Two Footballs, Two Worlds - How English Tradition Outpaced American Billionaire Boy's Club
April 2026
Why One Game Freed Its Players While the Other Broke Them
T he death of the NCAA's farm system didn't come with a funeral. It came with a lawsuit, a federal settlement, a transfer portal, and a bunch of NIL collectives operating in jurisdictional chaos. On June 6, 2025, a federal judge approved the House v. NCAA settlement, awarding $2.8 billion in damages to former Division I athletes and fundamentally dismantling a century-old arrangement that had extracted billions of dollars in value from unpaid labor. [1] But by then, the system was already dead. It had been dying for years—slowly at first, then all at once, the way most empires collapse.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Premier League was thriving. Not without chaos (chaos abounds in modern football), but with a fundamentally different architecture: one where geographic permanence, fan governance, and structural constraints on billionaire behavior had produced a system that was simultaneously more profitable and more equitable. It's a useful comparison—not because English football is perfect, but because it reveals something crucial about how systems of power shape who gets rich and who stays poor.
For a century, American football—both college and professional—operated on a principle that the Premier League never adopted: the principle that athletes were commodities to be managed, relocated, and exploited with minimal obligation to compensate them. The college version of this was explicit: amateurism rules ensured that the universities and networks generating billions in revenue paid players nothing, just a scholarship that was simultaneously invaluable and poverty wages, depending on your perspective. The NFL version was only slightly more subtle: franchises could relocate at will, using the threat of relocation to extract public subsidies from cities. Both systems produced enormous wealth for owners and executives, and kept the actual athletes—the ones generating the revenue—perpetually scrambling for scraps.
Then, in a cascade of legal challenges and state legislation, the whole thing cracked.
The Farm System's Collapse: How 100 Years of Exploitation Finally Hit a Limit
For a hundred years, the NCAA presided over what might be the most audacious labor extraction scheme in American sports history. The basic deal was simple: universities would offer scholarships (tuition, room, board—valuable, but capped) to student-athletes in exchange for the right to broadcast their games, sell merchandise with their likenesses, and aggregate their talent into teams that generated billions in television revenue. The NCAA explicitly banned athletes from being paid, calling them "amateurs" despite the fact that they were generating professional-grade entertainment.
The money was staggering. College football generated nearly $4 billion in annual television rights alone by the 2020s, and another $2+ billion in merchandise and apparel. Every cent of that flowed to the universities, the conferences, the networks, and the NCAA—and precisely zero of it went to the athletes. A star quarterback generating $50 million in broadcast revenue could be sanctioned for accepting an improper benefit if a booster bought him a car. [2]
It worked because the NCAA could enforce it. Because there was no other market for college football players. Because the amateurism ideology—the idea that playing for "the love of the game" and an education was sufficient compensation—was cultural doctrine, repeated by coaches, administrators, and media so consistently that millions of young athletes accepted poverty wages as noble sacrifice.
But when NIL laws began passing in states (California first, in 2023), the monopoly cracked. [3] When the Ohio Attorney General sued on antitrust grounds, challenging the NCAA's ability to restrict athlete movement and compensation, the façade began to crumble. [4] And when courts granted injunctions allowing athletes to transfer with immediate eligibility, the system collapsed.
Today's landscape is unrecognizable from even five years ago. As of 2025, the House v. NCAA settlement allows schools to pay athletes directly, capped at $20.5 million per school in "revenue sharing." [5] The transfer portal offers unlimited transfers without penalty. NIL deals allow athletes to monetize their names, images, and likenesses with relative freedom. A quarterback like Arch Manning can earn $3.7 million in NIL alone, before ever setting foot on an NFL field. [6]
In other words: the free farm system is over. Universities now have to pay for the talent they use. The bills are coming due.
College football rosters now cost schools upward of $26 million per team—split between direct revenue sharing and guaranteed NIL deals. [7] The transfer portal window in 2026 is expected to be as chaotic as ever, with collective heads reporting 100+ text messages before 11 a.m. on key recruitment days. The House settlement was supposed to create guardrails; instead, it simply moved the exploitation from the public sector (universities and conferences) to the private sector (NIL collectives and third-party entities). The constraints are weaker, not stronger. [8]
Meanwhile, in England: A Different Genealogy, Different Outcomes
The Premier League didn't emerge from a business plan. It emerged from communities. Manchester United didn't start as an NFL-style franchise designed to extract maximum revenue from a media market; it started as the works team for the Manchester Railway, a group of factory workers who organized themselves into a football club. Arsenal started as a munitions factory team. Liverpool emerged from community organization. [9]
This genealogy matters, because it shaped the structure that persists today. English football clubs remain geographically tied to their cities. They have fan governance—some teams have fan trusts with actual voting power on ownership decisions. They operate under Profit and Sustainability rules that limit debt-to-revenue ratios, preventing the leveraged buyouts that sometimes plague US franchises. And crucially, they can't relocate. Not because of explicit rules, but because the league structure assumes geographic permanence. There is no "Los Angeles option" if you own Liverpool.
