Football: pool in to the Final Spur of the season

[Iskaral Pust]

6 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Meanwhile Dortmund have completed a few high profile signings.

Brandt (Leverkusen) joins for 25m € or so (release fee), N. Schulz (Hoffenheim) is also confirmed, T. Hazard (Gladbach) has also been confirmed now, fee is rumoredly way closer to 30m (or even below, kicker claims 25.5m+add-ons) than the 40m Gladbach wanted. They also signed 19 y.o. Mateus Morey from Barca on a free. The latter could be a pretty sweet bit of business for them. Morey is really immensely talented, but the left back has quite an injury history.

I think the prices for Brandt and T. Hazard show that the speculation of interest by Liverpool, Spurs, etc was just an attempt to pump up the price and/or wages via the appearance of a bidding war with deeper pockets in the PL.  If PL clubs were seriously interested in either player then those prices would have lured them to participate.

There has been an emerging two-tier market for football players.  If Barca, Real, PSG, City, United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal or Spurs enquire about a player, then the price is suddenly double what would be asked of Dortmund, Juve (other than Ronaldo), Atletico, Bayern, Ajax, etc.  Even though they are all all in the same pool of CL contenders. 

If Pulisic had moved to another German team, I expect his fee would have been much lower than what Chelsea paid.  Even Bayern would not have been charged that much.  Same with Jadon Sancho: he's doing really well after his first full season.  If Bayern tried to swoop for him the price would be say 50 million.  But because he's English and appealing to PL clubs, his price would be 100 million if United, City or Liverpool made an enquiry.  If Fekir leaves Lyon this summer, will his price be as much as Liverpool was going to pay?

I guess you can say that is just effective price discrimination (in the economic sense), but it does suggest the PL teams have room to negotiate harder.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Just now, Iskaral Pust said:

I think the prices for Brandt and T. Hazard show that the speculation of interest by Liverpool, Spurs, etc was just an attempt to pump up the price and/or wages via the appearance of a bidding war with deeper pockets in the PL.  If PL clubs were seriously interested in either player then those prices would have lured them to participate.

Not true wrt Brandt. He simply had a release fee clause in his contract that kicked in. So no matter where Brandt was heading, Leverkusen were not gonna get paid more than that. Which is way below market value.

[ljkeane]

Brandt going to Dortmund's an interesting one. I don't follow German football particularly closely at all but I'd sort of assumed with Dortmund not winning the title this year people would think they'd missed their window. Brandt's the kind of player I'd think would be looking to make the step up to one of the really big European sides or if he doesn't see that happening this year Leverkusen qualified for the Champions League so he could just stick with them. That he's chosen to go to Dortmund's a bit of a vote of confidence in how good they're going to be next season.

ETA:

15 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

If Fekir leaves Lyon this summer, will his price be as much as Liverpool was going to pay?

Well he's down to his last year of his contract with Lyon and there was all the talk of Liverpool pulling out of the deal because they weren't happy with his medical so even with all other things being equal you'd expect his price to have gone down fairly significantly.

[Iskaral Pust]

6 hours ago, Consigliere said:

A nice little piece by Ken Early in The Irish Times.

City’s domination has been bought – and they’re paying the price

Good article.  Ken Early is an insightful writer.  "more of a transaction than a triumph" pretty well sums it up, as does the weaponized angry fanbase supporting the sportswashing desired by the owners.

There have been similar comparisons lately to Gaelic football in Ireland.  For those unfamiliar: the highest tier of the sport is played at an inter-county level, but one county in particular (Dublin) has a vast and growing advantage in population and resources.  As more and more of the population, and especially young people, gets concentrated in the Dublin metro region through urbanization, the notion of inter-county competition has become ridiculous.  Dublin has won the last four championships in a row, and six of the last eight.  Prior to that they had won just once in thirty years.  Now they look invincible and getting stronger.  There's no sportswashing of a sordid regime going on, but there is a sense that there is no longer anything close to a level playing field and the competition has been ruined.  Viewership is in decline and interest is waning.  Most people watch hurling now instead because it is much more competitive (because Dublin does not have a strong culture of playing hurling, which is typically played more in the south and west).

Although I'm a football/soccer fan through and through, having playing it competitively for most of my life in addition to my unfortunate brainwashing toward Liverpool at a young age, I honestly find the NFL a more enjoyable league to follow because of the in-built parity and mean reversion.  Results of individual games are less predictable.  Any team can be a contender within a couple of years.  Reaching play-offs or winning a championship brings a headwind rather than a virtuous cycle of advantage, and every champion must innovate and find a new path to success if they want to be competitive again.  Perhaps payroll caps should be tried in football too.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

@ljkeane

Partly true. I think the point is, that Dortmund is more or less guaranteed CL football each year. I also thought Bayern would try to sign him. Anyway... Dortmund being guaranteed CL football, and Leverkusen being just "guaranteed EL with the possibility of CL" is a step up. He went from a top 4-6 club, to a top two club. That is a step up. With Leverkusen there's also some rumour about an impending exodus over the next few years. Havertz is on the shortlist of a few bigger clubs (Bayern obviously among them), and Tah is also not guaranteed to stick around there. He is a really talented centerback, who also has played top level football for a few years now and is just 23 y.o.

