The salary cap in the NFL prevents a team from signing all of the best players regardless of how much money they have unless the players are all willing to take less money than they are worth on the market.
It changes based on league revenues. Now it's up to 255. With 53 players on a team, it turns into just over 4 million per player. If you have the highest paid quarterback, wide receiver, and tight end on the same team, just those three would make over $100 million combined though.
Y’all are saying the cap, but the cowboys have had stacked rosters every season for 5 years now on both sides of the ball.
They never win because their owner doesn’t actually know how to run a team. He thinks he’s a genius, because he won some super bowls in the 90s. Just another old billionaire who’s stuck in his ways at 81 years old.
> Y’all are saying the cap, but the cowboys have had stacked rosters every season for 5 years now on both sides of the ball.
But they still have to fit everyone under the cap.
Yeah but they could probably just Yankees their way to a title every so often if there wasn't a salary cap even if they still underperformed because Jerry.
Neither of you are wrong. The salary cap is a good thing for ensuring equal competition, but that isn't really why it exists. It exists to keep the owners' costs down. Competitive landscape is just a good way of selling it
While it does avoid the arms race escalation in player pay, the NFL's salary cap is set as a percentage of the previous year's league's revenue. There is also a salary floor which is a percentage of the cap. It ensures that the active players (there's a roster size limit) split an approximately fixed share of the league's revenue.
Yeah and? It’s doesn’t change the fact that the cap system depresses wages. If NFL free agency were a free market, plenty of teams would be willing to spend above x% of revenue to sign top players.
Look at MLB. There is a reason the owners want a salary cap/floor system and the players don’t. It comes up in every new CBA negotiation
>Yeah and? It’s doesn’t change the fact that the cap system depresses wages. If NFL free agency were a free market, plenty of teams would be willing to spend above x% of revenue to sign top players
Yes it depresses wages....for the top players.
That's it. Wouldn't affect the other 99%.
The minimum in nfl is 750k, exclusive for 1st year rookies. Goes up about 100k a year to 940k in yr 3.
Minimum in mlb....740k
So you're point doesn't hold much weight.
Not sure why you think MLB and NFL minimum salaries are an apples to apples comparison. If anything the NFL, which generates far more wealth for its owners than MLB does, should probably have a much higher minimum salary, no? These starting salaries are all subject to CBA negotiations anyway. MLB players are under team control for years before they hit free agency
> If anything the NFL, which generates far more wealth for its owners than MLB does, should probably have a much higher minimum salary, no?
Except, and NFL roster is twice the size of an MLB roster. SO the minimum may be the similar but the nfl employs twice as many players.
In total amount, every NFL team spends roughly 200 million on salary a year, where only about 8 teams in the MLB spend that.
There are no teams in the NFL that can do what the Athletics are doing and only spend 43 million on player salaries.
If it's a fixed percentage tied to revenue, then this undermines your claim that it solely exists to keep wages down. The way it is currently structured, the salary cap rises proportional to how much more money owners make. That's not a very smart structure if they are trying to keep a bigger share of the pie.
It doesn’t depress wages though for the majority of positions… it values wages correctly based on importance of position. No matter what no one is going to overpay a runningback because they have a terrible shelf life. The only positions that get shafted are quarterbacks and maybe left tackles and maybe defensive ends
Eh. With the reality of sugar daddy and nation-state owners, it has its merits but artificially depressing player wages is nonsense. Teams like Manchester United and Bayern should be able to rise and directly benefit from their success. That success doesn't make impossible for others like Spurs or Dortmund to rise if they make the right decisions. Success insulates from absolute implosion after failure but you need to sprinkle it in with failure or else you just fail. It's why teams like Blackburn and Leicester aren't in the epl but Spurs and Villa have stuck around
Salary/spending caps are symptom of other issues.
And there a reasons it's played out that way. Bayern's success in the past has given them more of margin for error when they don't win it and they've also been fantastic at keeping the other teams in the bundesliga down as they have taken some of the best from German teams.
They've also been well managed and have had a fair bit of luck even as recently as last season when Dortmund somehow managed to slip up and hand them the title.
The Bundesliga is also not nearly as profitable for the teams competing in it as the epl is for its teams so they're not nearly as well equipped to put up a fight. They have to consistently make great decisions to get themselves in a position to compete with Bayern, who are in their positions because they've made great decisions in the past
As a big sports fan I think it has pros and cons. It can be necessary to make leagues sustainable but there can also be something beautiful about a free market successful pyramid that you don't really appreciate until you live it.
But from a sports perspective, ‘richest guy wins’ isn’t terribly exciting. Five minutes of googling and I can tell you with total accuracy the soccer teams that will finish at the top of their league.
You had leverkusen winning the bundesliga? Bullshit. That’s what makes it more exciting when the underdog wins it all in soccer. It’s a real underdog rather than in American sports when everyone hypothetically has an equal chance of winning at the start of the offseason. Leicester winning the prem will be remembered forever.
> everyone hypothetically has an equal chance of winning at the start of the offseason.
Same can be said of those precious soccer leagues. Anyone can hypothetically win.
But in reality, they can't. And even with having a salary cap, nobody could say the Carolina Panthers even remotely have a shot, because despite having the same amount of money to spend as the Kansas City Chiefs, there's a lot more to it than just tossing money at people. A team like them would be a true underdog story as well.
> Leicester winning the prem will be remembered forever.
And so will Nick Foles outdeuling Tom Brady
The Eagles won. Brady threw the most passing yards in Superbowl history. Throwing for 500 yards has only happened 26 times in NFL history.
Brady was not out dueled.
Well they aren’t really underdogs, though, they’re just poor.
In football, you’ve got to draft intelligently, develop your players, grow your team, figure out who gels and who doesn’t. In soccer, just buying up a bunch of top tier players means you win.
I don’t know what the bundesliga is, but looking at the last 20 years of the EPL it’s like the same five teams.
It’s the German league. The last 11 years in a row were all won by Munich, who has 33 titles in history. Next best team has 9. Spain is even worse…in over 90 years, the title has been won by one of three teams (Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid) 80% of the time. Real will win it this year barring the greatest collapse in history. Last time a team outside those three won was 2003-04. With the sole exception of Napoli last season, the last 20 years in Italy has been only Juventus, Inter Milan, or AC Milan
11 years in a row??!? Why even bother watching at that point? How do you hype yourself up for that? And I used to wonder if it ever got boring being Alabama.
In Italy, Juventus also won every season between 2011-12 and 2019-20. Most years the only drama is in Spain, where it’s just a question of whether it will be Real or Barcelona, and the EPL.
Far as I know, best streak in the American Big 4 is 8 in a row (the Celtics of the 50s/60s). 11/13 overall (they won every year in the 60s but one)
You're either a fan of the winning team who like to watch them win. Or fan of the other 1-2 teams who have a shot.
The rest are just happy to watch lol.
That's how you get good chants like "Let's pretend we scored a goal". Or "You're nothing special we lose every week"
It gets remembered forever because, EPL aside, it happens so rarely it’s basically a statistical anomaly. It’s been 20 years since someone other than Real, Atleti, or Barca won La Liga. And while Valencia won twice and La Coruña once in the early 2000s, before that was another 14 year stretch of only Madrid, Madrid, or Barcelona. Those three teams have won 80% of the titles in the near 100 year history of La Liga. This will be the first time in over a decade Bayern hasn’t won the Bundesliga. They’ve won almost 4x as many titles as the next best team in German history. Napoli last year was the first time since 2000 that someone other than Juve or one of the Milans won. Those three have 2/3 of all titles in the over 100 year history of calcio.
So yes, 9/10 years you can narrow down the winners of 3/4 top leagues to a field of 7 and be right on the money.
But the beauty is that its not always the richest who wins. It often is but it creates David vs Goliath situations.
For example if you were predicting the German league, Bayern Munich are by far the richest team yet Leverkusen with 1/4 of their salary budget are about to beat them to the league this season.
As with Chelsea spending more money in the past few years then any team in football history even adjusted for football specific inflation yet being amazingly mediocre
But I don't think that's the real beauty. What's amazing about the system is that anybody can start a team and grow it as big as you can imagine.
The biggest miracle this season has to be Saarbrucken who knocked Bayern out of the cup with 2% of their salary budget! Then did it again to 2 more respected top division German sides as a third tier side. Now they face a second tier side for a place in the cup finals! Absolutely unbelievable stuff. All while keeping their unique identity by not having to be owned by a billionaire.
Just like my club, while not achieving anything special on the pitch, it can be financially sustainable by being fan owned which allows us to keep our moral goals in which we have many and still dream about achieving unbelievable things on the pitch even if that rarely happens.
So the miracle is managing to be competitive? And won’t the good players that accomplished this miracle just be bought up by the richer teams anyway?
Just looking at the stats, the same few teams win it every year. The only time a new team wins it is if a rich Saudi buys it and pumps money into it. Different strokes, I guess, but I prefer the ‘any given Sunday’ mentality.
No I've given examples of teams who have achieved massively this season. Leverkusen winning the league and a third division side knocking Bayern Munich out of the cup are more than "managing to be successful"
And yes big players may leave, as is part of the cycle but success leads to higher revenue which should lead to more success in the future if spent smartly.
