this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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It's what happens when the team ownership is a cartel.
Planet Money had an episode last Wendesday (May 6) about this called "How we got free agents in baseball" about Curt Flood who challenged the system.
The fight went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which decided that yes, MLB had monopsony power, but that it was somehow exempt from laws every other business had to follow.
What's interesting is that the US likes to think of itself as the most capitalist system in the world. But, an essential part of capitalism is competition. Regulators need to step in and prevent cartels from forming so that capitalism can work. The owners of baseball teams (and every other major sports league in the US) prefer to have a cartel where they get to decide if a new team is allowed into the league. And, once you're in the league, no matter how badly the team does, it remains in the league and keeps getting its share of the league revenue.
Meanwhile, in much more "socialist" Europe, football / futbol is far more of a free market capitalist system. In those leagues, a player has an 4-5 year contract with a club. If the club doesn't want the player anymore they can try to sell him to a different club, but the player has to agree to the move. If not, the player's allowed to just see out the rest of their contract, even if they're not playing. The clubs are also not a closed cartel because of promotion and relegation. Typically the worst 3 teams in a league are dropped down to a lower league at the end of the season, while 3 teams from a lower league are promoted to the top league. As a result, if a team looks like it might end up at the bottom, there's a mad scramble to avoid relegation. Unlike in American sports where sometimes a club might lose on purpose to be the worst team in the league and get the first draft pick.
The flip side of this is that in capitalist USA, player's unions are much stronger than in Europe. In the USA the worst paid player on the worst team still tends to make a lot of money. In European futbol teams, the worst paid player is making whatever his/her agent negotiated.
Expanding on this, in the Netherlands, the lowest tier of professional football clubs regularly lose players to the highest tier of amateur clubs. They'll suddenly want to play for the "love of the game", meanwhile accepting a high paying job at the amateur club's main sponsor.
Does the Netherlands have semi-pro leagues too, where there are some pro players and the rest of the team is amateurs?
AFAIK the lowest paid players in the UK make about 20k pounds per year. For many of them, they are basically playing for the love of the game at that point, because they could be making more money doing just about any other job. Sometimes on semi-pro teams, the pro athletes make less than their amateur teammates, because the amateur teammates have high paid office jobs. But, as you said, sometimes those office jobs are a bit suspect.
I'm not sure, if we have semi-pro then it's more like maybe a few k each year. Also first league has quite a few players who need additional income, the pay as a player is too low, especially the players who don't play a lot will get paid on a per match base.
It's even worse, they have a league with around 30 teams for the entire country, while there are several leagues with 20 teams and with high paying clubs.