This creates accountability. An owner who alienates fans faces genuine consequences: reduced ticket sales, damaged reputation, inability to attract players. In the US, an owner facing fan backlash can simply relocate (see: Chargers, Dean Spanos). In England, you're stuck with your constituency.
The result is a system where owners still accumulate enormous wealth—Roman Abramovich, Stan Kroenke, the Saudi Public Investment Fund buying Newcastle—but within constraints. They can't extract unlimited public subsidies because English local governments don't offer them the way US cities do. They can't build stadiums on public money; they have to finance them through bonds and private equity. They can't cut players loose without absorbing massive wage bills. And they can't relocate to a larger market, because the league structure doesn't allow it.
Is English football equitable? Not really. Rich owners still dominate. Manchester City, backed by Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth, has won multiple championships in a row by outspending everyone else. But at least the exploitation is constrained. At least the clubs stay in their communities. At least the geographical permanence creates long-term thinking.
The NFL's Relocation Problem: How Billionaires Learned to Hold Cities Hostage
The NFL's structure is the inverse. Born as a business venture designed to monetize professional football, the league was built on the principle that franchises were tradeable commodities. If a market wasn't profitable enough, you could move. If a city wouldn't subsidize your stadium, you could threaten to leave. The relocation option became the NFL's ultimate leverage.
Consider Dean Spanos and the Chargers: the owner wanted a new stadium, demanded substantial public subsidy, and when San Diego said no, he moved the team to Los Angeles, paid a $645 million relocation fee (nearly double what a public subsidy would have cost), and essentially gave up on the San Diego market forever. Was this rational? Financially, maybe. A Los Angeles franchise is worth billions more than a San Diego one—but only if you can actually generate revenue from Los Angeles fans. The Chargers can't. They're the Rams' perpetual tenants, playing in Kroenke's stadium, in Kroenke's market. [10]
The tragedy is that none of this had to happen. If the Chargers were geographically locked—if relocation was not an option—Spanos would have had to invest in San Diego as a permanent market. He would have built the stadium differently, integrated it into the community differently, developed a sustainable fan base differently. Instead, the relocation option led him to a decision that was simultaneously profitable (higher franchise valuation) and destructive (no actual fan base, no civic integration, a team nobody in LA cares about).
The Transfer Portal: College Football Discovers Free Agency (Too Late)
What's fascinating about the collapse of the NCAA system is that it's producing something that looks like free agency—but without the salary caps, guaranteed contracts, and union protections that make free agency work in the NFL. The transfer portal opened the market for player movement, but without closing the loopholes that allow schools (via NIL collectives) to structure compensation in ways that circumvent oversight.
A player can now transfer with immediate eligibility. [11] They can declare a second time, a third time, with no sitting out. In theory, this empowers athletes. In practice, it creates chaos. Top-tier talent moves constantly, chasing the highest NIL offers. Smaller schools can't compete, so the gap between rich and poor programs widens. And because NIL compensation is informal (collectives, boosters, third-party deals), there's no transparency, no salary cap, no union negotiating power.
Compare this to the NFL, where there's a salary cap, guaranteed contracts, a union that negotiates terms collectively, and transparent compensation structures. The NFL's system is exploitative (players make billions for owners while being constrained by draft mechanics), but at least it's structured. You know what you're getting paid. You have union representation. There's a floor and a ceiling to the exploitation.
College football's new system offers neither. It's pure market chaos, where powerful programs poach talent via NIL collectives, mid-tier schools scramble, and small programs collapse. And because athletes are 18–22 years old, often without agents or proper legal representation, they're getting fleeced by collectives promising deals that never materialize, signing away rights they don't understand, and entering a market with zero protections.