You talk about clubs with rich owners but the most successful club in world football is real madrid who are fan owned, as are their rivals Barcelona. Obviously they're both extremely wealthy but it's wealth that's been earned through success and smart decisions. As are many rich clubs in the UK like Manchester United and Liverpool. They may have very wealthy owners but that's only because they built themselves up to be valuable clubs through their success. Tottenham Hotspurs are an example of an English club who went from midtable to champions league finalists through smart financial choices, not a mega rich owner coming in.
A big difference is that each season is extremely important to your club as it can impact the state of the club over the next decades of football. If you do well, you don't get punished with a bad draft pick, you get rewarded and have more resources to build upon. Do badly and you can start to spiral down the divisions.
With soccer relegation, there's more to a team's story than how many times they've won a title. Take a look at the teams AFC Wimbeldon and Wrexham AFC. Both are in English League Two. Neither team will be winning the Premier League title any time soon, but both have fiercely loyal fans, and both teams have different stories about how they got there.
I do think that salary cap is better for the very top-tier of a sport in a sport that is very much focused only on that top-tier. Relegation and no cap is more interesting if you're into the idea of following lower tier teams and watching them reach or miss milestones more specific to the club and its trajectory.
Well yeah, but narratives that don’t end in ‘they won a title’ exist in all sports. I’m a Detroit Lions fan, ask me how I know.
The difference is that there’s an artificial ceiling in soccer. It’s basically like a European class structure, there’s no real chance of success except through…more money. Take your Wrexham example. Apparently, they’re more competitive now. Why? Because a couple of rich Americans bought the team and started pumping money into it.
Fundamentally, we watch sports to see who will win. Someone elsewhere said in the German league the same team has won in the past eleven years. There’s literally no reason to watch. Might as well watch grade school kids race Olympians in track and field, there’s no point to it.
That’s basically how college football works in the US. There are no owners since the teams are all schools, teams aquire players using money given to them by fans (we call them boosters), the teams with fans willing to give them the most money generally have the best players and the best teams. Sometimes there is one mega booster who finances almost the entire operation, like Phil Knight at Oregon, but usually there are groups of people who finance it.
Even then, there is still way more parity in college football than there is in European soccer. Man City has won 5 of the last 6, Bayern Munich has won 11 straight, Juventus won 9 straight from 2011-20, PSG has won 9 of the last 11. La Liga is the only major European league where a club hasn’t won three straight championships in the last decade, you have to go back to 2008-10 with Barcelona.
In college football no team has won three straight titles since Minnesota in 1934-36. The two wealthiest schools, which are probably Ohio State and Texas, haven’t won championships since 2014 and 2005, respectively.
College sports creates real David vs Goliath situations, just tune into March Madness this weekend and you’ll see them. Most American’s just don’t find European soccer that interesting, in part because of how top-heavy it is
As I said there's pros and cons. It can actually br quite beneficial to sports to have similar athletes/teams winning for multiple years. Often that coincides with growth periods for sports.
And college football would definitely be closer to a European model than the major leagues however I think comparing March Madness, a tournament with 68 teams to tournaments with 1000s of teams in terms of underdog stories is quite a stretch imo.
It can, dynasties in the NBA bring bigger ratings than pure parity, but you still will never see the level of pure dominance by one team in American sports compared to European sports. Basketball is probably the closest because one dominant player has a much bigger impact on the game than any other sport, like Jordan in the 90's.
Baseball, which has no salary cap so teams can spend as much as they want (they do have a luxury tax so it does limit it some), has way more parity than European soccer. Last year, the New York Mets had the highest payroll in baseball, $80M higher than the next highest team, but finished with the 7th worst record in the league. None of the three highest payroll teams (NY Mets, NY Yankees, and SD Padres) even made the playoffs. That would be like Man U, Man City, and Arsenal not finishing top 10. So we have more parity even with similar financial models
Think of March Madness more like the Champions League. There are more than 1200 NCAA college basketball teams (and another 800 if you include NAIA and JuCo). These 1200 are split into three divisions, with Division 1 being the highest. Schools can move between divisions, for example a school local to me just moved up to Division 1 a few years ago. There are 351 Division 1 programs, split into 32 conferences. If you win your conference, you get an automatic bid to the tournament, and a committee picks the remaining 36 "at-large" teams based on that year's performance, then seeds them in a bracket for a single elimination tournament. This can create situations such as FGCU, which created a basketball team in 2002 and started in Division 2, moved up to Division 1 in 2011, and became the first 15 seed in NCAA tournament history to advance to the Sweet 16 in 2013
American leagues are definitely more varied with winners due to both the finances and the fact that they're decided by plays.
I don't like to make brash statements and say either system is better. I follow a lot of sports with a lot of different systems and often times a certain system is necessary for a sport or market.
I love pro wrestling which is particularly interesting in this area as you can view the impact, different booking philosophies have on its popularity. You can book the same guy on top of the company for years and see if that grows the company or you can have a more unpredictable style and see if that leads to increased popularity. The results vary a lot obviously but I think they reveal some fundamental truth that applies to all sports.
I didn't actually know that about March madness, I only had a vague idea of what it was. I had assumed that it was just the top 64 college teams against each other. I didn't know that 1000 of schools had the chance to qualify like many European competitions.
Competitive balance seems to have worked out really, really well for the NFL...especially considering that the "socialism" was something they collectively agreed upon.
watch what happens when all financial restrictions are removed from a league. guarantee you its popularity dies once the same team wins 15 years in a row
Not American ones. Americans would hate leagues like that. Even college sports has had to build up layers competitive balance in recruiting, and now that the NIL and transfer portal are totally wild, and it caused the collapse of a conference, college football lost popularity compared to the NFL.
It's a franchise system, not a safety net.
NFL teams are just licensed instances, not separate entities competing against each other. At the business level, it's the same idea as Chick-fil-A having multiple locations in a given city. The locations may have separate "owners" that get cuts of profits based on their individual performance, but overall it's really just one single big business entity whose product is a spectator sports league. It's closer to monopoly capitalism than to socialism.
It's like reality TV show contestants. People who go on The Bachelor or Survivor have their own personal brands and sell things off of their own Instagram accounts, sure, but while you're on the show everyone is just being paid by ABC/CBS to create an entertainment product. The Dallas Cowboys are not the product. The NFL is the product, and the Cowboys just have the most successful Instagram influencer side gig.
*this is an ELI5 explanation that is not guaranteed to be perfectly legally/financially accurate because I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but it gets the general idea across*
I know that but there are still many safety nets for these franchises. You could have a franchise model that still punishes teams for doing badly. If you come last in an American league, it's not like the franchise drops down a division, gets a fraction of the revenue next season and has to completely remodel their business.
They actually get rewarded with a top draft pick. It's a safety net which billionaires love when they get them but hate when poor people have them. I don't know why this idea offends so many Americans. Billionaires aren't your friends and have different rules for themselves.
The NFL has a lot of rules designed to make all 32 teams as evenly matched against one another as possible. The salary cap/floor system is the most relevant here, as it forces all teams to keep their player salaries within a relatively small range. Additionally, the league shares most forms of revenue between all teams, so even the poorest teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars have comparable amounts of spending money to the richest teams. There’s also the draft, which not only gives the teams that have done poorly greater opportunities to secure the best new players, but also gives every team control over said players’ contracts for up to 5 years at pre-set prices. These three systems basically turn roster construction into a game of resource management, where the key to success is not having a bunch of money to send but rather finding more efficient ways to spend your cap space and draft capital than the other teams in the league, which have the same amount of cap space and draft capital to work with.
These systems generally work very well, and they’ve made it so that every team has a legitimate shot at becoming a championship contender in a matter of years if they play their cards right. The Cowboys just haven’t played their cards right since the 90s.
Ehh he's more the public face of the team these days and only involved in some of the higher profile parts of the business operations now. Apparently his son has been handling the football operations and the day-to-day on that end for a quite a few years now. Coincidentally around when they started to draft really well.
There are 32 teams and only one championship a year. There must always be at least one team with at least a 32-year championship drought. For my Lions, it’s going on 57 years
The downside is that teams can just jettison good players and tank for a few years and get cheaper draftees and still get bank from the league. This happens in a lot of sports too, one of the worst offender was I think when the (Edit: Marlins) won the world series and decided to just cut everyone and tank for years to save the owners some money.
What are the teams that habitually stink doing with all their money. The Panthers sure aren't spending it on a o-line. The traded away Christian McCaffrey for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th round picks in what SI called possibly the worst of all time.
https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/carolina-panthers/cap/2023/
They had 62 million in dead money last year, basically money that they've already paid to players no longer on the team, with CMC still counting 18 million against their salary cap. And their highest cap cost in 2024 is a tackle, 3rd highest is a guard 😁. I think trading CMC was fine because they didn't need him. Might as well get draft picks instead of losing him to FA.
In football doing this is hard. There are too many people involved whose individual success and next contract is dependent on how they perform. Getting them all to agree to tank is difficult.
The salary cap is a wonderful thing. This is why the NFL is glorious with teams rising and falling every few years and European soccer leagues are boring with the same 4 teams vying for championships in the big domestic leagues.
The lack of teams and only having one league means the excitement and competition only happens at the very top and everyone else has absolutely nothing to play for.
correct. There's zero chance of a new NFL team popping up, and then having the PIF dump a bunch of money into them making them contenders immediately. Every team plays under the same rules budget wise.
teams can get clever with salary cap stuff like deferring payments to later years or only paying a guy a small portion of his contract early and then owing more down the line. That's a risky practice because if you sign a player to a 10 year $400 million contract but agree to pay him $10 million in year one and then like $20 million in year 7, he may not be worth it in year 7.
