The Transfer System is Screwed, So is it Time For a British Draft?

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

The transfer market is fucking mental. You know it, I know it, and Wenger knows it. FIFPro know it too – that's why they have launched a complaint to FIFA claiming that the current system is "anti-competitive, unjustified and illegal".

With teams increasingly making a mockery of Financial Fair Play, it's easy to feel a bit disillusioned with it all and yearn for the simpler times we lived in before Sky invented football way back in 1992.

These days, football possesses the kind of inconvenient truth that Al Gore makes films about: namely, that money can buy you success. Man City, Chelsea and PSG are all recent beneficiaries of dubiously acquired foreign wealth and they have the trophies to go along with it. It's pretty simple, really: Get Rich And Win Trophies. Although a shout-out must go to Brendan Rodgers, who has spent nearly £300m at Liverpool but is yet to achieve any notable success in his tenure. Every rule must have an exception.

The uneven distribution of wealth doesn't just affect things on a domestic level: it also takes prisoners internationally. The astronomical TV deals that the Premier League has struck mean that the league's also-rans are now a more attractive proposition than their European counterparts. Dimitri Payet's move from potential French title challengers, Marseille, to perennial mid table dwellers West Ham is a case in point (sure, they're currently flying high in third, but they will find their way back to a comfy 10th).

Similarly, former heavyweights Ajax are now a mere feeder club to any of the big boys – big boys like Southampton and Stoke – willing to take a punt on the famously hit and miss strike rate of Eredivisie talent. The transfer market is a capitalist behemoth where the biggest bidder almost always wins.

Across the pond, transfer dealings are done very differently. In a nutshell, the draft system is a process whereby teams can select new players who are eligible to play in the league, whether that be straight from high school or college. To ensure a level playing field, the team that did worst the season before is given the first pick from the new emerging talent, progressing upwards until whoever won the Super Bowl/Stanley Cup/World Series is given the last pick.

This is done to encourage parity, competitiveness and to fight against any stockpiling of talent in one team such as Chelsea's 900 players currently out on loan. For the country that spawned McCarthyism, was embroiled in the Cold War and brought you Rush Limbaugh, this all sounds suspiciously socialist. It's all a far cry from the free market capitalism that America prides itself on.

And this system is yielding much more competitive leagues. The past 10 seasons have seen nine different Super Bowl winners, six winners of the NBA Championship, seven different World Series winners, and seven Stanley Cup winners. In the same time period, the Premier League has produced just three different winners, two of which were the nouveau riche powers of Chelsea and Man City. Although traditionally Britain is to the left of America, we are perhaps the biggest proponents and beneficiaries of modern football and its capitalist ways.

America's own soccerball league, the MLS, also uses a draft system, but it underpins the sport to a much lesser extent. Although some notable examples have come through it (Clint Dempsey, Jozy Altidore and Michael Bradley to name but a few) many MLS franchises have started sidestepping the SuperDraft and creating their own youth academies to poach talent at a younger age so as not be at the mercy of the draft lottery; Tim Howard and Landon Donovan, for example, both avoided the draft.

If MLS teams are ever going to rival Europe's heavyweights (stop sniggering) then relying purely on homegrown talent and ageing apathetic stars is not going to get them their fast – or at all. Such patience isn't considered a virtue by super-rich and super-new New York City, who have primarily focused on setting up their own youth system and signing perhaps the slowest central midfield partnership in history in Andrea Pirlo and Frank Lampard. As part of the mega-wealthy group of clubs owned by Sheikh Mansour, they are unwilling to embrace a draft system that hinders more than it helps; after all, why would a billionaire play the lottery?

Football and the draft are uneasy bedfellows and there are multiple reasons why it couldn't be implemented in the Premier League without massive and potentially destructive overhaul. For starters, we haven't followed the grand old American tradition of exclusively playing sports that the rest of the world doesn't play or understand. Although picking exclusively from an English talent pool every season could potentially improve our chances internationally, it would more than likely result in a sharp dovetail in the quality of the league. That paired with the lack of college infrastructure, the complications of promotion and relegation being added into the mix and the fact that footballers mature younger and need to be nurtured differently all make the introduction of the draft system near impossible.

In addition to this, football wouldn't suddenly become a glorious socialist utopia either. The 'why don't nurses earn the same as footballers?' parade are unlikely to be appeased, as astronomical wages across the sports are pretty much even. FSG, the owners of both the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool, have a near identical wage bill for both clubs, while Anthony Davis recently signed the biggest contract in NBA history for a reported $145 million. Although salary caps have been introduced, a negative byproduct is a huge disparity in wages inside the team and the tendency to offload veteran fan favourites as soon as their skills deteriorate slightly, which kills a bit of the romanticism.

For better or worse, the transfer market is here to stay. Although it's easy to get disillusioned with a market that values Raheem Sterling's potential at £49 million and £59.7 million will get you a listless Di Maria for a season, it's not all doom and gloom. Across the Atlantic, they'll never know the pure joy of seeing the rise and fall of a dynasty, the fond farewell of a hometown hero spending his whole career at one club, or a rogue fan sticking a dildo in Alan Irwin's ear on deadline day.

@petestrauss