[Matty81]

I tend to agree as I feel like the NHL salary cap and draft system is sad without any lasting competitive reward for success, everybody gets a turn to win soulless smoke and mirror show to momentarily distract simpletons from their D2D. No connection to the community and no meritocracy. The natural advantages of having more fans attend your games, making good decisions on and off the pitch and having a bigger domestic support needs to stay.

But I think the financial gaps right now are becoming a real concern and even more magnified due to the financial doping you referenced Locke and maybe it should be toned down a little. The doping needs to be addressed first and foremost, but also because of the global appeal of the product and lemming/bandwagon fan effect the gap is becoming unnaturally magnified due to a sort of globalization effect.

You go on social media these days and if you support a smaller club even your own club's social media posts are infested with reams of toxic, intolerable big six club fans spewing bile from NA, africa, the mideast, asia, etc and I think that also reflects that the growing commercial might of the big teams is being amplified and the gap to compete with them is getting even wider.

The more those teams win in a global environment the more they can strangle the competition because most of those fans without a local team or geographic tether within England will just choose a big team due to the glory hound principle, you don't have any way to access that group of fans as a smaller club like you do with locals. You end up with those clubs being able to do 20-50 million dollar preasons tours and having massive merch revenues. It's like a snowball rolling down hill as they win more and more, and the appeal of the prem is the history and differences between the clubs, but also the competitiveness, when the smaller clubs turn into jokes you get leagues like Spain and Italy that become way less interesting as much as I am sure that is satisfying for the big club fans who sometimes seem that they feel entitled to win.

I think a soft cap, potentially on salaries, but definitely on commercial revenues counting as part of the financial fair play equation is needed. Or maybe even more radically, any non-domestic generated revenues should be pooled and distributed throughout the pyramid. A cap would reduce the risk of fake sponsorships by the state owned teams and level the playing field ever so slightly in a good way without sanitizing the product too much. Big clubs will still be way bigger and better, success and good investment is rewarded, but you need an occasional Leicester and Wigan story every 2-3 years to keep the product compelling and to give fans of the Norwich, WBA and Watfords of the world some degree of hope to keep coming out or the support for those clubs is going to dry up like you're seeing in leagues like Scotland.