Within the great majority of American sports you have the very prudent and sensible Salary Cap rule. It means no owner can goose the system by piling an imperial ton of readies into their respective team, walking away with the MLS Cup / Super Bowl / Stanley Cup on a regular basis.
Within football, or at least within the Premier League, no such arrangement exists. Sure, you have Michel Platini’s half-assed attempt at Financial Fair Play, but the bottom line is this: if you have the wherewithal to pump enough cash into your team to choke a dozen donkeys for every hour of the day, seven days a week, you’re more than welcome to do so. You could end up winning the Champions League (see: FC, Chelsea), or you could go bust (see: United, Leeds). Either way, it’s Bentleys all round for players' agents.
But just imagine for a second if the Premier League did have a Salary Cap, set at a suitably low level so that all teams were, by and large, competing on a financially even playing field. Who would have won the 2014/15 EPL under that scenario?
While we fully appreciate there are myriad other criteria that attract players to clubs - its history, manager, location and brand to name just a few - The18 decided to take a look at this season’s Premier League table through the cold, hard light of a cash-constructed prism: which team, over the course of the season, delivered the most points per pound spent on wages?
We've taken our wage bills from these numbers calculated by totalsportek.com, who extrapolated the figures from each club's 2012, 2013 and 2014 report and accounts. As you can see from the graphic below, the winner of the 2014-15 Barclays Premier League on a points per £1 million spent basis is startling:
Congratulations to Sean Dyche and Burnley FC. Despite being relegated from the Premier League proper, on a points per pound basis they absolutely pummelled the opposition, earning fully 1.53 points per £1 million spent on wages. That’s 1.08 more points per £1 million spent than EPL champions Chelsea, and a whopping 1.22 more points per pound than the positively profligate Manchester United. For the record, Burnley also notched up more goals for their money, spending just £770,000 per goal scored, compared to the £3.48 million spent by United for each of their 62 strikes.
Of course, what this little exercise proves more than anything is that teams have to spend enormous amounts of money to climb the Premier League’s greasy pole: this year’s top six finishers comfortably outspent the rest of the league combined on player wages.
A salary cap would only work if it was implemented universally throughout football’s elite leagues. If the Premier League or La Liga implemented such a policy in isolation, all the best players would simply migrate to whichever league was prepared to let teams spend however much they wished.
Nevertheless, in theory at least, a salary cap would certainly make for a very interesting and different Premier League season than the one we’ve just witnessed. One that would, perhaps, have resulted in a much closer, more entertaining run-in.
We’re sure Sean Dyche would agree.
