If you, tomorrow, cut the amount that ACFC and Waitakere spent by 25% how would that improve the league?
But it would never be implemented in the simplistic way you’ve described. For starters, you would give every team the same expenditure budget, not arbitrarily cut a % from the top two. I also think it would work best married up with a mechanism to centralise the acquisition of grant funding for the entire league. And you’re dead right - another franchise or two in Auckland would do a lot to rebalance the talent in a way that doesn’t place unreasonable expectations on players to move. That’s a great example of where an expenditure cap would be valuable - by stopping an inflationary bidding war in Auckland using pokie money.
Sure, the implementation requires some thought but the principle remains very simple. Like every other salary-capped league in the world by giving everyone roughly the same amount to spend you level the playing field and create a more competitive, interesting and engaging competition. But yes, it would not work in isolation (although I don’t think I’ve ever argued for that).
If ACFC and Waitakere were actually generating any significant revenues of their own (gate receipts, commercial sponsorships etc) I might even have a different view. But the fact is they aren’t. Our national league is largely funded by pokie money, which creates all sorts of issues. One of the biggest ones is that it is grossly distorting the competitiveness of the league. The ability to attract pokie money simply should not be a factor in whether a team is successful or not in our national football league, and yet it is probably the single biggest factor. It’s ludicrous! If we have to have pokie money in the sport then we should at least make sure it is used equitably.
Quoting you from the other thread.
You say pokie machine grants are the major factor in competitiveness between the teams. That's patently wrong. The difference is that Auckland is a city of 1.3mn people and Dunedin is a city of 60,000 people, and when you look at the best 30 players in Auckland and the best 15 players in Dunedin, surprise surprise Auckland comes up with a lot better football teams. This is not new! You could remove all funding from the league tomorrow and that would be true. The amount teams are spending on payroll is a factor in getting some imports and maybe one or two players. It does not determine the quality of the bulk of the players who play for Auckland or Otago - that quality is based on the local players in those leagues.
If the league was more equal in spend, how would you improve Otago? You can't give them money. You can take away money from Waitak and that may affect their squad to some extent but it doesn't change the fact that the player base is just completely different. Players are not going to move to Dunedin for 14 matches and some lunch money even if you could suddenly give Otago an extra 50k to spend on players, which is impossible anyway.
Seriously, you need to have a think about this because you're spending a lot of time writing and there's a major non sequitur at the heart of your argument