Promotion and Relegation: The Structure America Could Never Import
There's one feature of English football that perfectly encapsulates the difference between the two systems, and it's one that American billionaires would never allow: promotion and relegation. The Premier League isn't a closed circle of 20 permanent franchises. It's the apex of a pyramid that extends down through the English Football League (the Championship, League One, League Two) and beyond into the National League and countless semi-professional and amateur tiers. Every season, the bottom three teams in the Premier League are relegated to the Championship, replaced by the top three finishers from the tier below. [12]
This creates consequences that persist for every match of every season, at every level. A Premier League team fighting relegation in May is playing for something as consequential as a team fighting for the title. Finishing 17th versus 18th isn't a meaningless distinction—it's the difference between another year in the Premier League and demotion to the Championship, a loss of tens of millions in annual revenue, a seismic shift in prestige and resources. Even in April, when a mid-table team has no chance at the title, every match matters because the gap between safety and the danger zone is real.
Compare this to the NFL or college football: once a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, the remaining games are theater. Coaches rest starters. Fans stop showing up. The season becomes a staging ground for the playoffs, not a competition where every match carries genuine weight. In English football, that's impossible. Relegation is always a threat, always a possibility, always a reason to keep fighting. Manchester City was in the second tier in 1999. Sunderland fell from Premier League status to fighting in lower divisions. That possibility of movement—up or down—runs through every match, every season, at every level.
The pyramid that makes this work—hundreds of professional, semi-professional, and amateur clubs cascading down through dozens of competitive tiers—emerged organically from English football's community origins. A kid in a small English town can play in a youth league, move to the local non-league club, work his way up through the pyramid if he's good enough, and potentially reach the Premier League. The infrastructure exists because English football grew from grassroots, not from a business plan imposed from above.
The United States has no equivalent infrastructure. College football is nominally the "amateur" tier, but it's not amateur in any meaningful sense—it's a professional entertainment product operated by universities. High school football exists but is a feeder system for college, not a legitimate competitive tier. Semi-professional football barely exists. There's no genuine pyramid, no way for a talented player outside the college system to work his way into professional football. The system is completely closed.
Which is precisely why promotion and relegation could never work in the US, and why American billionaires will never allow it:
First, there's no infrastructure to support it. You can't have promotion and relegation without viable professional and semi-professional clubs operating at multiple levels. The US has maybe a dozen marginal semi-professional leagues. The infrastructure simply doesn't exist. It would take decades and billions in investment to build.
Second, it threatens the billionaire monopoly. Promotion and relegation means the NFL could lose franchises. If the Jacksonville Jaguars were terrible for five consecutive years, they'd be relegated. That's anathema to the closed-league model. The 32 teams are a monopoly; no one gets in, no one gets out. Promotion and relegation would break that monopoly and introduce real consequences for failure—something no owner would volunteer for.
Third, it destroys the investment guarantee. A billionaire buying an NFL franchise pays billions for a guaranteed permanent place in the league. If relegation was possible, that value proposition collapses. Why pay $5 billion for a franchise that could be demoted to a second tier? The entire NFL business model depends on that investment security. Promotion and relegation would eliminate it.
Fourth, it destabilizes revenue-sharing. The NFL's economic model depends on revenue-sharing among the 32 teams. If teams got relegated, that sharing becomes unstable. How do you distribute TV money if some franchises aren't in the top tier? The logistics alone would be nightmarish.
So despite being vastly more interesting from a fan perspective, despite creating genuine stakes at every level of the pyramid, despite building infrastructure that creates opportunities for thousands more players—promotion and relegation will never come to American football. It would require either building an entire semi-professional infrastructure (decades of work, billions of investment, and no immediate return) or convincing billionaires to voluntarily surrender control of the league (impossible).
What's particularly revealing is that promotion and relegation survived English football's commercialization. When Sky Television began its massive investment in the 1990s, they could have insisted on a closed league model—Sky could have said "we only broadcast the top division, make it closed like the NFL." Instead, the promotion and relegation structure persisted because it's so fundamental to how English football works that even billionaires buying into the system accepted it. The structure is older and more durable than individual ownership.
In the US, the reverse happened: the structure (closed league, franchise monopoly, geographic tradability) was created by and for billionaires, so it reflects their interests. Promotion and relegation would threaten those interests, so it's not even considered as a possibility. The structure shapes the system, the system shapes who benefits, and those who benefit have every incentive to keep the structure in place.
Why English Football, Despite Its Flaws, Might Actually Be Better
Here's the thing: English football isn't perfect. Owners are still billionaires extracting enormous value. Manchester City has basically bought their way to dominance. Wages are astronomical and distribute value unequally. But the structural constraints—geographic permanence, fan governance, limits on debt leverage—create a system where exploitation is at least bounded.
