This summer’s transfer market has shown that football is in a world of its own. While the rest of the world struggles through the recession, Real Madrid have taken out loans reportedly adding up to €1bn to fund their excessive spending and Manchester City are throwing money at anything that moves.

Many footballing figures are called for a salary cap to be placed in football to stop the inflated figures from making the world’s most popular sport from becoming solely an expensive plaything of billionaires instead of normal, grounded fans and to increase competition. Yet, any comparisons to a salary cap and draft in the NFL are poorly researched considering the fact that, at least in Europe, extravagant spending occurs across a number of top flights.

Implementing such a cap would require agreement from a number of national football associations along with both UEFA and FIFA. As Paul Simpson, editor of Champions Magazine claims: despite UEFA’s insistence of the effectiveness of a salary cap, the European Commission has not yet recognized what Eurocrats call the “specificity” of sport:

“In other words, it hasn’t yet formally said that sport is a special field of human endeavour and, as such, is immune to the rules and regulations which govern other industries.

And until it does so, salary caps and drafts will remain in breach of the pact that lies at the heart of the European Union: the Treaty of Rome which guarantees freedom of labour.”

If such a revolutionary move were to ever be passed, the most logical proposal would be for clubs to spend a fixed percentage, say 50-60%, of their revenue on transfer fees and wages, including and deterring bonuses or massive signing-on fees. The principle, based on the American NFL, has the right idea in improving the competitive nature of the sport, through promoting the idea of teams operating within their own means. Yet, the American version takes the League’s defined gross revenue divided across all the sides competing, instead of a fixed percentage relative to each side.

Since 1994, when the NFL introduced a salary cap, over 84% of its teams have finished at least one season with a top-six record. In comparison, it has been near impossible for most sides to break the top-four stranglehold in the English Premier League, with fewer than 30% of the 20 teams competing each year managing to do so since its inception in 1992. In theory, a salary cap looks the way to go to increase competition in European football. Right?