The trick there is those clubs are run with league-mandated salary caps, not a self-imposed club wage structure.Dan_85 wrote:There are few things I give less of a fuck about than the Colorado Rapids, NFL & NHL yet here we are having to discuss them & look at how they're run in order to try to guess what the future of our club will be like.
In other words while they are run more like we were in the past when we we had a wage bill of 64 Million GBP but tow players on over 90 or 100K a week as opposed to now where oour wage bill is closer to 120K but our top earner would only have been a thrid higest earner before 2004.
HOWEVER the salary caps our fairly strict and rigid. That is to say that generally to sign a big player you must let a simlar wage earner go. The result is that unlesseveral top players go you cannot add other top players unless they are willing to take pay cuts.
It's why you will read of certain teams stars re-structuring contracts to make more money to add better players available in American sports, though they ususally don't do this until they have made some of the really big money.
But you can't just look at the performance of the American teams and say with certainty either way that is how Arsenal would be run or perform becayuse there are different rules in place here.
One clue look at the number of League winners in each American league compared to English Premiership because that is where you will see the drastic difference that suggests you can't just assume anything from that.
Remember four have won the Premier League since 1992, and six have finished second, and foru of them also won the League in that time so basically you have six teams finshing in the top two since 1992.
In the NFL you have 23 teams finishing in the top two in that time
In the NBA you have 18 teams finishing in the top two in that time
In the NHL you have 24 teams finishing in the top two in that time
Again 6 in the Premier League, against 23 in the NFL, 18 in the NBA, 24 in the NHL with well-established salary caps for all clubs in those leagues, so just counting the number fo trophies here is not as cut-and-dry as some think. We need to keep that in mind here.