[Iskaral Pust]

25 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Not true wrt Brandt. He simply had a release fee clause in his contract that kicked in. So no matter where Brandt was heading, Leverkusen were not gonna get paid more than that. Which is way below market value.

That's why I said "and/or wages".  The player can increase his negotiating power on wages from Dortmund if they think he has a competing offer from a PL team.  Sometimes it's the selling club trying to create an auction, other times it's the player's agent.

[ljkeane]

6 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

 I honestly find the NFL a more enjoyable league to follow because of the in-built parity and mean reversion.  Results of individual games are less predictable.  Any team can be a contender within a couple of years.  Reaching play-offs or winning a championship brings a headwind rather than a virtuous cycle of advantage, and every champion must innovate and find a new path to success if they want to be competitive again.  Perhaps payroll caps should be tried in football too.

I do quite like American football but I'm not actually a big fan of the league structure at all. Teams have a fairly big incentive to just be shit if they're not in a position to win immediately which is very annoying. I don't have any major objections to salary caps in sport, so long as they're not structured in a way to allow the owners to screw the players over, but I'm really not a fan of teams being rewarded for failure. 

 

[Iskaral Pust]

1 minute ago, ljkeane said:

I do quite like American football but I'm not actually a big fan of the league structure at all. Teams have a fairly big incentive to just be shit if they're not in a position to win immediately which is very annoying. I don't have any major objections to salary caps in sport, so long as they're not structured in a way to allow the owners to screw the players over, but I'm really not a fan of teams being rewarded for failure. 

 

The NBA just introduced a new system that significantly reduces the incentive for deliberate tanking -- adding a lottery element to the draft rankings.  I would expect the NFL to adopt it too.  Plus soccer still has relegation, which is a huge incentive to strive.  A payroll cap by league division would not remove the relegation/promotion system or the qualifying for CL and EL, which could inject some marginal payroll cap expansion as added incentive.

It's important to note that any long term underperformance in NFL or NBA is because of ineffectual owners/management who are selecting the wrong coaches and/or making bad decisions on player recruitment.  And it's very visible and well understood.  Daniel Levy would beat the Glazers/Woodward almost every season. 

Any payroll cap definitely increases the profits to owners, but it increases competition and reduces hegemony.  And you wouldn't say that American athletes are underpaid.  NFL, baseball and basketball all use some variation of payroll limitations (payroll caps, collective bargaining, luxury tax, etc) but they've still continued to increase the wages to players as their TV contracts improved.  Baseball's long term decline in popularity is just now starting to show up in new player contracts, while previously their wages had out-grown underlying viewership for the past several years.

The separate problem with the NBA is that there is so much money to be spent on a relatively small squad that top players have become so wealthy that they are now choosing teams on features other than salary: e.g. does Durant want easy championships with the Warriors or will he go to the Knicks to show he can take a nothing team and lead them to success?; do players want to be part of the LeBron supporting cast or be a star in their own right?  Salaries are so high that it has freed players to maximize ego/legend, brand, etc.  Not unlike Ronaldo, Neymar, etc. 

Soccer would fall somewhere between NBA and NFL.  NFL has a very large squad so money is spread further around more players.  NBA has smaller squads so everyone can get really well paid.  NFL has a very short season to generate money, NBA has a very long season.  Soccer falls about mid way between the two on both dimensions.  Both NBA and NFL have merchandising markets outside of their local fans, but definitely not as much as the largest soccer clubs.  So economically there should be plenty of money for soccer players to be very well paid even if owners take some bigger profit margins. 

 

[Consigliere]

Salary caps would be near impossible to implement in football. Really, the only way it could possibly be done is if UEFA get involved so that it would apply to the top 5 or 6 European leagues otherwise there will just be a mass exodus of the most talented players to leagues where salary caps don't apply. But such a measure would certainly result in major resistance from the wealthy clubs and the most likely result would be the top clubs breaking away and forming a super league. The FA's of the top European leagues are also well aware that a breakaway by their biggest and most popular clubs would be extremely damaging financially to their domestic leagues and as such would not support such a measure either.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Not to mention certain club owners bypassing it with commercial/advertising deals for the players, totally unrelated to the club the payer signed for *cough* Neymar *cough*

[ljkeane]

Yeah, there's definitely no way it's happening in football.

Still, I wouldn't object to it. I'm not convinced how much it actually leads to 'parity' though. They like to talk about it a lot marketing the NFL but really I think it's more that they have a knockout system to decide the champion which makes it more variable who wins the Superbowl. If it was just a case of a balanced league season picking out the best side in the league as champions then it probably would have been the Patriots for the majority of the last 20 years. 

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Anyway, I always found the US leagues to be quite funny on another level.

I mean with all their almost pathological obsession with communism being evil and stuff, yet their professional sports league and draft orders are so the opposite of free market and talent going to the highest bidder and stuff, and then there's also salary caps now. All of that make it arguably the most communist professional sport in the entire world - on an organisational level at least.