And it produces different long-term outcomes. English clubs become permanent civic institutions. Liverpool has been in Liverpool for 135 years, through wars and economic collapse, because relocation was never an option. Manchester United's fan base spans the globe because the club has had centuries to build cultural significance. Arsenal's fans have intergenerational loyalty because the club stayed in North London through transformations that would have triggered relocation in the US.
The financial outcomes are the same for owners—they get rich either way—but the civic outcomes are entirely different. A club that stays in its community for a century generates different kinds of value: cultural significance, intergenerational loyalty, civic pride, institutional permanence.
The US college football system is now discovering this the hard way. By abolishing amateurism rules but failing to impose structural constraints on compensation or geographic permanence, it's created pure market chaos. Schools are spending $26 million per year on rosters. Smaller programs are collapsing. Transfer portal chaos makes it impossible to build stable teams. And because there's no union, no collective bargaining, and no transparency, the system is just as exploitative as before—it's just exploitative in less stable ways.
The Lesson: Structure Matters More Than Freedom
The historical irony is that American sports (both college and professional) were born from a belief in the superiority of the free market. Let billionaires compete, let franchises relocate to maximize value, let compensation be determined by market forces. The result was enormous wealth creation—and endemic instability, relocation threats, public subsidy extraction, and athlete exploitation at every level.
English football, by contrast, inherited structures from its community origins that constrained billionaires in ways that paradoxically increased long-term value. By making relocation impossible, you force long-term thinking. By requiring fan governance, you create accountability. By limiting debt leverage, you prevent financial collapse. None of these constraints reduce profitability; they just redistribute it differently and make it more stable.
The lesson isn't that English football is better—it has its own problems, and billionaires are billionaires everywhere. The lesson is that structure shapes outcomes in ways that freedom alone does not. A system designed to maximize billionaire leverage (the NFL's relocation model) produces different results than a system designed to constrain it (English football's geographic permanence). Both make billionaires rich. But one leaves cities abandoned and franchises adrift, while the other produces permanent civic institutions.
The NCAA is learning this now. By abolishing amateurism without imposing new structural constraints, it created a system that is simultaneously more exploitative and less stable. Players can now make money, but without union protections, salary caps, or transparency. Schools now have to pay for talent, but without coordinated limits on spending or player protections. The free market triumphed—and everyone got chaos.
English football never bet on the free market because it didn't start as a commercial venture. It started as a community activity, and the structures that constrained it—geographic permanence, fan governance, geographic boundaries—became advantages rather than handicaps. The billionaires who own Premier League clubs discovered they could get rich without extracting every possible dollar, because the structures that limited exploitation also created long-term stability and cultural significance.
It's a lesson American sports are learning too late. But perhaps not too late. If the NFL imposed geographic constraints—if franchises couldn't relocate—cities might actually invest in their stadiums as permanent public assets. If college football imposed salary caps and union representation, it might produce more stable rosters and less chaos. If either sport imported even fragments of the governance structures that English football inherited, it might look less like a billionaire's casino and more like a civic institution.
The golden rule still applies: those with the gold make the rules. But English football discovered something American sports forgot: sometimes the most profitable rule is the one that constrains your own leverage. Permanence beats relocation. Community beats commodification. And a hundred years of accumulated civic significance beats a single season's market value.
Sources and Citations
https://smudailycampus.com/1067830/sports/nil-and-the-transfer-portal-opportunity-or-chaos-in-college-football/ | https://schneiderdowns.com/our-thoughts-on/ncaa-nil-revenue-framework/
https://www.sportsmed.org/membership/sports-medicine-update/spring-2025/
https://athleticdirectoru.com/articles/the-transfer-portal-and-nil/
https://www.sportsmed.org/membership/sports-medicine-update/spring-2025/take-care-of-the-student-athlete-in-the-era-of-the-transfer-portal-and-name-image-and-likeness-nil
https://nil-ncaa.com/ | https://athleticdirectoru.com/articles/the-transfer-portal-and-nil/
https://www.sportsmed.org/membership/sports-medicine-update/spring-2025/
https://nil-ncaa.com/ | https://frontofficesports.com/football-transfer-portal-chaos-continues-despite-new-rules/
https://frontofficesports.com/football-transfer-portal-chaos-continues-despite-new-rules/
Premier League historical records | English Football League archives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_Chargers_stadium_proposals | https://athlonsports.com/nfl/los-angeles-chargers/why-did-chargers-leave-san-diego-for-los-angeles
https://athleticdirectoru.com/articles/the-transfer-portal-and-nil/ | https://www.sportsmed.org/membership/sports-medicine-update/spring-2025/
Premier League official rules | English Football League structure
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