How Neymar's transfer changed football forever

[devoted_dm]

https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/foot...14788.html

Much has been made in these pages of how one of the greater motivations of the Neymar deal was “shorting the market” because PSG’s owners knew, in the long run, only a handful of clubs would be able to compete if fees and wages were forced up. One connected source has told The Independent there was another element to this. It was the calculation that a lot of other clubs “would try and keep up but bankrupt themselves in the process”.

Plenty of food for thought here. I'll be honest, to me a lot of football's charm is gone. European club football has become this hyper-commercial entertainment machine with just a handful of clubs actually having the resources to win anything. For example, to me Juve's 9 scudetti in a row aren't that impressive. In my eyes, what the last decade in Serie A reflects is a lack of competition, not Juventus having this absolutely amazing, once-in-a-lifetime level team. Ancelotti's Milan would likely have been even more dominant, had they faced similar competition. Mourinho's Inter would have beaten them too. And now we're at this point where even Barca and Real might not be able to compete in Europe anymore, having lost out against Man City and PSG's oil money. I despair at the thought of where this game will be in 10 years from now, unless there is some kind of revolution.

[reza]

That's a lot of food for thought. The big clubs talk a lot of unity when they deal with UEFA when asking for CL money for example but they destroyed themselves, in order to win big teams spent forcing others to spend more too. The rest of article points to some self created problems though, the teams created galacticos phenomenon not the players, which meant many teams went into debt 'willingly' and now they want anybody but themselves to fix it, like tax laws for example.
There is no solution that will help...well there is one but it will never happen: salary cap.

[devoted_dm]

That's a lot of food for thought. The big clubs talk a lot of unity when they deal with UEFA when asking for CL money for example but they destroyed themselves, in order to win big teams spent forcing others to spend more too. The rest of article points to some self created problems though, the teams created galacticos phenomenon not the players, which meant many teams went into debt 'willingly' and now they want anybody but themselves to fix it, like tax laws for example.
There is no solution that will help...well there is one but it will never happen: salary cap.

True. I think a cap on salaries and transfer fees would be the right way to go, but it's unlikely to happen. In this perspective it's hard to really disagree with what Milan is doing these days in terms of transfers and salaries. I think it's the way forward for pretty much all clubs that aren't Man City or PSG.