Parity or greatness (must read)

Which do you prefer? Soccer and the NFL do it differentlly

The old joke about soccer and American sports is that mild, single-payer Europe somehow gave birth to ruthlessly capitalist sports leagues, while laissez-faire America coughed up socialist ones. In light of the systemic inequalities facing soccer clubs, it might be more apt to say that European leagues are feudal aristocracies—a free-for-all for the lords, not so free for the peasants. American leagues include built-in social mobility: The NFC has sent 10 different teams to the Super Bowl in the last 10 years. Even the Yankees and the Red Sox, the most European-style franchises in American sports, have their dominance checked by Major League Baseball—imagine how mangled they might have left the rest of the league without the luxury tax and the last-place-team-picks-first MLB draft. With no such enforced equality, the only clubs to break into, or even threaten to break into, the ranks of the English soccer dynasties in the last decade are Chelsea and Manchester City, clubs bankrolled, respectively, by a Russian plutocrat and the royal family of a Middle Eastern emirate. For a nouveau riche club to break into the landed gentry, it needs a whole lot of riche.