Lessons the Premier League can learn from the NBA

by John Naldrett

Another season goes by and yet again we have a familiar situation at the top, as well as the bottom of the Premier League.

Manchester United and Chelsea are battling it out for the league title, whilst recently promoted Hull and Burnley have been relegated along with penniless Portsmouth

So why is there this sense of déjà vu?

It is because the Premier League is unfair.

It’s unfair that Premier League teams receive so much more television money than lower league teams.

It’s unfair that lesser teams in both the Premier League and lower leagues lose their best young players to the biggest Premier League teams.

It’s unfair that wealthy billionaires are allowed to pump money into the likes of Chelsea and Manchester City giving them the opportunity to make mercenaries of the best players in the world.

You hear your friends complaining about all of these things, especially those who support struggling Premier League teams and lower league teams.

New rules?

Well, how about we apply new rules where there are no transfer fees, no youth academies, a wage cap and a system that intrinsically keeps the league competitive and fair, from top to bottom, with no monopolising like we have seen with the emergence of the big four.

If you haven't realised yet, this is how the trade and draft systems work in NBA basketball.

It has to be said, socialist systems are not something that you would commonly associate with the staunchly capitalist American corporations but this is a system that is truly fair and keeps the league close and competitive, year after year.

It has its drawbacks, though.

UK football fans would bemoan the fact that there is no promotion or relegation, to or from the NBA, and only one league with no punishment for finishing bottom other than humiliation. To be fair, it's a process that's worked for 60 years.

There are 30 teams competing at the top level and it is readily accepted that it stays that way.

A similar system is applied to the NFL American football. Wage caps are placed on all teams, they trade players and select promising youngsters from a draft lottery.

How could it work?

Let's put the draft system into a footballing context - using the examples of Cesc Fabregas and Wayne Rooney - and imagine what might have happened if they had come through a fictional draft system to reach the Premier league.

They are two of the top players in the league, who turned professional at roughly the same time (around 2003) and play for Arsenal and Manchester united respectively.

Let's go back to 2003 and imagine that they didn't play for the Barcelona and Everton youth academies respectively because academies didn't exist within a draft system.

Instead they play for their college or university (they would be there on footballing merit, not academic merit) in a highly competitive, high profile, televised league of all the other colleges or universities in their countries.

As standout players at college level, they enter the Premier League draft in the summer of 2003.

Now here is where it gets interesting and a little complicated.

For the sake of the argument, we will take into account promotion and relegation.

The seventeen teams who avoided relegation from the Premiership and the three promoted Championship teams are then part of a lottery in which they are allocated 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th (etc) picks from a pool of players who have put themselves forward for the draft that summer, including Fabregas and Rooney.

The lottery is heavily weighted so that the teams that finished lowest (or in this case the promoted teams from the championship) are more likely to get the highest picks.

The teams that finished 16th and 17th that previous season and the three promoted championship teams were Aston Villa (16th), Bolton (17th), Portsmouth (1st), Leicester (2nd) and Wolves (Play offs) which means that two of those five teams would a lmost certainly get Fabregas or Rooney assuming that the two of them would be amongst the top players available having built up a reputation during their college careers.

No merry-go-round

To demonstrate how the trade system would work within the English Premiership, lets say that Wolves drafted Wayne Rooney with the first pick of the 2003 Premiership draft.

If Manchester United wanted Rooney, rather than pay a fee, they would have to trade a player of similar quality (e.g. Ruud Van Nistlerooy who played for United at the time) or a number of players of lesser quality (e.g Phil Neville, Diego Forlan and Wes Brown) and/or future draft picks depending on what the needs of both teams are and whether the players agree to swap clubs.

Which means that if teams who finish lower in the league are savvy, they should get a fair deal when losing their best players and the likes of Manchester United and Chelsea are unable to hog all of the top players to themselves.

Rather than the merry-go-round of players coming in and out of clubs that we have today, managers would be encouraged to persevere with the players that they have.

There would be no 'rich get richer, poor get poorer' going on as there is at the moment.

There would be a far closer gap between the top and the bottom of the league because the talent would be spread across the teams more equally and we could witness the excitement of top young players attempting to improve the fortunes of failing teams.

All luxuries that NBA fans can enjoy season after season.

Already firmly established, of course, this system might prove to be impossible to implement now, but food for thought nonetheless.

The club academies are a firmly established part of the game and for this system to work, promotion and relegation would have to stop, if not to and from the championship, at some point down the leagues which would be unfair to the teams in the league that misses out.

The huge debts that the likes of Portsmouth find themselves in, can only really be repaid by the sale of players and I'm sure that they preferred the £20 million that they received from the sale of Lassana Diarra to Real Madrid in January 2009 to any trade deal that they would have to make within the NBA system, even if it did mean Raul trotting about at Fratton Park.

However, it cannot be denied that if the founders of the football league, many years ago, had created a structure for our beautiful game, similar to the one that we see successfully functioning in the NBA, the hardened and disgruntled fans who bemoan the state of football on a daily basis, might just have been satisfied.