Originally Posted by
Gray77
I agreed with everything else in the post more or less, but disagree with this bit. How has a salary cap and a play-off system rigged the league in favour of 4 clubs? Surely both of those things have been designed to rig the system away from that happening? It wasn't long ago that we had 8 from 14 making the play-offs, with pure mediocrity being told they'd achieved something by making the 8.
Surely a FPTP system would be 'rigging it' for the top clubs, because their consistency over 25-30 games would show, and the mediocre clubs would be out of contention half way through the season. Instead we have a system were a club that loses 50% of its games is still in it going into the latter stages, and therefore good planning, good ownership, good recruitment, good youth development etc can be defeated by some half-arsed club hitting form for 5-6 weeks in Sept and Oct.
Of course, the fact is that outside of the 4 clubs mentioned, the league is fairly poor (Cas an exception) and all of the attempts to produce a level playing field have failed because none of them could ever consistently compete through their own mis-management or mistakes. But that is a failing of those clubs, not some attempt to rig it in favour of the big 4 or 5 IMO.