New Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly claimed some of English football’s most annoying people last week when he suggested the Premier League could learn from America and consider introducing an All-Star game to boost TV revenue. “US investment in English football is a clear and present danger to the pyramid and fabric of the game,” Gary Neville thundered on Twitter, in an emblematic reaction. “They just don’t get it and think differently.”
In response, many have pointed out that pundits like Neville owe their very livelihood to the Americanization of English football: uninfluenced by America’s example, the entire modern Premier League – as a business structured around massive TV deals, as an endlessly mediated spectacle, as a hegemonic cultural form—would not exist. Proposals such as Boehly’s are aimed at furthering the commercialization of English football; this is not “thinking differently”, but the very essence of the sport as it has evolved over the past three decades.
But there is a further irony here, and it is one that demands closer examination as European football travels deeper into its suicidal spiral of wage inflation, bailouts, spending and debt. Despite the merits of gimmick games like Boehly’s North vs. South showdown, the American model of professional sports—where spending is constrained by salary caps, player acquisitions are tamed by pre-season drafts, and commercialization must contend with a form of collectivism—offers a way for leagues to live within their means while ensuring fair competition. Beginning in the middle of the last century, America—the most intensely capitalist society on earth—developed equalization structures in professional sports, even as the leagues ruthlessly exploited every opportunity to turn the notion of athletic competition into profit.
England – at least in football – went in a different direction, embracing commercialism without putting in American-style restrictions to ensure equal competition at the highest levels of the sport. Some pretty spectacular cultural inversions have flowed from this divergence. America—the land of 24-hour service, calorie overload, and the ten-thousand-dollar ER visit—is now a paradise for sports equality, a land that has seen 12 different winners in the last 15 Super Bowls.
During the same period, England – cradle of socialized medicine, the local pub and the village green – has become a footballing oligarchy, with just five different clubs winning the Premier League. If competitive balance is essential to preserving the “pyramid and substance” of English and European football, as it absolutely must be, there is much the old world can learn from the new – a point made by Uefa president Aleksander Čeferin, a consistent but unsuccessful advocate for a Europe-wide salary cap, has recognized.
How have these two sporting cultures diverged so sharply over the last few decades? The answer has its roots in timing and the very particular development, in each country, of the relationship between labor and capital. The three biggest professional sports in America are all subject to equalizing restrictions: the NBA and NFL both have salary caps, baseball disciplines spending via a luxury tax, and all three have a draft to ensure an even distribution of young talent throughout the league. It is one of American sportswriter’s laziest clichés to refer to this as a form of “socialism”. Indeed, these structures emerged throughout the second half of the 20th century as expressions of a distinctly American form of capitalism. Professional American sports as we know them today owes as much to strikes, lockouts, and collective bargaining as it does to sponsorships, merchandising, naming rights, or any of the other dealmaking tricks commonly thought to symbolize the corrupting influence of money in sports. .
Employee unions in professional sports began to emerge after World War II: the National Basketball Players Association was originally formed in 1954, and football and baseball saw the foundation of similar bodies in 1956 and 1966, respectively. Sports unionism emerged in America during the heyday of the postwar compact between organized labor and business, when union representation was high and it was widely accepted that the economy would function best when the rights of workers and the interests of owners were reconciled. The relationship between players’ bodies and team owners was unapologetically antagonistic from the beginning: “This is going to be an adversarial relationship,” Marvin Miller, the first president of the Major League Baseball Players Association, announced to the players in 1966. “A union is not a social club. A union is a limitation on what else an employer can do. If you expect the owners to like me, praise me, compliment me, you’re going to be disappointed.”
Although overall union membership in American society declined in the decades after 1980, the power and influence of unions in sports did not—and American professional sports’ basic organizational constitution, as a shared business enterprise that took shape through negotiations between players and owners, remained intact. . The introduction of salary caps in both the NBA (in 1983) and the NFL (in 1993) was the result of direct negotiations between owners and unions; collective bargaining remains a core feature of all major sports in America today, and the relationship is as antagonistic now as it was at its inception. Unionism played an important historical role in English football – the PFA, led by Jimmy Hill, famously secured the abolition of the wage cap in 1961 – but in general players’ associations in Europe and England do not enjoy anything like the institutional centrality of their American peers.
Unionization in the major American leagues emerged at a time when all the major issues in modern sports—player mobility, revenue generation and television rights, salary sustainability and talent distribution—were at the same time. In the years following the war, television rights were seen – as they are still seen today – as key to the long-term financial viability of professional sports. American television in the 1950s and 1960s was heavily regulated but dominated by three independent private operators (CBS, NBC and ABC) – another point of departure from the UK, where ITV was the only commercial network until the early 1980s.
