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The Premier League's competitive balance built its reputation - could it cope without it?

Liverpool players in dejection end of the English Premier League soccer match between Aston Villa and Liverpool - AP
Liverpool players in dejection end of the English Premier League soccer match between Aston Villa and Liverpool - AP

Any Given Sunday is the motto of the richest league in the world – which, despite the Premier League’s stunning advances, remains the NFL.

In 1962, NFL owners met to discuss how to allocate broadcasting revenue. Because of their bigger local market, the New York Giants received five times more than some franchises. Yet the Giants agreed that “the NFL was only as strong as its weakest link,” and that all teams should receive the same. The agreement underpinned the NFL’s ascent, ensuring a fundamental level of uncertainty in every game.

European football is structured very differently to US sports. And yet, among the continent’s big five sports, the distribution of cash in the Premier League has come closest to emulating the principles of US leagues.

The technical detail at the heart of this is the ratio between how much the top and bottom teams earn from the league. In the Premier League, despite the biggest successfully pushing for a greater share of overseas broadcasting revenue from 2019, this ratio is capped at a maximum of 1.7:1. But in Serie A, the ratio is 2.3:1, and it is over 3:1 in La Liga, Ligue 1 and Bundesliga, research by Alex Bond from Leeds Beckett University has found.

These numbers provide the best single explanation for why the Premier League is comparatively unpredictable, with a depth of competition the envy of its rivals. Since 2009, the Premier League has only been successfully defended once; seven different English sides have reached the Champions League quarter-finals, two more than from any other European country. All the while other major leagues have stratified to the point of tedium. In La Liga, only one team has broken the Barcelona-Real Madrid duopoly since 2004. PSG have won six of the last seven Ligue 1 titles, Bayern Munich eight consecutive Bundesligas and Juventus nine consecutive Serie A crowns.

These leagues have served as case studies for how, as the US economist Walter Neale observed, “pure monopoly is disaster”: teams need competition.

For all the angst about the advantages enjoyed by the league’s behemoths, at least the Premier League has a Big Six, not a Big One or Two. “It is certainly a competitive advantage for the Premier League to regularly have several – at least two or three – title contenders each season,” believes Prof Tim Pawlowski from the University of Tubingen in Germany.

Revealingly, continental rivals have actually tinkered the way they divvy up their cash to be more like the Premier League in recent years. Since 2009, Uefa has found, TV revenues have generally become more evenly distributed in leagues across the continent. La Liga’s reforms, president Javier Tebas explained in 2014, were to create a “more equitable distribution” of revenue based upon the “English model”.

This English model now risks being abandoned. Project Big Picture would shatter the relative egalitarianism of the current revenue distribution model, turning the Premier League from one of Europe’s most equitable leagues to one of the least. The proposals would upend the way cash is handed out, allowing the ratio between the league’s top and bottom earners to increase from 1.7:1 to 4:1.

All of this would be particularly deleterious for newly promoted clubs whose incomes would fall by more than half, from in the region of £100 million to £40 million by 2025-26. The upshot would be to put up a roadblock against upstarts emulating the success of Leicester City and Wolves since they left the Championship behind.

How much these changes would impact viewing figures is unclear. Research on competitive balance in sport generally finds that leagues can withstand huge imbalances, with most interest driven by the popularity of individual teams themselves; in any case reducing the Premier League to 18 clubs would also remove the two least competitive teams.

Yet more predictable Premier League matches have proved less captivating to viewers. A study from Adam Cox of Portsmouth Business School found that, for every extra 10 per cent chance that one team has of winning a Premier League match, the domestic TV audience falls 2.4 per cent, or 25,000. The same has been observed abroad, with German viewers for Premier League games rising when games are more uncertain.

Whatever the impact on TV ratings, how the reforms would change the league’s character is altogether clearer. Matches would become more predictable, scorelines of the ilk of the start of this season scarcer. And one of the Premier League’s greatest claims – how it comes closer than any of its European rivals to matching the NFL’s ‘Any Given Sunday’ mantra – would be undermined, perhaps for ever.