Another consideration is that basketball is much easier to "rig" than soccer because the court is smaller, single players can dominate possession through ball hogging, screens and iso offenses. That's just not possible in soccer where you have to basically manipulate the space of a 120 x 90 yard playing surface through coordinated movement and timing, so the amount of pieces you have to buy to have an elite NBA team is much smaller. You can get three guys and dominate, as opposed to 7 or 8 elite players and 6 solid contributors.
While it's true that some sheik or oligarch could buy Charlotte from MJ and turn them into a juggernaut by sheer monetary investment, it would still be much, much harder in the NBA because you can't just purchase contracts. You have to draft, wait for FA's to hit the market or make a trade. You can't just buy Sergio Aguero from Atletico Madrid, David Silva from Villareal, etc and roll to a title. That's only viable because the sport has a half dozen relevant leagues and hundreds of other feeder leagues funneling thousands of pro players to 12 or so huge clubs. If the NBA was just constantly pillaging other NBA teams' rosters there would be chaos. That actually sounds fun.themiddle54 wrote:In the EPL, Chelsea and Man City used to be doormats. They got billionaire owners who started buying every piece of talent in sight. Now they're perennial contenders who have won lots of hardware the past decade or so. The lack of a salary cap there has brought more competition to the EPL, and it's not just ManCity and Arsenal and Liverpool anymore. While the glamour of La Liga's two biggest clubs tilts that league, the billions that went into the EPL in a cap-free system has made that league more competitive.
Another factor is that the NBA is still very market-oriented. Geography and culture play into it much more.
If I'm a hot up and coming teenager at a big club like Christian Pulisic, and I want to grow a gigantic personal brand, I can play for basically a dozen team in 5 countries to do that, whereas in the NBA, there's still a perception that individual market matters. Players want to be in LA, NY, Miami and now SF.
Basically, my overall point to Tim was that I don't think abolishing the salary cap does anything for a team like Charlotte. Even if they did, the chances that a team in Charlotte would have the owner that wanted to outspend their revenue like crazy to field an elite team in the hope that merch and out-of-market fan share would increase along with on-court success is very low. Owners like that would be attracted to bigger, more glamorous markets. To use your examples, Chelsea is in London. City is in Manchester. PSG is in Paris. They're not in the equivalent of Charlotte or Memphis. They're in the sexy spots where people want to live for cultural reasons. If we opened the market, I firmly believe the playing field would be even more heavily tilted to the big markets because that's where the owners with money would want to be. At least now small market teams have the chance to hit the lottery on players like Anthony Davis. NOLA is great, but it ain't exactly a big market.
