(Bloomberg) -- If the Cincinnati Bengals upset the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday, they'll become the 14th different team to win the Super Bowl this century.
That number would trigger envy among soccer fans in Europe, where the top leagues are increasingly dominated by a handful of the richest clubs -- or in some countries just one or two. Germany's Bayern Munich has won nine straight championships and is well on the way to winning a 10th this season.
The difference boils down to the economic blueprints for football either side of the Atlantic -– which are the opposite of what you'd expect. Put simply, the National Football League is set up to prize equality between teams. There are certain socialist elements to the structure. Europe's leagues, at least in principle, are organized around rugged free-market competition.
The flaws in those systems explain some of the recent ructions in both sports.
In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the NFL is mired in a “tanking” scandal. Former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores said the team's owner, Stephen Ross, offered to pay him $100,000 for each game the team lost a few seasons ago. Ross has strongly denied the allegation. NFL bosses say they'll look into it.
Leveling Up
If U.S. teams sometimes have an incentive to lose, it's because the leveling-up welfare economics of the NFL makes sure that the worst teams get looked after. They get to pick the best players out of next season's draft.
That's one reason the Bengals, who were pretty terrible last season and the one before, could turn themselves into contenders so quickly. (Their young star, quarterback Joe Burrow, as it turns out, is reportedly the player that Ross was eyeing at the time when Flores says he was offering cash to lose games.)
Also, everyone's subject to the same salary cap in the NFL. There's no equivalent of the vast financial gap that separates, for example, current English Premier League leaders Manchester City -– whose owners hail from one of the world's richest petro-states -- and bottom-placed Burnley.
Above all, there's no relegation. Once you're in the NFL, you're in. So the New York Giants and the Washington Commanders will keep playing each other twice every season, year after year, regardless of how dreadful they may be.
By contrast, in uber-capitalist European soccer, teams that finish near the bottom of their leagues get dumped down to the next tier, to be replaced by up-and-comers.
On paper, that system means a small-town club -- and there are hundreds of clubs across the country -- can rise through the ranks to challenge the rich blue-bloods. It sometimes even happens: Leicester City, who'd been in the second tier of English football just a couple of years earlier, was national champion in 2016. It's the kind of meritocracy associated with the American Dream.
But the owners of the biggest European clubs (some of whom are Americans steeped in the ways of the NFL system) aren't altogether happy with the way things are run. That's why, last year, they tried to set up a new European Super League -- a $4.8 billion project bankrolled by JPMorgan Chase & Co.
It would've meant an American-style closed league, with the biggest clubs guaranteed to face each other every year in front of large and lucrative TV audiences. There'd be no way for the smaller clubs to shoulder their way in, putting an end to fairy-tale stories that saw small fry like England's Nottingham Forest become champions of Europe.
Something like that may yet happen one day, but for now the mega-clubs have been forced to drop the plan by a storm of protests. It turns out that the fans tend to prefer keeping things the way they are.
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