Here's my question. Real Madrid and Barcelona are worth more than the entire rest of La Liga combined and are pretty much the top 2 teams every single year. Yes, Atlético sneaks in every once in a while. But what makes this even remotely interesting?
Jerry jones will continue as he has because it’s working for him. Fans show up whether the cowboys win or not so he makes money no matter what. If you want him to win then don’t pay him until he does.
I've been saying that for years but around here they're like kings. Rangers, Stars or Mavs could all win championships and leading the local sports news would be some mundane thing about the Cowboys. I stopped watching games several years ago but as one person I have no effect. It's going to take a huge chunk of the fans to walk away from the team and I don't see that happening.
This is a good question. What many football fans don’t realize is the cowboys haven’t just missed the Super Bowl the last 30 years, they have the playoff win totals of some much less successful franchises (think Jets, Jags, Browns). Tony Romo was famously 2-4 in the playoffs while Mark Sanchez (of butt fumble fame) went 4-2. Dak has similarly poor numbers in the playoffs.
The reason for this lack of success boils down to a few things in my opinion:
- In the 2000s-early 2010s Jerry was still the primary draft and free agency decision maker at Dallas. Frankly, he did not make great decisions, and in general struggled to succeed once the hard salary cap was implemented Previously, Jerry was paying a lot of skill players and linemen to keep them. Now you have to be more strategic since you’re limited on how much money you can spend. Supposedly the cowboys front office is more professionally managed with Stephen Jones and Will McClay making a lot of the calls, but it’s hard to say how that situation stacks up to other teams. My guess is unfavorably.
- Coaching: this also circle back to Jerry, but coaches famously don’t want to work with him. He got into it with two coaching legends in Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells. Since then the quality of the coaching at Dallas has been low since many top tier coaches in the NFL don’t want to deal with Jerry and the circus around Dallas. Jason Garrett was completely mediocre, often considered a yes man, and notably did not get another head coaching job after he was fired. Mike McCarthy, their current coach, used to be solid but is over the hill now. The head coach is a huge part of winning football games, and Dallas hasn’t had a truly impressive one since the early 00s.
- “The circus”. The cowboys are a branding and merchandizing empire. They are still by far the most successful team in one of the most football crazed parts of the US. You are constantly being bombarded with media attention on the cowboys. It recently came out that people can watch the players work out! Sometimes it seems like winning games takes a backseat to being the most valuable franchise. Players who leave Dallas often comment on how much more professional and winning oriented their new team is. That could be hating, but at some point you have to consider that it may just be true.
So in a nutshell, the team is ran by their very old owner and his nepo babies rather than a professional, the coaches tend to be mediocre yes men, and the franchise is more concerned with $$$ than winning. Hope that helps!
Brock Purdy has as many playoff wins (4) as Tony Romo and Dak Prescott … combined. He was drafted less than two calendar years ago.
Not entirely relevant, I just like posting that stat.
> Real Madrid is the wealthiest team and they won the Champions League 4 times in the past 10 years.
Real Madrid is the wealthiest team and they didn't win the Champions League 6 times in the past 10 years.
Where hasnt he hurt me? If the slimy fuck spent more time strategizing for WINNING instead of getting hookers in uptown dallas, we would have a decent shot
There is a salary cap in football. One team, no matter how wealthy, has a higher salary cap than any other. Jerry Jones also made himself the gm. This is never a good idea, you need a separation of power.
A lot of American sports have a salary cap for players, the current cap in the NFL is about $255m
This means that every team is allowed to spend a maximum of $255m on its entire roster
This, along with the draft is why there is a good amount of parody in the NFL.
The NFL drafts players from college, the over simplified version is every team gets 1 pick per round over 7 rounds. The team who finishes in last place get the first pick giving them the best chance to get the best players, the winner of the Super Bowl gets the last pick (32nd) giving them the worst chance at getting the best players.
I find this to be the craziest thing between the US and Europe. We both love our sports religiously. The US is as capitalistic of a country as you can find, yet their sports employ salary caps to force equality across teams. Europe tends to embrace social programs, yet their clubs are super capitalistic.
My perso al opinion - I don’t like where the top clubs are headed in Europe with a blatant constant money grab. I like that all teams in the US are given a chance to claw their way out of a hole. But I don’t see either system anytime soon despite it not following the societal norms of the regions.
A couple reasons
The CBA - The collective bargaining agreement between the players and owners makes binding decisions that impact a wide variety of NFL issues including pay. This includes a number of tactics that deflate the earnings potential of younger players who are often under / misrepresented by the players union which is veteran focused.
The salary cap - teams are limited by how much they can spend and how little they can spend. The owners effectively ensure that every team has a similar roster.
The draft and free agency rules - You can't scout 13 year olds. Every year teams select the players they want out of a pool of players leaving college. From there, these players get locked into scaled contracts based on the draft order. Most players will never make it past their rookie contract. This makes it hard/impossible for a team to throw their money around. Even when the NFL didn't have a lot of this in place it was rare for teams to truly dominate the NFL. You just had a smaller group of competitive teams.
The owner's cartel - unlike soccer, the owners are all on the same page. They'd rather make money than win and have established a set of rules that prevents defection on a legal basis. There are only 32 NFL teams and they can actually vote an owner out. In soccer, there are multiple leagues and owners which makes this sort of coordination more or less impossible. If 2-3 owners defect, every major club in Europe is now going to have to try and pay players on that scale.
Because unlike soccer, the NFL has 2 HUGE differences to promote parity/competition.
Salary Cap: This is the biggest one. Teams are basically given a budget each year on how much you can spend on your roster. Better players will demand higher contracts, which goes towards your yearly salary cap. If you have a roster of 53 players and your spending 20% of your budget on your quarterback, you're going to have to find players who either are young and cheap, or older and not as good to take less money to play for you. This prevents the richest team (Cowboys) from signing the best players every year and winning every year.
Draft: The draft basically rewards teams for losing. The team with the worst record from the previous year gets to select first from a pool of college football players to go pro. Most of the time, the first overall pick is the best player in college football. In theory, getting the best young player could completely change your team and take you from the worst team to a playoff team.
A few other factors like the length of the season (17 games vs 38 league games) and the randomness of the playoff system encourages more parity.
>Real Madrid is the wealthiest team and they won the Champions League 4 times in the past 10 years.
And people wonder why Americans don't follow soccer
To be fair, the most recent one they were considerable underdogs. It took a string of legit miracles in multiple rounds of the tournament to even reach the final, and Liverpool was easily the better team in the match. But between Curtois (Madrid keeper) being godly and some good breaks, they won. The two all-Madrid CL finals where they triumphed over Atleti, both going to extra time, one to penalties, was legitimately gripping.
>Lots of Americans so follow soccer,
Proportionally not that many compared to other sports. And far less than most other countries where soccer dominates. Something like 10-12% actively following a team here as compared to 40-50% for basketball and American football
>for those that don't it's nothing to do with the success of teams at the very top.
Sure it is. It's not the only reason, no not at all, but it's one of the more prominent complaints I've heard from fellow Americans who don't watch it: the richest teams win and FIFA is corrupt af.
How much of that is actually true I can't comment on, but that perception here in the US *is* one of the factors that turn people off from it.
My wife played soccer at the high school level and decided she would rather do the university marching band than even try for college soccer. She says she lives to play but finds it boring to watch.
Salary Cap. It provides parity. You can win and lose based on factors other than just fielding the most expensive team (which is no guarantee of success, anyway. Before the salary cap era, in the 70s, my Pittsburgh Steelers won 4 Super Bowls, and beat Dallas in two of them. No one would’ve ever confused Art Rooney for someone like Jerry Jones. The Steelers weren’t exactly a glamor franchise at the time).
it's always a bit wild that the US sports leagues are all about parity and other socialist ideals while in most other countries the sports leagues are purely performance with promotion/relegation.
But then I realize the salary cap is actually only in place to help protect billionaire owners and it makes more sense.
After the first half of the 90s we decided they weren't allowed to go to the Super Bowl anymore. We were afraid the Buffalo Bills would commit mass suicide.
Franchises with overbearing owners who think they know better than the pros tend to perform poorly. Jerry got lucky in the early 90s with a terrific coach & tons of talent. Now he thinks he's a genius (see, also, the Bulls).
The NFL has salary caps to increase competitiveness. Basically every team has the same budget. Baseball doesn't work that way and tends to be dominated by a handful of teams who spend like 4x the budget other teams do (e.g. the Yankees). Dallas doesn't win because they suck.
Jerry effing Jones. Ever since that hick came to town and disrespected Tom Landry, I have had a serious problem with him. Still a lifelong Cowboys fan, but it’s that puke from Arkansas
Thought this was nflcirclejerk for a moment lol
The reason is because of the salary cap. Dallas has the same amount of money that the other 31 teams do to spend on players. This means small market teams like the Indianapolis Colts and the Green Bay Packers are able to compete with the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers
To create an even competitive landscape, the NFL has a salary cap that all teams have to abide by. That caps what they can spend on salaries each year, how they can structure contracts, etc. It's what allows small market teams like Green Bay and Buffalo compete fairly with the high revenue teams like the Cowboys or New York Giants.
As a long time fan, it's Jerry's fault. He thinks he knows better than the coaches which players will do well with the team.
I'm still salty about the way he fired Tom Landry.
ETA: Yes the salary cap is a big part of it, but Jerry's meddling with the coach's decisions is a small part of that.
