Jamie Carragher

Recently, in an interview with Sky Sports, Jamie Carragher came out as a proponent of a wage cap in the premier league. Of course he hopes the cap will come after he’s gone.

“I hope he (Triesman) brings it in when I’ve just finished!

The knee jerk reaction from high profile players would be that they are against anything that could lead to them making less money. It’s a common problem we all have when we see a problem. We say, “Yeah, that needs to be fixed, but at no cost to me.”

How much money do you really need to play football? I think some of the founders of the sport would look at players today and just shake their heads. A helicopter and a Bentley does not a footballer make.

The opposition to the salary cap plan says that talent would go elsewhere. I say that’s true, for a while at least. The BPL is the leading league in Europe, which by default makes them the leading league in the world. Any standard that the BPL sets will more than likely be followed by other countries. Countries like Spain and Italy might really want to implement a cap, but know that if they do, the players will just goto England.

The main issue here is that the clubs other than the big 4 are having a hard time getting by and staying in the league because of the amount of money they have to shell out on talent. Hell, even Liverpool and Arsenal have trouble finding funds and it’s only a matter of time before Sir Alex pisses off the media to the point that they’re not selling enough merchandise to make the mortgage.

In a business, there’s only so many things you can control, the other are fixed costs. You have to have so much electricity going to the stadium, so much water, so much money allocated for taxes. Wages are one of the few variables that you can adjust to keep your business afloat. When your star players are making £150,000 a week and you’re trying to figure out how you’re going to avoid bankruptcy, something is terribly wrong. You could say, “well, don’t buy those players and then you don’t have to worry about paying them,” but then you run the risk of being demoted which is even more costlier.

The cost of football in England has reached a point where top clubs have to throw money at a team unconditionally. That much is demanded by the players and the fans. The players want to be able to retire after a month if they get injured and the fans want the best players for their team to win trophies. There’s only so many Roman Abramovich’s in the world that will throw money at a club without the hope of every recouping it. Even Arab investors tend to have 5-10 year plans to flip the clubs they invest in. I think they’ll be in for a shock when they try to get rid of those clubs.

If England leads the way, I believe the rest of Europe will follow and the state of football will be a better place. Again, I hate to bring up my Red blood, but such a place where players accept less money to play for a great club does exist. Make the players play the game instead of playing us.