[Iskaral Pust]

17 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Anyway, I always found the US leagues to be quite funny on another level.

I mean with all their almost pathological obsession with communism being evil and stuff, yet their professional sports league and draft orders are so the opposite of free market and talent going to the highest bidder and stuff, and then there's also salary caps now. All of that make it arguably the most communist professional sport in the entire world - on an organisational level at least.

This is true.  American sports are not at all a bastion of free market operations.  They actually represent a tension between collective bargaining by labor versus a closed oligopoly of owners, including periodic strikes by labor*.  The payroll cap actually comes from the oligopsonic power of owners of labor, against which players collectively bargain to set the cap high enough that they still get paid well.  Fans support it because it results in more competition between teams but not to the point that players are not paid as well as other top athletes, e.g. tennis, golf, motor sports, soccer, etc and cause a talent drain.

*Ironically as concentration among employers is increasing in the general economy, the typical worker has less recourse to collective bargaining to offset the oligopsonic suppression of wages.

I'd prefer to see the oligopoly broken down, e.g. with promotion/relegation.  But you do need some sort of closed system to preserve the payroll cap system, as @Consigliere mentioned above.  So you would need all the soccer leagues and associations to coordinate on an payroll cap.  Anyone exempt from the cap can then siphon off the talent.  But that already happens when one region or tier of clubs gets an outsize share of total revenues, e.g. Italian clubs of the 1980s-1990s, PL clubs now, Barca and Real Madrid for the past 25 years, Bayern, CL clubs in general.  In the current system, any club that can strike a revenue sharing deal that disproportionately benefits them, or injects exogenous capital from a sugar daddy, is effectively gaining the same advantage as a club that can stand outside a payroll cap.

[Consigliere]

Come to think of it, salary caps would just benefit the wealthy clubs even more especially if the caps are set so that players can still earn well compared to other athletes. The rich clubs can carry much higher wage bills and will be able to afford having more players at the cap limit. A salary cap would also go a long way to help these clubs keep their wage bills down by reducing the bargaining power of players and agents and as a result the rich clubs will have even more money available to spend on transfers, infrastructure and scouting. 

A salary cap alone will not lead to any more parity than there is now. The entire system has to be scrapped. No more transfer fees in addition to a salary cap as well as a complete rejigging of the global academy system. Such sweeping changes on a global scale is impossible to implement which means you can never have a system designed for parity by rewarding failure like you do in the NFL/NBA.

[Mme Erzulie]

You could also have a total salary cap, though. Like in fantasy football. Everyone gets £100 mil.

[Iskaral Pust]

1 hour ago, Mme Erzulie said:

You could also have a total salary cap, though. Like in fantasy football. Everyone gets £100 mil.

Yes, payroll caps are per team, not per player.   I thought that was understood.

[Consigliere]

Still the same issue though. The cap will be negotiated to be high enough so that rich clubs can still pay top salaries. A wage cap is far more likely to be set at around 250m than 100m and only the wealthy clubs will be able to afford a wage bill at or close to the wage limit. You're just kidding yourself if you think that a salary cap alone will lead to more parity. 

[Heartofice]

The other issue with salary caps is that players and agents would find ways around it pretty easily. There would be other types of payment and benefits that can be used to entice players to clubs and could be taken off the books somehow. All of these rules sound good on paper but generally its up to a good accountant to find a way around them. 

 

[AncalagonTheBlack]

Seems our first transfer is a young Polish goalkeeper - Jakub Ojrzynski from Legia Warsaw

Also reported that we sent scouts to watch Memphis Depay play for Lyon against Marseille over the weekend.

Lastly,some surprising news: Timo Werner has been told Bayern Munich don’t want him - by RB Leipzig chief Ralf Rangnick.

We are said to be worth £1.02bn, which places us sixth in a report compiled by Brand Finance, the world's leading independent brand valuation consultancy.

[Consigliere]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

The other issue with salary caps is that players and agents would find ways around it pretty easily. There would be other types of payment and benefits that can be used to entice players to clubs and could be taken off the books somehow. All of these rules sound good on paper but generally its up to a good accountant to find a way around them. 
 

True. And the wealthy clubs themselves as well as the players union will ensure that the cap is still quite high. 

 

It's pretty naive to think that just implementing salary caps will lead to greater parity. The reason the NFL enjoys greater parity is not only because of wage caps. The NFL's strategy of maximising profit revolves around attempting to level the playing field as much as possible. The entire system is designed to ensure that the greater earning potential of franchises in bigger markets (eg. Dallas Cowboys) does not actually give them an advantage over franchises in smaller markets (eg. Green Bay Packers).

Not having to pay transfer fees as well as the draft system are crucial to all this as well. Instead of each franchise having their own academy, the college football program is entirely responsible for recruiting and developing the young talent for the benefit of the entire league with the worst performing teams getting preference in drafting the best talent without having to pay obscene fees. As I said before, NFL like parity in football is impossible to achieve unless the entire system in its current form is scrapped.