British laissez-faire. The 1990s makeover of English football was part of the Keynesian postwar settlement’s failure and Thatcher’s shift to the market.
League
Player power, collective bargaining, and a welfarist attention to the common good, all relics of the postwar New Deal order, were no longer negotiable by the time Reagan’s neoliberal conversion was in full swing. English football has all the commercialism of American sport but none of its redistribution.
The outcome in England is rocket player salaries, absurd transfer costs, a new breed of billionaire owners unconcerned with financial sustainability, and a lopsided competition that only two or three clubs can win.
These flaws have sparked discussion of a regulator fixing English football. The Atlantic may hold answers. Despite fan displeasure over US-inspired projects like the unsuccessful European Super League, America’s impact in football need not be bad.
Promotion and relegation are foreign notions in the US, and none of the great American sports has many divisions of professional competition like Europe’s big football nations.
Football is truly multinational, making it difficult to implement equalizing measures like the draught and salary limits. England can’t imitate all American competition’s institutional constraints. But don’t give up.