You may have noticed that Formula One, one of the grandest and most popular sports in the world, has been involved in a car crash of its own making. The governing body has collided in monumental fashion with eight of the leading teams.
Until yesterday there had been a real possibility of two rival championships next season, something that would confuse, irritate and ultimately turn off the watching public.
Some presented the impasse as a dispute about freedom. Max Mosley, the boss of the governing body, was keen to introduce stringent budget caps, something that was being resisted, particularly by many of the bigger teams, who portrayed it as an assault on their commercial autonomy, compromising their ability to spend big on innovation, wind tunnels and the other essential elements of a successful F1 operation.
But the reality is that such financial restrictions are ubiquitous across planet sport. In the National Football League and National Basketball League, two of the most lucrative leagues in the world, all franchises operate under stringent salary caps and with a collegiate draft system favouring the weaker teams. In the Premier League, a redistributive system takes television rights income from the biggest clubs and hands it to those lower down the table.
All these regulations guard against the threat that one financially muscular team (or coterie of teams) will monopolise the competition to the exclusion of everyone else; they are there to ensure the kind of intense, vigorous, unpredictable sporting dynamic that most fans want to see.
But, as with all financial regulation, there is a delicate balance to be struck. In the case of the Premier League, for example, the governing body knows that competition could be increased further if more money were taken from the big four and handed to the rest. So, why doesn't it act? Because it fears that any more financial interference will cause the top clubs to form a breakaway league.
Mosley's radical vision was precisely what Formula One needed, reducing barriers to entry, bringing more teams on to the grid and creating more excitement from those already on it. Competition cannot work, cannot exist, unless it is protected by regulation. Deep down, many of the teams understand this, which is why they have at least accepted the principle of a budget cap, even if they rebelled over the details.
All of which hints at a deeper truth: that what was really exercising the teams is not the cap itself but Mosley's "dictatorial" style, introducing rule changes without proper consultation. In which case this dispute was less about freedom than democracy.
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