In the early 1960s, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle negotiated an exclusive two-year, $9.3 million deal with CBS to broadcast regular season and postseason games. This was an extraordinary amount of money for its time, but the true genius of the deal lay in its collectivity: where previous teams had negotiated their own rights deals individually, with richly uneven results (before the CBS deal, the New York Giants received $350,000 a year for television -rights, while the Green Bay Packers only received a tenth of that sum), Rozelle convinced everyone to secure a single network deal and distribute the windfall evenly across all NFL teams. This, more than any other, was the deal that launched professional sports in America into the modern age, and entrenched the collective good as an overarching goal of American sports administration.
But money — serious money, the kind only possible in a large, relatively competitive television market like postwar America — also brought a certainty to American sports that catalyzed negotiations for other chips on the bargaining table. The carrot of TV money sweetened the stick of salary cap and draft, giving owner-player negotiations a kind of simultaneity – the nature of a competition for everything at once – that has been less evident in English and European football. When negotiations with ITV and BSkyB began in the early 1990s over the formation of the eventual Premier League, for example, issues such as transfer mobility and wage capping had already been largely decided in the players’ favor, and there was no robust American-style history of player- owner negotiations to draw on.
The American experience was different; all these problems were solved at once, not in a piecemeal fashion as in Britain. In 1983, NBA players agreed to a salary cap in exchange for a majority share of television revenue. In 1993, after a series of debilitating work stoppages and lockouts, the NFL imposed a salary cap while allowing players the freedom of movement between clubs that had long been denied them. These landmark agreements, along with the commitment to league-wide parity that Rozelle’s CBS sale secured, have set the tone for the administration of professional sports in America in the decades since. As Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss said in 2011, commenting on a new NBA-wide revenue sharing agreement, “We want a league with teams that are financially viable, so that every team has the opportunity to compete. It makes for a healthier league.”
America’s judiciary has done its part to uphold these collectivist principles. Several of the first major television agreements and collective agreements, especially those that introduced salary caps and drafts, were challenged in court on the grounds that they were restrictive of competition. American antitrust law, with its roots in the Progressive Era antitrust crusades, has long held that restraints of trade are permitted where they are necessary to the success of a joint venture. Courts have upheld the legality of structures such as the draft and salary cap on the basis that the product of professional sports is the competition itself.
In 2010, the Supreme Court noted that restrictions in the NFL may be justifiable when motivated by the need to ensure the league’s overall success or “competitive balance”. Competition law has also been deployed in English football, notably in 1963, to abolish the “retain and transfer” system which hampered players’ freedom of movement. But it is unclear how much protection UK law, particularly post-Brexit, will offer mechanisms to ensure level competition in the modern game. The salary cap introduced in Leagues 1 and 2 at the start of the 2020–21 season failed in a legal challenge, although this largely appeared to reflect sloppiness in the scheme’s design.
Strong unions, the omnibus nature of player-owner negotiations in the postwar years, and the unusually collectivist tradition of American competition law: Together, these three factors explain how America evolved to have far more egalitarian structures in professional sports than England. The contrast between the two countries is not between American-style socialism and British laissez-faire, as is sometimes claimed: it is a clash of capitalism. The transformation of English football in the 1990s was part of the collapse of the post-war Keynesian settlement and the wider turn towards the market initiated under the Thatcher government.
Reagan’s America witnessed its own neoliberal conversion towards the end of the last century, but by the time it was in full swing the basic conditions for sports professionalisation had been set, and the factors that give American sport its unique character – player power, collective bargaining and a welfare focus on the common good, all these relics of the postwar New Deal order—were no longer negotiable. English football got all the crazy commercialism of American sport, but none of its comfort with redistribution.
The results in England today are well known: run-of-the-mill player wages, ridiculous transfer fees, a new breed of billionaire owners untroubled by common notions of financial sustainability, and a lopsided competition that realistically only two or three clubs have any chance of winning. These problems have encouraged talk of giving a regulator the ability to fix English football. One place to look for solutions may be across the Atlantic. Despite legitimate anger among fans over US-inspired initiatives such as the failed European Super League, America’s creeping influence in football need not be universally bad.
There are, of course, important differences between American and English sports that complicate an exact transposition of models: promotion and relegation are foreign concepts in the United States, and none of the major American sports has anything like the many levels of professional competition that Europe’s majors have. soccer nations boast. Football is also genuinely international, which makes the implementation of equalization mechanisms such as the draft and salary cap far more difficult than it is in America’s minor sports. England will not be able to emulate all the institutional constraints of American competition. But that’s no reason not to try.
