Salary cap

In professional sports, a salary cap (or wage cap) is an agreement or rule that places a limit on the amount of money that a team can spend on players' salaries. It exists as a per-player limit or a total limit for the team's roster, or both. Several sports leagues have implemented salary caps, both as a method of keeping overall costs down, and to ensure parity between teams so wealthy teams cannot entrench dominance by signing many more top players than their rivals. Salary caps can be a major issue in negotiations between league management and players' unions, and have been the focus point of several strikes by players and lockouts by owners and administrators.

Salary caps are used by the following major sports leagues around the world:

Recently, several European association football leagues have also discussed introducing salary caps. The Union of European Football Associations introduced a set of Financial Fair Play Regulations in 2011, which limits football clubs' spending relative to their income.

In theory, there are two main benefits derived from salary caps - promotion of parity between teams, and control of costs.

Primarily, an effective salary cap prevents wealthy teams from certain destructive behaviours, such as signing a multitude of high-paid star players to prevent their rivals from accessing talented players and ensuring victory through superior economic power. With a salary cap, each club has roughly the same economic power to attract players, which contributes to parity by producing roughly equal playing talent in each team in the league, and in turn brings economic benefits, both to the league and to its individual teams.

Leagues need to ensure a degree of parity between teams so that games are exciting for the fans and not a foregone conclusion. The leagues that have adopted salary caps generally do so because they believe letting richer teams accumulate talent affects the quality of the sporting product they want to sell. If only a handful of dominant teams are able to win consistently and challenge for the championship, many of the contests will be blowouts by the superior team, reducing the sport's attractiveness for fans at the stadium and viewers on television. Television revenue is an important part of the income of many sports around the world, and the more evenly matched and exciting the contests, the more interesting the television product, meaning the value of the television broadcast rights is higher. An unbalanced league also threatens the financial viability of the weaker teams, because if there is no long-term hope of their team winning, fans of the weaker clubs will gravitate to other sports and leagues.

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