How the NFL creates equal opportunities

aHe tells about James Arthur Haslam, who everyone calls “Jimmy”, who has $ 2.9 billion. This is around 2.4 billion euros, a fortune that makes you influential and powerful – with which many dreams can come true. But you cannot buy everything with money. Neither in the United States nor in the National Football League (NFL). It restricts the use of huge sums of money such as that invested by the sheikhs, oligarchs, and others in major soccer tournaments around the world. There is a system behind this, too, in other US sports leagues. This is a good thing.

Businessman Hassan, whose brother Bill was governor of Tennessee from 2011 to 2019, owns the Cleveland Browns, a soccer team that has slid the length of the field for the past several decades, most of which have been on the verge of banality. However, Brown’s team and owner, who also owns Major League Soccer club Columbus Crewe, had a dream this year: They qualified for the playoff matches. For the first time in nearly two decades. Cleveland plays in the Super Bowl, the annual NFL Championship Final. This sounds implausible, but it can be explained. Because in the NFL, the principle of equal opportunity applies.

Common roof

All teams must adhere to a common salary cap. No transfer fee may be paid when changing players. The best young players are awarded, for the teams with their squads of 53 players, a central resource in this sport, which is characterized by frequent injuries, according to a strictly organized distribution key. Simply put, the principle works like this: The worst pre-season team is allowed to help itself first, and thus (mostly) receive the greatest talent of the year. All this means that any franchise can go from bottom to top in just a few years, provided that management and well-trained personnel operate consistently. This is what happened with the Cleveland Browns family.

In System NFL, almost anyone can beat anyone, in every match and every season. Decades of strains are undesirable and rarely occurring. In light of the balance of power getting more and more solidified, for example in international football, this is definitely refreshing.