La Liga is is the common name for the Primera Division within La Liga Nacional de Futbol Profesional. As the top division under the Spanish football league system, La Liga creates passion and emotion for football fans throughout Spain. La Liga has twenty participating teams which are able to play up or down through the internal division system. The top two teams of the division B will rise to then play in the division A, while the third team is decided on a playoff game. Conversely, the three worst teams in division A drop down to B. This depends solely on the competitive win-loss record at the end of each season. Due to this oscillating division participants list, 59 different teams have played within La Liga. This alone creates an elite aura about the league contributing to its widespread popularity and competitiveness of the teams. Teams such as Real Madrid and Barcelona are continually successful within the system of La Liga, ever increasing the popularity around the globe.
Seasons consist of a double round robin schedule where each team plays competitors both home and away. This gives credibility to teams that win both at home and on the road. The season lasts from September to June, while each team plays a total of 38 games. This system that helps dominant teams stay in La Liga can be quickly questioned as certain teams are able to buy out the best players, shutting out competition from smaller clubs and markets. Is this competitively moral? Should each team have a salary cap in which they must operate under? With the current governance, the wonderful divisional system on La Liga is tarnished by the uncompetitive lack of fairness between team expenditures. How long will the current league set up last if the ever increasing gap between clubs becomes to big? If one thing helps back up a change, it is the grotesque salaries that players make in which lower tier clubs cannot compete.
Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Liga#Competition_format ; http://www.onbeingablacklawyer.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/gavel.jpg
I think that the salary cap would greatly diminish the growing gap between teams like Barcelona and Madrid and the rest of La Liga, and it would make for a more competitive league. I think this would be good for the league because going into the season, there would be more than just a small handful of teams who truly had a chance to win the league that year. Better competition leads to more fan interest which leads to a more successful league. On the flip side however, this season in Major League Baseball, which also runs without a salary cap, only two teams of the top nine highest payrolls made the playoffs, and both these teams got knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. This suggests that teams should be able to find ways to win despite being at an economic disadvantage.
ReplyDeleteThis may be true, but trying to place a salary cap on an already established league would be very difficult. The salary cap would immediately force Madrid and Barcelona to sell a lot of their players. Even more importantly, if this was imposed it would be likely that Madrid and Barcelona would break off into a "Super League."
ReplyDeleteMaybe you could have a salary cap that didn't come into effect until, for example, 2020. If you implement it now but don't have it take effect for another decade or so, then teams would have plenty of time to plan for the future and get under the cap, without having to sell all their current players right away.
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