I think the biggest problem with baseball is you can buy your way to greatness. Not always mind you, but teams with seemingly unlimited payrolls like the Dodgers, Giants, Phillies, Yankees have a huge advantage over smaller market teams in terms of attracting top talent and they are perennially "in the hunt" which makes the chances of smaller franchises all the more smaller. I know they implement revenue sharing to the smaller teams but restricting the top teams salary would make for a more compelling product.
Compare that to NFL football which has a very restrictive salary cap and you get a scenario where any team in 1-2 years despite how bad they are in a given year with great coaching and a smart draft can get to the superbowl or win it all(see this years Cincinnati Bengals, or last years Buccaneers).
Yep, that’s the takeaway that I hope non-sports-fans will have from this thread. The salary caps in the NFL/NBA promote parity extremely well while maintaining the same pay level for the vast majority of players. I’m told European soccer and MLB suffer greatly from big-market teams heavily hoarding the success.
You're not wrong, the state of football in Europe feels quite unsustainable to me and rewards clubs who make huge financial gambles or manage to get lucrative investment from billionaires (or both!). Every now and again you'll see a flash-in-the-pan where a slightly less well-off team will succeed (Leicester a couple of years ago in the Premier League springs to mind, though they were owned by a Thai billionaire...) but overall it's pretty predictable.
It's a funny situation though because having stupendous injections of cash doesn't always pay off. Paris Saint Germain have been profligate in the transfer market and have little to show for it on the European stage (and domestically they didn't even win Ligue 1 last season). And sometimes just a modest investment, raising the wage bill by shrewd signings can really upset things. There was a fairly sizeable backlash at RB Leipzig - a team bought by Red Bull which progressed through the ranks to the top level - suggesting that they'd bought their way to success. Which is true in a sense but in reality everyone who's successful has basically bought that success. Bayern's average salary is 8x that of Leipzig's[0] - as an outsider it seems they were just nervous at the idea of someone upsetting the balance. Right now Leipzig are the fourth-highest wage bill and are fourth in the Bundesliga.
I kinda hope one of these big clubs has a high-profile collapse, it's a shame that it's Barcelona who have come closest because I don't feel too much disdain for them. Scots tend to have a soft-spot for Catalonia :) Interestingly we weren't without our own big-spending-investor stories, Gretna (tiny club from a town of 3,000 people) were bought by a supposed-millionaire who bankrolled them to the top-level, took a turn for the worse, withdrew his support and the club then fell to pieces.
Anyway yet another ramble-y football comment from me, you can tell I hang out with people who do not like the sport :)
One might argue that's an ownership incentive problem - there are insufficient incentives for owners to spend enough money to field a competitive baseball team. A bunch of owners are more or less explicitly in it for the guaranteed profit that comes with cheaply fielding uncompetitive teams.
(It's notable that teams in capped leagues also do this, most noticeably in the NHL. So the salary cap doesn't solve this problem so much as it redirects revenue from players to owners.)
How many times have the Rays had a better record than the Yankees in the past decade?
It's not all about the payroll any more. It's about who actually wants a good team and is willing to hire the right people.
The small market excuse is just that, an excuse. The value of the franchises has been exploding. Direct revenue isn't a meaningful constraint on payroll.
Small markets notoriously can't afford to keep their talent around. Pros know they have a limited time in the league and want to maximize revenue so they go to whoever offers them the most. The tweet below is relevant to the sentiment:
>Small markets notoriously can't afford to keep their talent around.
I highly doubt this, as a longtime Marlins fan. I strongly suspect that "small market" teams are those owned by people who notoriously don't want to spend more money than they have to.
According to Forbes, the Rays were purchased in 2004 for 200 million and are now worth 1.1B. In 18 years ownership has received a total return of more than 500% on their investment.
Now, for some strange reason, these teams don't want to publish annual audited profit/loss numbers, but the Marlins had those numbers leak for some of the franchise's bleakest years. The leaks showed them making money hand over fist. I suspect the same is true of the Rays during much of the last 18 years. So, you have a profitable business (I speculate) that's also appreciating in value at an incredible rate. Sounds like someone who can afford to pay the people who actually put butts in seats.
You can try to buy your way to greatness, but it really works as a long term solution. Signing at 28 year-old star to a 10 year contract means you have to managed an expensive older player that will under-perform at the end of the contract. In a few occasions that works, but generally you are spending more for less at that point. Sure, you can keep spending, but you eventually have an old aging team that is difficult to upgrade, unless you trade players and agree to pay part of the salary.
The biggest problem in baseball is you have to maintain a minor league AND a major league. You need younger less expansive players, inexpensive players to fill the roster, and expensive players. Depending on the market you need to either trade your younger talent before it gets expensive (getting younger players from other teams) and be able to develop those players. Or, you have to be able sign high price players and make trades to bring in lesser talented players from other teams to developer your farm system, where you'll often trade your best prospects for older, more expensive players.
Both systems have worked lately. Cleveland has had one of the best records in baseball since 2014, but the Dodgers and Yankees spend and do well.
The larger problem is revenue sharing in MLB. While there is revenue sharing because of the TV contracts, New York, Boston, and LA make a huge amount of money off local TV deals. Cleveland, Tampa, et.al. make a lot less. So, unlike many other sports, revenue is not shared equally and teams need different ways to acquire and use talent.
In the NFL, you need to have a very good QB and you can build a team around them. In the NBA, you need 2-3 very talented players, mid-cost starters to fill your game day rotations and strong reserves to handle injuries and such. Since those leagues share revenue that can implement caps and floors with salary. Sorry, I can't talk about the NHL, I don't understand their business enough.
The bigger problem with the MLB is their lack of equal revenue sharing makes a floor and cap next to impossible to setup. MLB teams simply are not going to put all their money in a big pool and share it.
The products don't understand what they're selling (or are desperate for Blackrock money). They continue to alienate fans by continually injecting ESG propaganda into the product, when most fans I know use it as an escape from all that inane bullshit.
haha very much agree here. Baseball fans are probably one of the more conservative/older fan bases in sports and the leagues tilt towards ESG is quite baffling from a business perspective. I think they are trying to be more relevant again to younger fans by embracing stuff like this but could see it backfiring by alienating a whole generation and another with a strike on the horizon. Going back to the strike back in the 90's that really mad alot folks mad and set the stage for a large percentage of its fanbase to leave and some of which never came back.
Compare that to NFL football which has a very restrictive salary cap and you get a scenario where any team in 1-2 years despite how bad they are in a given year with great coaching and a smart draft can get to the superbowl or win it all(see this years Cincinnati Bengals, or last years Buccaneers).