Draft system For English football

[Raw Dykes]

On 19/06/2019 at 17:45, Lambert09 said:

A hypothetical question to give us something to talk about while we wait for Rudkin to get changed out of his swimming trunks. 

 

How do we think the English game would take shape if we had a similar draft system as the American sports leagues.

 

Now I understand this is incredibly difficult to implement given that we have a football pyramid, so it would work a little differently.  We have 92 teams in the english league levels, these would be the only teams included. Non-league would have to source players outside of the draft. 

 

Academy's would be set up around the country in catchment areas, they would focus purely on talent development with large funding from the football league. These would look after the top talent up to the season a player turns 18.

 

The flaw with the NFL is that towards the end of the season teams want to loose games, to ensure a better draft pick so I think draft picks should be earnt by league standing. Top of the premier league- gets #1 pick, rather than prize money and it moves down like that. The prize money is allocated instead to the academies.     

 

Now this would be more beneficial to every tier of english football. Because you only get one pick in round one. So rather than Chelsea having the 26 best 18 year olds in the country these are now shared out among teams, so a team in the bottom division is more likely to secure a player who is capable of playing for their side. Now if teams at the top want the best youth they will have to trade for it, which would lead to a large amount of money filtering down the tree. 

 

There's probably a crazy amount of flaws to this but it would add the excitement of a draft pick and a new dimension to transfers. Imagine being in a position where rather than just selling Marhrez we also could have had their draft picks in the deal, leading to us having one of the best 18 year olds in the country for the next couple of seasons?

 

I think most people would agree that football is too unfair. One of the few things great about American sports is how they are set up to avoid monopolies.

 

I think it's great whenever the corrupt system football has is beaten, e.g. our title win with a team built for relative peanuts, or the fact that every PL club is more or less rich enough to be able to refuse to sell players to the elite few. Sadly, I'm sure there are plans to stamp this out so that the rich can get richer again. I just hope they don't manage it.

 

I can't see a draft system working in football. There may be a way to do it, but I think it would require drastic changes, and I don't think changing the pyramid system should be considered - it is great that any club, no matter how small, can dream of one day climbing their way to the top.

 

There are other simple ways to make football fairer, however. I think a salary cap is an obvious choice, but it would have to be a global thing, in order to avoid all the best players fleeing the country. I think having a max length of contract for young players would be a good way of stopping clubs like Chelsea from hoarding all the best young talent and never playing them. Maybe a max number of young players you can sign from outside your academy up to a certain age might work.