Killing the competition
It’s a recurrent theme. Every transfer window, football fans loathe the amount of money being spent by rich clubs to get a big leg-up in the competition. When Chelsea splashed money after their acquisition by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich almost everyone, except the Blues fans, despised it.
The same was the case in Sheikh Mansour’s Manchester City. This season much of that ire has been reserved for Qatar Investment’s Paris Saint-Germain and the newly-promoted Monaco AS, owned by Russian Dmitry Rybolovlev.
There is no doubt, the rich clubs buying big stars to win a competition will affect ‘smaller teams’, but purely on an economic perspective, it is hardly a death blow. If world football is to be considered as a free market, rich clubs competing against each other for sensational players is demand. That demand can be met by the ‘producers’, in this case ‘smaller clubs’ who can nurture young talent and sell them for windfall margins. Many clubs, especially the Latin American ones, have mastered that art. True, the trend, however, ensures that the these clubs, on field, are almost always at a disadvantage against the big names. So there is solid reasoning to hate all that big money moves. However, the question is are big-money transfers the only way the ‘smaller clubs’ are being kept out of title-contention? No, just look at Spain. For years, Barcelona and Real Madrid have dominated La Liga. Of course, the Barcelona model of developing own talent and making them highly-attractive footballers is commendable. But both Barca and Real are guilty of killing competition, albeit through a different financial route.
Unlike in England or Germany, where the television deals are negotiated by the league and distributed fairly from a pool, in Spain the clubs strike separate financial deals. This ensures that the Big Two — Real and Barca — earn around 140 million euros each from lucrative deals. The rest of the La Liga teams have to be content with 50 million to as low as 12-15 million euros. The set-up effectively ensures that the smaller clubs struggle to hold on to their best players as for one, they don’t have enough money to pay the salary, and second, selling them is a way to reduce the financial deficit. The result? There is little chance for any other club to win or even put up a noteworthy competition for the Big Two.
Thanks to this forced situation, coupled with the effect of the Spanish financial crunch, average stadium attendance of the smaller club has nose-dived, piling up more financial burden on the teams. The clandestine arrangement has ensured a duopoly in the Spanish league. A loathsome state, both in football and on economic terms.
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