David Stern used to tell a joke. In his early years as NBA commissioner, he liked to say, his job was essentially to travel back and forth between Boston and Los Angeles to hand out the championship trophy. In the first five NBA Finals after he took the helm in early 1984, the Celtics and Lakers won all five titles, each missing the decisive series just once.
Current commissioner Adam Silver recalled the anecdote last June, ahead of the 2025 NBA Finals, by which time the league was guaranteed a seventh different champion in seven years. “We set out to create a system that allowed for more competition around the league,” Silver said then in his annual news conference. “The goal being to have 30 teams all in the position, if well managed, to compete for championships. And that’s what we’re seeing here.”
“The goal isn’t necessarily to have a different champion every year,” Silver added. “It’s to have […] parity of opportunity.”
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell gave his own endorsement of competitive parity in 2011: “There are systems that we have to make sure that we maintain. When you come into a season, every fan thinks that their football team has a chance to win the Super Bowl.”
When the Los Angeles Dodgers loaded up on talent yet again before the 2025 MLB season, seemingly fated to repeat as champions, commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged that, “We certainly have owners in the game who are as concerned as fans are about the level of disparity in the game.”
For decades, the heads of American sports leagues have argued that parity is necessary to sustain fan interest and to stay financially sustainable. And they have manipulated the talent market in all sorts of ways – with salary caps, revenue sharing, drafts, wealth and talent redistribution, “aprons”, and so on – in service of that goal.
Yet the competitiveness of a league has no obvious bearing on its popularity. Baseball was never more popular than when the New York Yankees dominated it. The NBA’s cultural ascent coincided with the Celtics and Lakers’ decade-long duopoly, followed by the Chicago Bulls dynasty. Manchester United won the Premier League just about every year as the circuit became globally dominant.
Concerned about sustainability? Don’t be. Professional teams that lost money often double as handy instruments to write off taxes for billionaires while the asset steadily appreciates anyway. To a cynic, parity has always felt like an excuse to short-change the players, a contrived cover for cost-controls and labor suppression.
Lately, the flaws in the parity principle have been delightfully illustrated by the Premier League, the sports world’s ongoing experiment to determine what happens when virtually no brakes are applied to runaway globalized capitalism. Past the halfway point of this season, just nine points separate fourth-place Liverpool from 15th-place Bournemouth. Sixth-place Newcastle are three points from 12th-place Everton. In sum, seven teams sit within the swing of a single game. Which is to say that with no parity mechanisms whatsoever, almost all the teams in the league are competitive.
They can’t all win the thing, exactly, but through an ever-evolving class of owners who treat their Premier League clubs as anything from vanity projects to investment vehicles to soft-power plays, a broad upper class and a huge middle class of teams have emerged.
The league’s largely unfettered economics – with the profitability and sustainability rules now tweaked to merely limit clubs to spending no more than 85 percent of their footballing earnings on their squads – practically require every club to spend at a competitive level every single season. This has caused a flattening of the talent level between many teams, and forced the smaller clubs to get smarter and better. In either case, the situation stands in stark contrast to the American system, in which many parasite teams allowed to feed off their more ambitious peers.
Meanwhile, the Premier League’s 20 teams are trending towards more competitive balance. Liverpool’s 84-point title last season was the lowest haul since Leicester City’s fluky (if thrilling) championship in 2015-16, when all the habitual contenders happened to have an off-year at exactly the same time.
More tellingly, perhaps, is the uptick in the average points total of the middle third, give or take, of the Premier League table in the past four seasons and change. In 2021-22, the clubs who finished eighth through 13th averaged 49.5 points over the course of the campaign. That number ticked up by half a point over the next two seasons, before jumping to 54.7 in 2024-25. So far, 2025-26 is on pace to post a figure of 53.7, suggesting that something lasting may be shifting. (The 2020-21 season did produce a 54-point average, but that was a significant outlier to the three seasons before and after it.)
Certainly, you could point out that this competitive balance may exist organically in the Premier League but eludes almost every other league in the world, save for Italy’s Serie A. But then the closest comparator to the Premier League in our little parity case study isn’t the European continent’s legacy soccer leagues. It’s the other best-in-class, globally popular circuits that dominate their sports: the NFL, the NBA and MLB.
At least a half-dozen Premier League teams, and as many as eight, have the resources to mount a plausible title challenge in any given season. That’s about a third of the league. Three-quarters of the top-tier clubs stand a reasonable chance of finishing in the top half or better.
That’s a kind of parity, too. Yet it was achieved without manipulating the market to the detriment of the players and, ultimately, the product.
-
Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.
