English Premier League Under the Salary Cap

Our thesis brought forth the question, how would the implementation of a salary cap into the English Premier League influence the entertainment level of the league as well as the financial aspects of the league. The English Premier League currently has no salary cap which allows teams with billionaire owners to heavily spend on star players and training facilities. This makes it extremely difficult for small market teams to be able to compete for silverware when put up against these high spending clubs. There is also a huge financial issue with a lot of clubs in the EPL because many of them are heavily in debt and rely constantly on loans from financial groups to support their high cash outflow. We hypothesized that this implementation of the cap would help teams become more financially stable as well as creating more parity in the league. To test these assumptions we issued a survey which asked various questions regarding what people preferred when watching a sporting league. We then ran a simulation on the video game FIFA 19 with our own created salary cap which we developed to see if the implementation of the cap would create more parity in the league. To test the validity of the simulation on the video game, we ran simulations on last years FIFA 18 and compared it with the actual standings of the league season from that year. According to our simulation, the EPL would be a much more competitive league with more exciting games and more chance for the smaller market teams to compete for the lucrative positions in the league table. We also compared the financial successes of the NBA versus the EPL to see if the cap has been beneficiary to the NBA since its’ adoption in the early 80’s. We concluded that the implementation of the salary cap would make the league more exciting as well as having the ability to make the clubs more financially stable.