In 1946-47, a real visionary involved in the National Basketball Association (NBA) thought of a brilliant way of keeping the league competitive – Making sure billionaires (or millionaires back then) didn’t splash out their pocket change and buy every player in the league that had become a household name.

This was done by introducing a method called the SALARY CAP. In short, a salary cap is a way of putting a maximum amount on what a club can spend on buying players.

The method, though introduced in the forties, was revised in the 1984-85 and has been in effect ever since. To break up the salary cap further -

- The NBA follows a soft cap, which allows teams to go beyond their cap at times to ensure they keep their loyal players on their roster.

- A hard cap system doesn’t allow a team to spend a penny beyond the upper limit, no matter who they lose out on.

With more and more Russians buying top football clubs the world over it isn’t tough to see why the likes of Chelsea will run away with title after title each year. With Abramovic’s funding, Chelsea has already increased the “cost of keeping a superstar� rates of all the leading clubs from different leagues. Agreed, with high profile signings come high profile egos, but what satisfies these egos are trophies and with world class players at each and every position (and I mean each and every position on your bench!), it’s going to be hard to keep those trophies from a club with endless funds.

This in turn hampers the growth of smaller football clubs because –

- Their promising young talents will be lured by the glitz and glamour of top level football, and the club will lose out of a possible “hero that can promote them�

- Who is really going to support a team that doesn’t have at least one player that isn’t playing on an International Level?

The list goes on and on.

Also, this hampers the growth of the whole league. Why? Simple… Let’s take the example of Formula 1 racing. The sport has been losing out on fans year after year and the main reason for this is that the sport has been a two horse race (pun unintended).

Looking at the last few years in various football leagues the world over Lyon has been champion in France since 2001, Ajax and PSV Eindhoven are the only teams to have won the Dutch league since 1999, the premiership has always been a four horse race, Bayern Munich has pretty much been winning all the titles in Germany for the last ten years and the only serious contenders for the Serie A title over the last few years have been A.C Milan and Juventus – ALL RICH CLUBS.

The only exception to the “Rich Clubs win trophies� case is Newcastle United who (let’s face it) have as much a chance of winning a trophy this year as Abramovic has of going kaput in the bank!

It’s about time that FIFA imposed some sort of upper limit on what a club can spend on buying players or we might as well start distributing the trophies on a ‘who has more money’ basis.

Until then, bring in the Beers!