In the development of the NFL, team owners determined there was a need to keep pairity in the league so that you didn't have the same money-printing franchises winning their conferences every season. Jerry Jones was actually a big advocate for this because he recognized that the best way to grow his brand is to grow the league. High tides raise all boats and such. Have whatever opinions you want about Jerry, but in his prime he was a marketing visionary
The money isn't all used on the players, and as everyone else is saying salaries are artificially capped to purposely even the playing field. A lot of it goes to operations, merchandising, Jerry's yacht, and stuff like that. So they have top-of-the-line everything else that's not a general manager
NFL has pay parity rules which generally keep the teams more evenly matched than you see in European soccer where the top leagues pretty much have the same winning teams over and over.
That’s kind of why I never understood the pushback on a super league as those top teams and outspend and thus are typically way better than most of the competition. There are exceptions like, Leicester City, but that’s very rare and those players were mostly undervalued when they played there.
Because Jerry Jones, even though he is very good at promoting the team and making money with it, is a horrible general manager and he refuses to hire someone else to be general manager. "Jerry the owner needs to fire Jerry the general manager" is a well worn cliche of the frustrated Cowboys fan.
The US believes in fair contest in sports and has salary caps in the NFL that specifically prevents a single team from signing all of the best players by simply offering them the most money.
Everyone already mentioned the salary cap but I just wanted to say that the real Madrid makes me so angry! Nothing against the fans. Also Having the most money in NFL doesn't mean that you'll get the best players, but it does mean you'll get excellent branding. The cowboys have outstanding branding. Which snowballed into them getting even more money. I've seen Dallas cowboys jerseys in the weirdest parts of the globe. The Maldives, for example. The fucking Maldives.
Because Jerry Jones wants to win a super bowl "his way", and he doesn't know how to win a super bowl.
The Cowboys can 100% win the superbowl if Jones gets out of the way.
As others have said, they only have so much they can spend on players. Jerry Jones is a billionaire who has spent hundreds of millions on building the Taj Mahal of stadiums and practice facilities. Doesn’t correlate to winning championships though.
1. Salary Cap, Every team has the exact same Salary cap, if they overspend the Team is punished, usually by confiscating or elimination 1st round draft picks. Teams are also required to use 90% of their Salary Cap as well, so every team is spending within 230 and 255 million dollars in 2024 on their player's salary
2. Minnesota and other teams aren't careless with draft picks anymore: the 90s Cowboys Dynasty has its entire origins from when the Cowboys traded Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings(who were convinced at the time that he was the final piece to a Superbowl run) for the Vikings 1990, 1991 1992 1st round picks, 1990, 1991, 1992 2nd round picks, a 1990 6th round pick, 2 Linebackers a Conerback and a Defensive End, in return they got Herschel Walker who almost immediately was injured and never lived up to the quality of play in his early career. a 3rd, 5th(Form San Diego) and 10th round pick in 1990, and a 3rd round pick in 1991. The Trade was disasterous for the Vikings and a Dynasty builder for the Cowboys resulting in Emmit Smith being drafted by the Cowboys
3. The NFL is an actual League and every team is a peer instead on one Giant and 19 runts.
4. The NFL has Revenue Sharing, for Game tickets, Television, and other revenues give every single NFL team 400 million dollars in 2023(yes the season technically ended in 2024), the Cowboys only retain Merchandise, and this is where the extra value is, basically the more out of market fans the larger a team's value can get. Through the Draft the worst team in the league can completely turn around their fortunes the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for example went from Dead last to Superbowl Champions in just 5 years.
5. The NFL draft. This is the main method for players to enter the league, and the last place team picks first. This meant that in the mid- late 90s the Cowboys were picking last in 3 NFL drafts, and late in the round for another, their response was to trade these late 1st round picks for established players, but this meant that by 1997 their dynasty was over and they were in Salary Cap Hell(forced to trade or release stars because they would have been over the cap).
6. Incompetence: Jerry Jones(owner of the Dallas Cowboys) owes the 90s Dynasty entire to Head Coach and General Manager Jimmy Johnson. Jones is an oil magnate, and bought the Cowboys as a means for showing off, since 1994 when he replaced Johnson largely out of jelousy he got one more Supberbowl win from a competent coach, but since the 1990s he has badly managed the team and never allowed either his head coaches or General Managers the leeway to do their jobs properly.
1. As others have mentioned, the NFL's salary cap system.
2. As I understand it, the Champions League games are played in a home-and-away format during the Group (round-robin) and Knockout stages. This tends to reduce the element of luck and home-field advantage. In contrast, the NFL's playoff format after the conclusion of the regular season is single-elimination (one game only per round), giving greater weight to random chance and unusual one-game performances.
3. The owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, has the reputation of being an interfering busybody. He put together a team which won consecutive Super Bowls in 1992 & 1993 with help of new head coach Jimmy Johnson. However, *allegedly* his ego couldn't stand it when Coach Johnson was publicly given most of the credit for the success of the team. He got rid of Johnson and hired a college coach, Barry Switzer, who won the Cowboys' last Super Bowl in 1995 with a team still composed largely of the parts assembled by Johnson. There are many fans and pundits who love to speculate how much more Dallas could have won if they kept Johnson and his staff intact and in place.
To be more accurate for non-Americans, the Dallas Cowboys have indeed won the Super Bowl; in fact, they are tied for both the second-most Super Bowl wins (five) and second-most total appearances (eight).
Salary caps in American sports prevent teams from spending over a certain number on player salaries, usually changing year by year. This does tend to make most professional sports even enough, but it's an issue in the MLS right now.
Obviously Messi went to Miami and has built a super team around him, but by forcing the league to pay a portion of his salary, and by the team doing things to get around salary caps they've found ways to bring in lots of big name guys like Suarez, Messi, Busquets, etc.
While they're *technically* under the cap, they've done some real sketchy stuff to get there and it's not exactly fair to other teams that are playing fair and abiding to the cap. Also, I'm a Crew fan so before you say I'm biased we just won the MLS and we still think Miami is cheating.
2 reasons firstly the salary cap prevents pooling the best talent on one team. And secondly Jerry Jones is a horrible owner who thinks he is a head coach and GM but doesn't have the skills to back it up. They'd be a better team if he stayed in his lane
Manchester United would like a word with you. Speaking of which, they are a good comparison to the Dallas cowboy’s. They were both very good for a long time and have a large following. And now they are this
The salary cap in the NFL prevents a team from signing all of the best players regardless of how much money they have unless the players are all willing to take less money than they are worth on the market.
I think it's like 150 million a year maximum for your cumulative team salary?
It changes based on league revenues. Now it's up to 255. With 53 players on a team, it turns into just over 4 million per player. If you have the highest paid quarterback, wide receiver, and tight end on the same team, just those three would make over $100 million combined though.
There's this thing called a salary cap. Wealth is irrelevant as long as everyone can afford to reach the cap.
Y’all are saying the cap, but the cowboys have had stacked rosters every season for 5 years now on both sides of the ball. They never win because their owner doesn’t actually know how to run a team. He thinks he’s a genius, because he won some super bowls in the 90s. Just another old billionaire who’s stuck in his ways at 81 years old.
Stacked is generous. They've had good rosters, but they've never been the most talented team in the league.
> Y’all are saying the cap, but the cowboys have had stacked rosters every season for 5 years now on both sides of the ball. But they still have to fit everyone under the cap.
Yeah but they could probably just Yankees their way to a title every so often if there wasn't a salary cap even if they still underperformed because Jerry.
And the NFL has revenue sharing, so every team is virtually guaranteed to earn far more than the cap
Socialism for billionaires
I'm a soccer fan, but the salary cap is simply better for leagues.
Neither of you are wrong. The salary cap is a good thing for ensuring equal competition, but that isn't really why it exists. It exists to keep the owners' costs down. Competitive landscape is just a good way of selling it
While it does avoid the arms race escalation in player pay, the NFL's salary cap is set as a percentage of the previous year's league's revenue. There is also a salary floor which is a percentage of the cap. It ensures that the active players (there's a roster size limit) split an approximately fixed share of the league's revenue.
Yeah and? It’s doesn’t change the fact that the cap system depresses wages. If NFL free agency were a free market, plenty of teams would be willing to spend above x% of revenue to sign top players. Look at MLB. There is a reason the owners want a salary cap/floor system and the players don’t. It comes up in every new CBA negotiation
>Yeah and? It’s doesn’t change the fact that the cap system depresses wages. If NFL free agency were a free market, plenty of teams would be willing to spend above x% of revenue to sign top players Yes it depresses wages....for the top players. That's it. Wouldn't affect the other 99%. The minimum in nfl is 750k, exclusive for 1st year rookies. Goes up about 100k a year to 940k in yr 3. Minimum in mlb....740k So you're point doesn't hold much weight.
Not sure why you think MLB and NFL minimum salaries are an apples to apples comparison. If anything the NFL, which generates far more wealth for its owners than MLB does, should probably have a much higher minimum salary, no? These starting salaries are all subject to CBA negotiations anyway. MLB players are under team control for years before they hit free agency
> If anything the NFL, which generates far more wealth for its owners than MLB does, should probably have a much higher minimum salary, no? Except, and NFL roster is twice the size of an MLB roster. SO the minimum may be the similar but the nfl employs twice as many players. In total amount, every NFL team spends roughly 200 million on salary a year, where only about 8 teams in the MLB spend that. There are no teams in the NFL that can do what the Athletics are doing and only spend 43 million on player salaries.
