The idea came from the late Mino Raiola, the super agent hated by clubs, adored by his clients and forever dividing opinion. And, like a lot of his public pronouncements, his idea was seen as part-provocation, part self-interest, part-showmanship. But it also cut through the BS and laid bare the game’s many inconsistencies.
“You want competitive balance?” Raiola said. “No problem. Have tournaments with categories, like in boxing. One for clubs with budgets of more than 200 million, one for clubs between 50 and 200 million, one for the rest. That’s fair. That’s simple.”
Raiola’s words stuck with me and I was thinking about them as the Champions League group stage ended this week. Most years, it’s pretty straight-forward: the super clubs qualify early and, usually, the two teams with the highest revenue in each group advance. You’ll have one or two exceptions, but no more than that. This year it was considered a banner season because it did not happen as often as it usually does: Juventus, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid were all eliminated.
We think this is normal. Unlike American sports there are no mechanisms to ensure parity, like the draft, salary cap or free agency. It embraces inequality because it’s sort of always been like that. Teams from bigger, wealthier cities drew larger crowds and paid higher wages so they won more. And then, over the past twenty years, we’ve had the Bosman ruling (which gives European soccer players their free agency), globalization, commercialisation and these differences became more entrenched and extreme, with the gap in resources growing to unprecedented levels.
Maybe not enough of us care. After all, Formula One is hugely popular, yet it’s pretty obvious that the guys in the best cars are going to win just about every single time. Mercedes, Red Bull or Ferrari have won 179 of the last 181 Grand Prix Races — that’s 98.9% — yet somehow many people (not me) love it.
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But surely the rest of us have some intrinsic sense that competition has to be, to some degree, fair. We don’t accept unfair advantages, like playing football with 12 men, or taking performance-enhancing drugs or bribing referees. And, to go back to Raiola’s point, most of us wouldn’t watch boxing or MMA if some 6’5″, 250 pound behemoth was in the ring with some 110 pound flyweight, unless you’re into that kind of thing.
(Note here that I’m talking about neutrals, not die-hard fans of a particular team who will watch paint dry if it’s in their team’s colors.)
