It’s almost as if capitalist billionaire sports team owners in the US believe that doing everything possible to ensure all parties have equal chances at success is worthwhile and benefits the whole system, and conversely, that allowing completely unrestrained economic competition would lead to ruin. 🤔
Revenue sharing is a business tool used by North American professional sports leagues to redistribute revenues from wealthy large-market clubs to less wealthy small-market clubs.
In professional sports, a salary cap (or wage cap) is an agreement or rule that places a limit on the amount of money that a team can spend on players’ salaries. It exists as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team’s roster, or both.
A draft is a process used in some countries (especially in North America) and sports (especially in closed leagues) to allocate certain players to teams. In a draft, teams take turns selecting from a pool of eligible players.
To encourage parity, teams that do poorly in the previous season usually get to choose first in the postseason draft, sometimes with a “lottery” factor in an attempt to discourage teams from tanking.
Promotion and relegation is used by sports leagues as a process where teams can move up and down among divisions in a league system, based on their performance over a season.
An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises. This maintains the same teams from year to year, with occasional admission of expansion teams and relocation of existing teams, and with no team movement between the major league and minor leagues.
This is also true of large corporations in general, in the US. Tax breaks, loopholes, and similar everywhere – if you’re rich enough. Privatized profits, but socialized losses.
Absolutely! Those corporations also love hobbling or getting rid of any honest competition through mergers, acquisitions, regulatory capture, non-compete agreements, and endless other mechanisms.