When the list of 23 finalists for this year's Ballon d'Or was released last month, it "included six players from German club Bayern Munich," according to Kevin Baxter of the L.A. TIMES. That is "one more player-of-the-year candidate than all 20 teams of the English Premier League contributed." Add in the English national team, which slipped 13 spots in the FIFA world rankings between February and September, and "lost consecutive home matches for the first time in 36 years this month, and it's hard not to wonder whether the sun is setting on the British" football empire. Fox football analyst Warren Barton said, "The German league's getting stronger. The Spanish league as well. The quality players are now spreading out." But while the top individual talent "may be concentrated in four teams" -- 13 of the 23 Ballon d'Or nominees play for Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Real Madrid or Barcelona -- the most compelling football "is still played in England, where parity has made upsets common." Much of that parity "stems from the way the EPL distributes its TV money, with each club getting an equal share of foreign broadcast fees while the revenue for domestic rights are divided based on where a team finishes in the standings and how many of its games are televised." Last season no EPL team got more than $21.7M from TV while no club got less than $9.3M.
Compare that to La Liga, where teams "can cut their own TV deals, a policy that, two seasons ago, allowed Real Madrid to bank broadcast earnings 10-plus times greater than what league rival Granada earned." But there is another factor driving parity in English football, and it is "having a detrimental impact on the country's national team: Domestic players have accounted for less than a third of the minutes played in the EPL this season, with imported players squeezing out young, developing talent."
Meanwhile homegrown players account for 50% to 60% of the playing time in La Liga and the Bundesliga.
The disparity has led FA Chair Greg Dyke "to suggest some radical reforms, including a cap on the number of foreigners on EPL rosters" (L.A. TIMES, 11/23).