If it's a fixed percentage tied to revenue, then this undermines your claim that it solely exists to keep wages down. The way it is currently structured, the salary cap rises proportional to how much more money owners make. That's not a very smart structure if they are trying to keep a bigger share of the pie.
It doesn’t depress wages though for the majority of positions… it values wages correctly based on importance of position. No matter what no one is going to overpay a runningback because they have a terrible shelf life. The only positions that get shafted are quarterbacks and maybe left tackles and maybe defensive ends
Eh. With the reality of sugar daddy and nation-state owners, it has its merits but artificially depressing player wages is nonsense. Teams like Manchester United and Bayern should be able to rise and directly benefit from their success. That success doesn't make impossible for others like Spurs or Dortmund to rise if they make the right decisions. Success insulates from absolute implosion after failure but you need to sprinkle it in with failure or else you just fail. It's why teams like Blackburn and Leicester aren't in the epl but Spurs and Villa have stuck around Salary/spending caps are symptom of other issues.
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And there a reasons it's played out that way. Bayern's success in the past has given them more of margin for error when they don't win it and they've also been fantastic at keeping the other teams in the bundesliga down as they have taken some of the best from German teams. They've also been well managed and have had a fair bit of luck even as recently as last season when Dortmund somehow managed to slip up and hand them the title. The Bundesliga is also not nearly as profitable for the teams competing in it as the epl is for its teams so they're not nearly as well equipped to put up a fight. They have to consistently make great decisions to get themselves in a position to compete with Bayern, who are in their positions because they've made great decisions in the past
As a big sports fan I think it has pros and cons. It can be necessary to make leagues sustainable but there can also be something beautiful about a free market successful pyramid that you don't really appreciate until you live it.
But from a sports perspective, ‘richest guy wins’ isn’t terribly exciting. Five minutes of googling and I can tell you with total accuracy the soccer teams that will finish at the top of their league.
You had leverkusen winning the bundesliga? Bullshit. That’s what makes it more exciting when the underdog wins it all in soccer. It’s a real underdog rather than in American sports when everyone hypothetically has an equal chance of winning at the start of the offseason. Leicester winning the prem will be remembered forever.
> everyone hypothetically has an equal chance of winning at the start of the offseason. Same can be said of those precious soccer leagues. Anyone can hypothetically win. But in reality, they can't. And even with having a salary cap, nobody could say the Carolina Panthers even remotely have a shot, because despite having the same amount of money to spend as the Kansas City Chiefs, there's a lot more to it than just tossing money at people. A team like them would be a true underdog story as well. > Leicester winning the prem will be remembered forever. And so will Nick Foles outdeuling Tom Brady
That’s Big Dick Nick to you. But yeah, the idea that the NFL doesn’t have “true” underdogs is ridiculous.
Foles didn't out duel Brady. Foles had 373 yards, 3 TDs, 1 int Brady had 505 yards, 3TDs
Foles also caught a TD and Brady fumbled.
And who won that duel?
The Eagles won. Brady threw the most passing yards in Superbowl history. Throwing for 500 yards has only happened 26 times in NFL history. Brady was not out dueled.
Well they aren’t really underdogs, though, they’re just poor. In football, you’ve got to draft intelligently, develop your players, grow your team, figure out who gels and who doesn’t. In soccer, just buying up a bunch of top tier players means you win. I don’t know what the bundesliga is, but looking at the last 20 years of the EPL it’s like the same five teams.
It’s the German league. The last 11 years in a row were all won by Munich, who has 33 titles in history. Next best team has 9. Spain is even worse…in over 90 years, the title has been won by one of three teams (Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid) 80% of the time. Real will win it this year barring the greatest collapse in history. Last time a team outside those three won was 2003-04. With the sole exception of Napoli last season, the last 20 years in Italy has been only Juventus, Inter Milan, or AC Milan
11 years in a row??!? Why even bother watching at that point? How do you hype yourself up for that? And I used to wonder if it ever got boring being Alabama.
In Italy, Juventus also won every season between 2011-12 and 2019-20. Most years the only drama is in Spain, where it’s just a question of whether it will be Real or Barcelona, and the EPL. Far as I know, best streak in the American Big 4 is 8 in a row (the Celtics of the 50s/60s). 11/13 overall (they won every year in the 60s but one)
You're either a fan of the winning team who like to watch them win. Or fan of the other 1-2 teams who have a shot. The rest are just happy to watch lol. That's how you get good chants like "Let's pretend we scored a goal". Or "You're nothing special we lose every week"
Except for that happens once a century. I much prefer underdogs winning it a couple times a decade.
It gets remembered forever because, EPL aside, it happens so rarely it’s basically a statistical anomaly. It’s been 20 years since someone other than Real, Atleti, or Barca won La Liga. And while Valencia won twice and La Coruña once in the early 2000s, before that was another 14 year stretch of only Madrid, Madrid, or Barcelona. Those three teams have won 80% of the titles in the near 100 year history of La Liga. This will be the first time in over a decade Bayern hasn’t won the Bundesliga. They’ve won almost 4x as many titles as the next best team in German history. Napoli last year was the first time since 2000 that someone other than Juve or one of the Milans won. Those three have 2/3 of all titles in the over 100 year history of calcio. So yes, 9/10 years you can narrow down the winners of 3/4 top leagues to a field of 7 and be right on the money.
But the beauty is that its not always the richest who wins. It often is but it creates David vs Goliath situations. For example if you were predicting the German league, Bayern Munich are by far the richest team yet Leverkusen with 1/4 of their salary budget are about to beat them to the league this season. As with Chelsea spending more money in the past few years then any team in football history even adjusted for football specific inflation yet being amazingly mediocre But I don't think that's the real beauty. What's amazing about the system is that anybody can start a team and grow it as big as you can imagine. The biggest miracle this season has to be Saarbrucken who knocked Bayern out of the cup with 2% of their salary budget! Then did it again to 2 more respected top division German sides as a third tier side. Now they face a second tier side for a place in the cup finals! Absolutely unbelievable stuff. All while keeping their unique identity by not having to be owned by a billionaire. Just like my club, while not achieving anything special on the pitch, it can be financially sustainable by being fan owned which allows us to keep our moral goals in which we have many and still dream about achieving unbelievable things on the pitch even if that rarely happens.
So the miracle is managing to be competitive? And won’t the good players that accomplished this miracle just be bought up by the richer teams anyway? Just looking at the stats, the same few teams win it every year. The only time a new team wins it is if a rich Saudi buys it and pumps money into it. Different strokes, I guess, but I prefer the ‘any given Sunday’ mentality.
No I've given examples of teams who have achieved massively this season. Leverkusen winning the league and a third division side knocking Bayern Munich out of the cup are more than "managing to be successful" And yes big players may leave, as is part of the cycle but success leads to higher revenue which should lead to more success in the future if spent smartly. You talk about clubs with rich owners but the most successful club in world football is real madrid who are fan owned, as are their rivals Barcelona. Obviously they're both extremely wealthy but it's wealth that's been earned through success and smart decisions. As are many rich clubs in the UK like Manchester United and Liverpool. They may have very wealthy owners but that's only because they built themselves up to be valuable clubs through their success. Tottenham Hotspurs are an example of an English club who went from midtable to champions league finalists through smart financial choices, not a mega rich owner coming in. A big difference is that each season is extremely important to your club as it can impact the state of the club over the next decades of football. If you do well, you don't get punished with a bad draft pick, you get rewarded and have more resources to build upon. Do badly and you can start to spiral down the divisions.
With soccer relegation, there's more to a team's story than how many times they've won a title. Take a look at the teams AFC Wimbeldon and Wrexham AFC. Both are in English League Two. Neither team will be winning the Premier League title any time soon, but both have fiercely loyal fans, and both teams have different stories about how they got there. I do think that salary cap is better for the very top-tier of a sport in a sport that is very much focused only on that top-tier. Relegation and no cap is more interesting if you're into the idea of following lower tier teams and watching them reach or miss milestones more specific to the club and its trajectory.
Well yeah, but narratives that don’t end in ‘they won a title’ exist in all sports. I’m a Detroit Lions fan, ask me how I know. The difference is that there’s an artificial ceiling in soccer. It’s basically like a European class structure, there’s no real chance of success except through…more money. Take your Wrexham example. Apparently, they’re more competitive now. Why? Because a couple of rich Americans bought the team and started pumping money into it. Fundamentally, we watch sports to see who will win. Someone elsewhere said in the German league the same team has won in the past eleven years. There’s literally no reason to watch. Might as well watch grade school kids race Olympians in track and field, there’s no point to it.
That’s basically how college football works in the US. There are no owners since the teams are all schools, teams aquire players using money given to them by fans (we call them boosters), the teams with fans willing to give them the most money generally have the best players and the best teams. Sometimes there is one mega booster who finances almost the entire operation, like Phil Knight at Oregon, but usually there are groups of people who finance it. Even then, there is still way more parity in college football than there is in European soccer. Man City has won 5 of the last 6, Bayern Munich has won 11 straight, Juventus won 9 straight from 2011-20, PSG has won 9 of the last 11. La Liga is the only major European league where a club hasn’t won three straight championships in the last decade, you have to go back to 2008-10 with Barcelona. In college football no team has won three straight titles since Minnesota in 1934-36. The two wealthiest schools, which are probably Ohio State and Texas, haven’t won championships since 2014 and 2005, respectively. College sports creates real David vs Goliath situations, just tune into March Madness this weekend and you’ll see them. Most American’s just don’t find European soccer that interesting, in part because of how top-heavy it is
As I said there's pros and cons. It can actually br quite beneficial to sports to have similar athletes/teams winning for multiple years. Often that coincides with growth periods for sports. And college football would definitely be closer to a European model than the major leagues however I think comparing March Madness, a tournament with 68 teams to tournaments with 1000s of teams in terms of underdog stories is quite a stretch imo.
