Tribune. The current economic situation marked by the pandemic Covid-19 crisis reveals to light the structural limits of the economic model of European professional football. However, there are many who have been warning for several years about the conditions of sustainability of this increasingly financialized model.
In March 2020, in some championships, in the heart of the crisis, wage cuts were negotiated, applied, sometimes abandoned, in order to counter the effects of the health crisis. The budget balance of clubs in Europe, already highly unstable, has indeed been put to the test by a contraction in their income under the effect of the restrictive measures introduced by the national public authorities in order to manage the distribution of the club. ‘epidemic.
With clubs dedicating more than 60% of their income to the payroll, activating pay leverage seemed obvious to managers, this solution being discussed again in France given the consequences linked to the withdrawal of Mediapro. Among the range of regulatory mechanisms that can be mobilized, reducing player salaries is the measure most often mentioned to purge professional football of its ills and save it from a bankruptcy announced for several years.
Make football part of a more virtuous model
To legitimize the adoption of such a provision, its supporters generally rely on the supposed effectiveness of the cap on individual club payrolls, which has been in place for several decades in certain major North American leagues. While the transposition of this instrument into European football raises questions of operability (harmonization on a continental scale or control of circumvention strategies), it also raises questions about the sharing of added value in a labor-intensive industry. work in which labor represents the bulk of the factors of production.
Moreover, in the North American leagues, the salary cap is only one part of a broader and extremely restrictive regulation aimed essentially at balancing the allocation of talent between the clubs. Finally, any desire to set itself the goal of placing football in a more virtuous model by means of a reduction in salaries comes up against a major obstacle: the market power of the big clubs, which are not ready to accept. a ceiling which would strongly constrain them.
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