While those who follow Spanish football know that La Liga is made up of 20 teams all throughout different regions of Spain, they might not know the origins of the league's existence and how it came to be today.
In April, 1927 the director of a Spanish football club, Jose Maria Acha, initiated the idea of a Spanish national league. Ten teams were decided upon in 1929 to make up the first Primera Division. Of the ten original teams, only Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Athletic Bilbao have yet to be relegated. Barcelona and Real Madrid each won titles in the early years; however Athletic Bilbao was the clear power-house at first, reaching the finals of the Primera Divison six times and winning four times in the first eight years.
La Liga was suspended during the Spanish Civil War, but it came back once the war had ended and continued as it had been before. FC Barcelona had a period of dominance from the late 1940’s through the early 1950’s and Real Madrid had a great deal of success starting in the mid-1950’s and continuing on all the way through 1980. Real Madrid won an unprecedented 14 times from 1961-1980 and then continued their dominance in the late 1980’s, winning five in a row.
FC Barcelona won four in a row in the early 1990’s, and in the past decade, they have advanced to the same level as Real Madrid. Many people today view La Liga as FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, and then everyone else. And in terms of both finances and on-field success, it truly is a league dominated by two. The question now is just how long will these two teams continue to dominate La Liga, and is it inevitable that a third or fourth team will enter the mix as elite clubs in the next decade or two.
Looking at the history of La Liga clearly indicates that Real Madrid and FC Barcelona have been at the top tier for most of, if not all of, the league’s existence. Is it good for a league to have one or two teams consistently winning decade after decade while the other teams simply hope to have a successful year here and there? Or would the league be better off being more competitively balanced? Even if you think it would be better off for the league as a whole to avoid teams monopolizing the success, how to go about doing this raises another question: should a salary cap be implemented?
I think La Liga does need to be more competitively balanced, but that being said there is no great way to do it. In my opinion, spreading TV revenue would be a decent start. However, a salary cap seems impractical since Madrid and Barcelona would immediately need to sell their players to fall underneath the cap. They would be very unlikely to do this, and a decision to implement a salary cap would lead to Madrid and Barca breaking away from the league in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteHistory would suggest that even though Barcelona and Madrid have always been upper-level teams, other teams will be able to float to the top of the league every few years. My question is, is this a thing of the past, when salaries for the elite players weren't nearly as outrageous as they have become today?
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