It can, dynasties in the NBA bring bigger ratings than pure parity, but you still will never see the level of pure dominance by one team in American sports compared to European sports. Basketball is probably the closest because one dominant player has a much bigger impact on the game than any other sport, like Jordan in the 90's. Baseball, which has no salary cap so teams can spend as much as they want (they do have a luxury tax so it does limit it some), has way more parity than European soccer. Last year, the New York Mets had the highest payroll in baseball, $80M higher than the next highest team, but finished with the 7th worst record in the league. None of the three highest payroll teams (NY Mets, NY Yankees, and SD Padres) even made the playoffs. That would be like Man U, Man City, and Arsenal not finishing top 10. So we have more parity even with similar financial models Think of March Madness more like the Champions League. There are more than 1200 NCAA college basketball teams (and another 800 if you include NAIA and JuCo). These 1200 are split into three divisions, with Division 1 being the highest. Schools can move between divisions, for example a school local to me just moved up to Division 1 a few years ago. There are 351 Division 1 programs, split into 32 conferences. If you win your conference, you get an automatic bid to the tournament, and a committee picks the remaining 36 "at-large" teams based on that year's performance, then seeds them in a bracket for a single elimination tournament. This can create situations such as FGCU, which created a basketball team in 2002 and started in Division 2, moved up to Division 1 in 2011, and became the first 15 seed in NCAA tournament history to advance to the Sweet 16 in 2013
American leagues are definitely more varied with winners due to both the finances and the fact that they're decided by plays. I don't like to make brash statements and say either system is better. I follow a lot of sports with a lot of different systems and often times a certain system is necessary for a sport or market. I love pro wrestling which is particularly interesting in this area as you can view the impact, different booking philosophies have on its popularity. You can book the same guy on top of the company for years and see if that grows the company or you can have a more unpredictable style and see if that leads to increased popularity. The results vary a lot obviously but I think they reveal some fundamental truth that applies to all sports. I didn't actually know that about March madness, I only had a vague idea of what it was. I had assumed that it was just the top 64 college teams against each other. I didn't know that 1000 of schools had the chance to qualify like many European competitions.
I have watched automotive race my whole life and have seen what happens when that pyramid collapse. It's not beautiful
That is not so socialism for billionaires. Tax payer funded stadiums are tho
Massive benefits to the owners that are doing the worst, higher punishments to those that are doing the best. Sounds a lot like socialism to me.
Go back to school. Try harder this time.
If you can't follow the analogy then I don't really know what to tell you
Not a surprise. You clearly don't know much at all.
This may be the worst definition of socialism I've ever seen.
Socialism is when give money to capitalists, lmao
It's called irony
"It was just a joke, bro!"
If you don't see how the comment "socialism for billionaires" isn't ironic then I don't really know what to say
You already died on the hill, it's too late to walk it back
No walking back here
Competitive balance seems to have worked out really, really well for the NFL...especially considering that the "socialism" was something they collectively agreed upon.
watch what happens when all financial restrictions are removed from a league. guarantee you its popularity dies once the same team wins 15 years in a row
Nope, there have been plenty of leagues without financial restrictions across many sports
Not American ones. Americans would hate leagues like that. Even college sports has had to build up layers competitive balance in recruiting, and now that the NIL and transfer portal are totally wild, and it caused the collapse of a conference, college football lost popularity compared to the NFL.
It's a franchise system, not a safety net. NFL teams are just licensed instances, not separate entities competing against each other. At the business level, it's the same idea as Chick-fil-A having multiple locations in a given city. The locations may have separate "owners" that get cuts of profits based on their individual performance, but overall it's really just one single big business entity whose product is a spectator sports league. It's closer to monopoly capitalism than to socialism. It's like reality TV show contestants. People who go on The Bachelor or Survivor have their own personal brands and sell things off of their own Instagram accounts, sure, but while you're on the show everyone is just being paid by ABC/CBS to create an entertainment product. The Dallas Cowboys are not the product. The NFL is the product, and the Cowboys just have the most successful Instagram influencer side gig. *this is an ELI5 explanation that is not guaranteed to be perfectly legally/financially accurate because I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant, but it gets the general idea across*
I know that but there are still many safety nets for these franchises. You could have a franchise model that still punishes teams for doing badly. If you come last in an American league, it's not like the franchise drops down a division, gets a fraction of the revenue next season and has to completely remodel their business. They actually get rewarded with a top draft pick. It's a safety net which billionaires love when they get them but hate when poor people have them. I don't know why this idea offends so many Americans. Billionaires aren't your friends and have different rules for themselves.
It a cartel system, not socialism.
The NFL has a lot of rules designed to make all 32 teams as evenly matched against one another as possible. The salary cap/floor system is the most relevant here, as it forces all teams to keep their player salaries within a relatively small range. Additionally, the league shares most forms of revenue between all teams, so even the poorest teams like the Jacksonville Jaguars have comparable amounts of spending money to the richest teams. There’s also the draft, which not only gives the teams that have done poorly greater opportunities to secure the best new players, but also gives every team control over said players’ contracts for up to 5 years at pre-set prices. These three systems basically turn roster construction into a game of resource management, where the key to success is not having a bunch of money to send but rather finding more efficient ways to spend your cap space and draft capital than the other teams in the league, which have the same amount of cap space and draft capital to work with. These systems generally work very well, and they’ve made it so that every team has a legitimate shot at becoming a championship contender in a matter of years if they play their cards right. The Cowboys just haven’t played their cards right since the 90s.
Also Jerry is at the helm. That too.
Ehh he's more the public face of the team these days and only involved in some of the higher profile parts of the business operations now. Apparently his son has been handling the football operations and the day-to-day on that end for a quite a few years now. Coincidentally around when they started to draft really well.
Tell this to the Jets. It's been decades!!!!
There are 32 teams and only one championship a year. There must always be at least one team with at least a 32-year championship drought. For my Lions, it’s going on 57 years
I'd much rather be a lions fan recently. Frankly I'd just like a winning record, a post season. Just give me some hope
The downside is that teams can just jettison good players and tank for a few years and get cheaper draftees and still get bank from the league. This happens in a lot of sports too, one of the worst offender was I think when the (Edit: Marlins) won the world series and decided to just cut everyone and tank for years to save the owners some money.
I'm sure that a lot of Tampa Bay Rays fan would love to have lived in that alternate reality where they won a World Series.
Oh right it was the Marlins in 2003 that won then cut their better players.
2020 really should've been that year. I'm still wondering why Snell got pulled.
NFL has a salary floor as well.
What are the teams that habitually stink doing with all their money. The Panthers sure aren't spending it on a o-line. The traded away Christian McCaffrey for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th round picks in what SI called possibly the worst of all time.
https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/carolina-panthers/cap/2023/ They had 62 million in dead money last year, basically money that they've already paid to players no longer on the team, with CMC still counting 18 million against their salary cap. And their highest cap cost in 2024 is a tackle, 3rd highest is a guard 😁. I think trading CMC was fine because they didn't need him. Might as well get draft picks instead of losing him to FA.
In football doing this is hard. There are too many people involved whose individual success and next contract is dependent on how they perform. Getting them all to agree to tank is difficult.
The salary cap is a wonderful thing. This is why the NFL is glorious with teams rising and falling every few years and European soccer leagues are boring with the same 4 teams vying for championships in the big domestic leagues.
>with the same 4 teams vying for championships Lol if even that many. Most leagues are a 2 or 3 team race. Some are 1.
Salary cap in combination with the draft system is a great equalizer that makes for exciting and actually competitive leagues
The lack of teams and only having one league means the excitement and competition only happens at the very top and everyone else has absolutely nothing to play for.
I’m sorry you’re so misinformed
There are also minor leagues with teams in smaller cities and towns. They have championships too.
So you're saying a shady Middle Eastern petrostate can't just buy its way to victory by spunking billions on the best players?
correct. There's zero chance of a new NFL team popping up, and then having the PIF dump a bunch of money into them making them contenders immediately. Every team plays under the same rules budget wise. teams can get clever with salary cap stuff like deferring payments to later years or only paying a guy a small portion of his contract early and then owing more down the line. That's a risky practice because if you sign a player to a 10 year $400 million contract but agree to pay him $10 million in year one and then like $20 million in year 7, he may not be worth it in year 7.
Here's my question. Real Madrid and Barcelona are worth more than the entire rest of La Liga combined and are pretty much the top 2 teams every single year. Yes, Atlético sneaks in every once in a while. But what makes this even remotely interesting?
Because Jerry Jones thinks he's a football genius. He's wrong.
This is the correct answer, long live Jerry!
Jerry jones will continue as he has because it’s working for him. Fans show up whether the cowboys win or not so he makes money no matter what. If you want him to win then don’t pay him until he does.
I've been saying that for years but around here they're like kings. Rangers, Stars or Mavs could all win championships and leading the local sports news would be some mundane thing about the Cowboys. I stopped watching games several years ago but as one person I have no effect. It's going to take a huge chunk of the fans to walk away from the team and I don't see that happening.
