Growing up, I never played soccer because I thought it was un-American. That is a very true story. However, in recent years I've seen the light and now am a proud and anguished supporter of Everton (with their beautiful manager Sean Dyche, pictured at the bottom) in England's Premier League. I love the setup of international football's promotion-relegation, free market approach, where seemingly any team has a chance to win; hypothetically, lowly Swindon Town in the fourth tier of English football could be less than five seasons away from winning the Champions League, Europe's highest title. However, this rarely occurs; in European football, just as in capitalism, the richest clubs win the day.
The European system differs greatly from any American sports league, even our own Major League Soccer. Major American leagues are set up to ensure the security of their member clubs even through financial woes and poor on-field performances. Even the wealthiest clubs have caps on their spending to ensure a fair competitive distribution (unfortunately for my Minnesota Twins, Major League Baseball is an outlier here). This Wall Street Journal article I read highlights the irony of this: America's strong laissez-faire culture contrasts with the socialist nature of American sports leagues, while Europe's more socialist culture supports a very capitalist soccer system. However, Europe's system slowly appears to be shifting toward a more American approach. Europe's major clubs tinkered with a "Super League" consisted of the top clubs from each major European nation, a move that was nearly unanimously shot down but led to a revised Champions League format that placed more focus on European instead of domestic competition. Recently, the EU's top court ruled that Europe's player transfer rules don't give players enough freedom, opening the door for free agency of sorts.
The article caught my eye for its relationship to Buchanan & Tullock's Calculus of Consent. Chapter 6 states, "Since no player can anticipate which specific rules might benefit him during a particular play of the game, he can, along with all the other players, attempt to devise a set of rules that will constitute the most interesting game for the average or representative player. It is to the self-interest of each player to do this." American sports have implemented said rules to create a more competitive league, giving every team a chance to compete or game the system. Europe appears to be following their lead.
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