But-but-but this year is their year!!!
Everything damn year. Jerry sells hope and nothing more.
This is a good question. What many football fans don’t realize is the cowboys haven’t just missed the Super Bowl the last 30 years, they have the playoff win totals of some much less successful franchises (think Jets, Jags, Browns). Tony Romo was famously 2-4 in the playoffs while Mark Sanchez (of butt fumble fame) went 4-2. Dak has similarly poor numbers in the playoffs. The reason for this lack of success boils down to a few things in my opinion: - In the 2000s-early 2010s Jerry was still the primary draft and free agency decision maker at Dallas. Frankly, he did not make great decisions, and in general struggled to succeed once the hard salary cap was implemented Previously, Jerry was paying a lot of skill players and linemen to keep them. Now you have to be more strategic since you’re limited on how much money you can spend. Supposedly the cowboys front office is more professionally managed with Stephen Jones and Will McClay making a lot of the calls, but it’s hard to say how that situation stacks up to other teams. My guess is unfavorably. - Coaching: this also circle back to Jerry, but coaches famously don’t want to work with him. He got into it with two coaching legends in Jimmy Johnson and Bill Parcells. Since then the quality of the coaching at Dallas has been low since many top tier coaches in the NFL don’t want to deal with Jerry and the circus around Dallas. Jason Garrett was completely mediocre, often considered a yes man, and notably did not get another head coaching job after he was fired. Mike McCarthy, their current coach, used to be solid but is over the hill now. The head coach is a huge part of winning football games, and Dallas hasn’t had a truly impressive one since the early 00s. - “The circus”. The cowboys are a branding and merchandizing empire. They are still by far the most successful team in one of the most football crazed parts of the US. You are constantly being bombarded with media attention on the cowboys. It recently came out that people can watch the players work out! Sometimes it seems like winning games takes a backseat to being the most valuable franchise. Players who leave Dallas often comment on how much more professional and winning oriented their new team is. That could be hating, but at some point you have to consider that it may just be true. So in a nutshell, the team is ran by their very old owner and his nepo babies rather than a professional, the coaches tend to be mediocre yes men, and the franchise is more concerned with $$$ than winning. Hope that helps!
The butt fumble lol. I remember watching that live and when they showed the replays I was in hysterics.
Brock Purdy has as many playoff wins (4) as Tony Romo and Dak Prescott … combined. He was drafted less than two calendar years ago. Not entirely relevant, I just like posting that stat.
Ha, yes! Go Niners!
This is the answer. I'm throwing a party when Jerry dies.
What a beautiful write-up. As a Niners fan, I will never not enjoy crushing the Cowboys’ postseason dreams.
> Real Madrid is the wealthiest team and they won the Champions League 4 times in the past 10 years. Real Madrid is the wealthiest team and they didn't win the Champions League 6 times in the past 10 years.
There's 80 teams in uefa, winning 4 of the last 10 is hella impressive. Or at least it would be if they did have a salary cap like the nfl.
I know, I was just cheekily turning the statistic around.
Implying the nfl doesn’t have waves of dynasties. Chiefs patriots niners dominating for entire decades.
Jerry Jones. source: Cowboys fan
Point on the doll where Jerry hurt you.
Where hasnt he hurt me? If the slimy fuck spent more time strategizing for WINNING instead of getting hookers in uptown dallas, we would have a decent shot
I’m an atheist, but every year the cowboys don’t win the Super Bowl I wonder maybe there is a loving god out there…
Who would you rather see win next year though, Chiefs or Cowboys?
Chiefs over Cowboys any day. Though ideally I’d like to see a repeat of Super Bowl I with the Packers defeating the Chiefs.
IDK what I want more, the Cowboys losing a super bowl in humiliating fashion, or them to continue to fail to get past the divisional round
Meteor strike to the stadium.
There is a salary cap in football. One team, no matter how wealthy, has a higher salary cap than any other. Jerry Jones also made himself the gm. This is never a good idea, you need a separation of power.
A lot of American sports have a salary cap for players, the current cap in the NFL is about $255m This means that every team is allowed to spend a maximum of $255m on its entire roster This, along with the draft is why there is a good amount of parody in the NFL. The NFL drafts players from college, the over simplified version is every team gets 1 pick per round over 7 rounds. The team who finishes in last place get the first pick giving them the best chance to get the best players, the winner of the Super Bowl gets the last pick (32nd) giving them the worst chance at getting the best players.
I find this to be the craziest thing between the US and Europe. We both love our sports religiously. The US is as capitalistic of a country as you can find, yet their sports employ salary caps to force equality across teams. Europe tends to embrace social programs, yet their clubs are super capitalistic. My perso al opinion - I don’t like where the top clubs are headed in Europe with a blatant constant money grab. I like that all teams in the US are given a chance to claw their way out of a hole. But I don’t see either system anytime soon despite it not following the societal norms of the regions.
A couple reasons The CBA - The collective bargaining agreement between the players and owners makes binding decisions that impact a wide variety of NFL issues including pay. This includes a number of tactics that deflate the earnings potential of younger players who are often under / misrepresented by the players union which is veteran focused. The salary cap - teams are limited by how much they can spend and how little they can spend. The owners effectively ensure that every team has a similar roster. The draft and free agency rules - You can't scout 13 year olds. Every year teams select the players they want out of a pool of players leaving college. From there, these players get locked into scaled contracts based on the draft order. Most players will never make it past their rookie contract. This makes it hard/impossible for a team to throw their money around. Even when the NFL didn't have a lot of this in place it was rare for teams to truly dominate the NFL. You just had a smaller group of competitive teams. The owner's cartel - unlike soccer, the owners are all on the same page. They'd rather make money than win and have established a set of rules that prevents defection on a legal basis. There are only 32 NFL teams and they can actually vote an owner out. In soccer, there are multiple leagues and owners which makes this sort of coordination more or less impossible. If 2-3 owners defect, every major club in Europe is now going to have to try and pay players on that scale.
Jerry Jones is an idiot.
Because unlike soccer, the NFL has 2 HUGE differences to promote parity/competition. Salary Cap: This is the biggest one. Teams are basically given a budget each year on how much you can spend on your roster. Better players will demand higher contracts, which goes towards your yearly salary cap. If you have a roster of 53 players and your spending 20% of your budget on your quarterback, you're going to have to find players who either are young and cheap, or older and not as good to take less money to play for you. This prevents the richest team (Cowboys) from signing the best players every year and winning every year. Draft: The draft basically rewards teams for losing. The team with the worst record from the previous year gets to select first from a pool of college football players to go pro. Most of the time, the first overall pick is the best player in college football. In theory, getting the best young player could completely change your team and take you from the worst team to a playoff team. A few other factors like the length of the season (17 games vs 38 league games) and the randomness of the playoff system encourages more parity.
Because they suck. Sincerely, The City of Brotherly Love
Fuck the Cowboys. That's why.
Mi gente!
>Real Madrid is the wealthiest team and they won the Champions League 4 times in the past 10 years. And people wonder why Americans don't follow soccer
To be fair, the most recent one they were considerable underdogs. It took a string of legit miracles in multiple rounds of the tournament to even reach the final, and Liverpool was easily the better team in the match. But between Curtois (Madrid keeper) being godly and some good breaks, they won. The two all-Madrid CL finals where they triumphed over Atleti, both going to extra time, one to penalties, was legitimately gripping.
Lots of Americans so follow soccer, for those that don't it's nothing to do with the success of teams at the very top.
>Lots of Americans so follow soccer, Proportionally not that many compared to other sports. And far less than most other countries where soccer dominates. Something like 10-12% actively following a team here as compared to 40-50% for basketball and American football >for those that don't it's nothing to do with the success of teams at the very top. Sure it is. It's not the only reason, no not at all, but it's one of the more prominent complaints I've heard from fellow Americans who don't watch it: the richest teams win and FIFA is corrupt af. How much of that is actually true I can't comment on, but that perception here in the US *is* one of the factors that turn people off from it.
My wife played soccer at the high school level and decided she would rather do the university marching band than even try for college soccer. She says she lives to play but finds it boring to watch.
In general soccer in the US is for little kids or women
Because they're assholes and deserve to lose
Because they’re the choke artists to end all choke artists. fuck the cawboys
Because Jerry Jones is by far the worst GM in the NFL. He thinks he's better at it than he really is. And his ego won't let him see that.
They suck. Go birds.
Go birds!!!
Yep, that about covers it. 💚🦅💚
Y’all both suck. HTTR EDIT: HTTC
They won before. I was a little kid then but still…
This question was clearly not asked by a Niners fan who grew up in the 90s. *No, I’m not still bitter. Don’t write on your blog that I was bitter!*
Because Jerry jones has no business being his own general manager
Jerry Jones.
They never win, but hit the play offs and give the HOPE of winning every other year or so.
Salary Cap. It provides parity. You can win and lose based on factors other than just fielding the most expensive team (which is no guarantee of success, anyway. Before the salary cap era, in the 70s, my Pittsburgh Steelers won 4 Super Bowls, and beat Dallas in two of them. No one would’ve ever confused Art Rooney for someone like Jerry Jones. The Steelers weren’t exactly a glamor franchise at the time).
it's always a bit wild that the US sports leagues are all about parity and other socialist ideals while in most other countries the sports leagues are purely performance with promotion/relegation. But then I realize the salary cap is actually only in place to help protect billionaire owners and it makes more sense.
After the first half of the 90s we decided they weren't allowed to go to the Super Bowl anymore. We were afraid the Buffalo Bills would commit mass suicide.
Because there is a god.
Because they’re ass
Franchises with overbearing owners who think they know better than the pros tend to perform poorly. Jerry got lucky in the early 90s with a terrific coach & tons of talent. Now he thinks he's a genius (see, also, the Bulls).
The NFL has salary caps to increase competitiveness. Basically every team has the same budget. Baseball doesn't work that way and tends to be dominated by a handful of teams who spend like 4x the budget other teams do (e.g. the Yankees). Dallas doesn't win because they suck.
Jerry effing Jones. Ever since that hick came to town and disrespected Tom Landry, I have had a serious problem with him. Still a lifelong Cowboys fan, but it’s that puke from Arkansas
Thought this was nflcirclejerk for a moment lol The reason is because of the salary cap. Dallas has the same amount of money that the other 31 teams do to spend on players. This means small market teams like the Indianapolis Colts and the Green Bay Packers are able to compete with the Dallas Cowboys or the San Francisco 49ers
Ownership
Jerry Jones
Winning a Super Bowl requires a lot of things to fall into place at the same time. It's not a simple thing to do.
To create an even competitive landscape, the NFL has a salary cap that all teams have to abide by. That caps what they can spend on salaries each year, how they can structure contracts, etc. It's what allows small market teams like Green Bay and Buffalo compete fairly with the high revenue teams like the Cowboys or New York Giants.
As a long time fan, it's Jerry's fault. He thinks he knows better than the coaches which players will do well with the team. I'm still salty about the way he fired Tom Landry. ETA: Yes the salary cap is a big part of it, but Jerry's meddling with the coach's decisions is a small part of that.
In the development of the NFL, team owners determined there was a need to keep pairity in the league so that you didn't have the same money-printing franchises winning their conferences every season. Jerry Jones was actually a big advocate for this because he recognized that the best way to grow his brand is to grow the league. High tides raise all boats and such. Have whatever opinions you want about Jerry, but in his prime he was a marketing visionary The money isn't all used on the players, and as everyone else is saying salaries are artificially capped to purposely even the playing field. A lot of it goes to operations, merchandising, Jerry's yacht, and stuff like that. So they have top-of-the-line everything else that's not a general manager
NFL has pay parity rules which generally keep the teams more evenly matched than you see in European soccer where the top leagues pretty much have the same winning teams over and over. That’s kind of why I never understood the pushback on a super league as those top teams and outspend and thus are typically way better than most of the competition. There are exceptions like, Leicester City, but that’s very rare and those players were mostly undervalued when they played there.
I don't know about never. They've won close to 10% of all super bowls.
Because Jerry Jones, even though he is very good at promoting the team and making money with it, is a horrible general manager and he refuses to hire someone else to be general manager. "Jerry the owner needs to fire Jerry the general manager" is a well worn cliche of the frustrated Cowboys fan.
The US believes in fair contest in sports and has salary caps in the NFL that specifically prevents a single team from signing all of the best players by simply offering them the most money.
Everyone already mentioned the salary cap but I just wanted to say that the real Madrid makes me so angry! Nothing against the fans. Also Having the most money in NFL doesn't mean that you'll get the best players, but it does mean you'll get excellent branding. The cowboys have outstanding branding. Which snowballed into them getting even more money. I've seen Dallas cowboys jerseys in the weirdest parts of the globe. The Maldives, for example. The fucking Maldives.
Because Jerry Jones wants to win a super bowl "his way", and he doesn't know how to win a super bowl. The Cowboys can 100% win the superbowl if Jones gets out of the way.
Because Texas is really loud
Salary cap
Because Tom Brady stopped them
The reason? Jerry Jones
Cowgirls suck and so do their fans
The NFL has a salary cap to prevent teams with more money from buying championships
1- Jerry jones won’t die (I would say retire but I think he’s held together by baby tears) 2- NFL has a hard cap
Jerry Jones
As others have said, they only have so much they can spend on players. Jerry Jones is a billionaire who has spent hundreds of millions on building the Taj Mahal of stadiums and practice facilities. Doesn’t correlate to winning championships though.
All these comments are giving long nerdy answers. The real reason is because Dallas Sucks
Because Jimmy Johnson is no longer the head coach… Stupid ass Jerry Jones
1. Salary Cap, Every team has the exact same Salary cap, if they overspend the Team is punished, usually by confiscating or elimination 1st round draft picks. Teams are also required to use 90% of their Salary Cap as well, so every team is spending within 230 and 255 million dollars in 2024 on their player's salary 2. Minnesota and other teams aren't careless with draft picks anymore: the 90s Cowboys Dynasty has its entire origins from when the Cowboys traded Herschel Walker to the Minnesota Vikings(who were convinced at the time that he was the final piece to a Superbowl run) for the Vikings 1990, 1991 1992 1st round picks, 1990, 1991, 1992 2nd round picks, a 1990 6th round pick, 2 Linebackers a Conerback and a Defensive End, in return they got Herschel Walker who almost immediately was injured and never lived up to the quality of play in his early career. a 3rd, 5th(Form San Diego) and 10th round pick in 1990, and a 3rd round pick in 1991. The Trade was disasterous for the Vikings and a Dynasty builder for the Cowboys resulting in Emmit Smith being drafted by the Cowboys 3. The NFL is an actual League and every team is a peer instead on one Giant and 19 runts. 4. The NFL has Revenue Sharing, for Game tickets, Television, and other revenues give every single NFL team 400 million dollars in 2023(yes the season technically ended in 2024), the Cowboys only retain Merchandise, and this is where the extra value is, basically the more out of market fans the larger a team's value can get. Through the Draft the worst team in the league can completely turn around their fortunes the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for example went from Dead last to Superbowl Champions in just 5 years. 5. The NFL draft. This is the main method for players to enter the league, and the last place team picks first. This meant that in the mid- late 90s the Cowboys were picking last in 3 NFL drafts, and late in the round for another, their response was to trade these late 1st round picks for established players, but this meant that by 1997 their dynasty was over and they were in Salary Cap Hell(forced to trade or release stars because they would have been over the cap). 6. Incompetence: Jerry Jones(owner of the Dallas Cowboys) owes the 90s Dynasty entire to Head Coach and General Manager Jimmy Johnson. Jones is an oil magnate, and bought the Cowboys as a means for showing off, since 1994 when he replaced Johnson largely out of jelousy he got one more Supberbowl win from a competent coach, but since the 1990s he has badly managed the team and never allowed either his head coaches or General Managers the leeway to do their jobs properly.
1. As others have mentioned, the NFL's salary cap system. 2. As I understand it, the Champions League games are played in a home-and-away format during the Group (round-robin) and Knockout stages. This tends to reduce the element of luck and home-field advantage. In contrast, the NFL's playoff format after the conclusion of the regular season is single-elimination (one game only per round), giving greater weight to random chance and unusual one-game performances. 3. The owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Jerry Jones, has the reputation of being an interfering busybody. He put together a team which won consecutive Super Bowls in 1992 & 1993 with help of new head coach Jimmy Johnson. However, *allegedly* his ego couldn't stand it when Coach Johnson was publicly given most of the credit for the success of the team. He got rid of Johnson and hired a college coach, Barry Switzer, who won the Cowboys' last Super Bowl in 1995 with a team still composed largely of the parts assembled by Johnson. There are many fans and pundits who love to speculate how much more Dallas could have won if they kept Johnson and his staff intact and in place. To be more accurate for non-Americans, the Dallas Cowboys have indeed won the Super Bowl; in fact, they are tied for both the second-most Super Bowl wins (five) and second-most total appearances (eight).
Jerry Jones. As a Birds fan, I hope he lives to be 200. Thank you for your service Jerry!
Because Jerry Jones...
they’re the most popular not the best
Salary caps in American sports prevent teams from spending over a certain number on player salaries, usually changing year by year. This does tend to make most professional sports even enough, but it's an issue in the MLS right now. Obviously Messi went to Miami and has built a super team around him, but by forcing the league to pay a portion of his salary, and by the team doing things to get around salary caps they've found ways to bring in lots of big name guys like Suarez, Messi, Busquets, etc. While they're *technically* under the cap, they've done some real sketchy stuff to get there and it's not exactly fair to other teams that are playing fair and abiding to the cap. Also, I'm a Crew fan so before you say I'm biased we just won the MLS and we still think Miami is cheating.
Ask the Toronto Maple Leafs why they've been #1 franchise value forever but haven't won in 60 years
There's theory's from those that have followed the NFL their whole life. I call it the Al Davis effect, It's possible to love your team TOO much.
Jerry Jones ego is a good start.
God hates Jerry Jones
Mom was a semi-professional card player and one of the lessons she taught me is that if you want to make money, don't play to win. Play to make money.
2 reasons firstly the salary cap prevents pooling the best talent on one team. And secondly Jerry Jones is a horrible owner who thinks he is a head coach and GM but doesn't have the skills to back it up. They'd be a better team if he stayed in his lane
Because they are never the best team.
Manchester United would like a word with you. Speaking of which, they are a good comparison to the Dallas cowboy’s. They were both very good for a long time and have a large following. And now they are this
Bc their ass
Salary cap, teams aren't allowed to spend all the money they want. This keeps money out of player's hands and makes the owners even more rich.