Football Salary Cap: The Future??

Its the middle of a world wide credit crunch, families are cutting back on their purchases, tv programmes have been introduced to advise on how to save money and nobody seems to have sold a house for months.......yet the football world has gone spend crazy!

Real Madrid have shocked the world by spending £150+ million plus on some of the worlds best players: Ronaldo, Kaka and Benzema et al. Manchester City have spent £100+ million on some of the worlds second/third tier players: Tevez, Adabayor and Lescott et al.

Of these it is the Lescott saga that has left a bitter taste in the mouth about how money talks in football and how loyalty is dead. Did Lescott believe he owed Everton anything for making him the player he was (Hughes stating he was "arguably the best central defender in the Premiership" - hmmmm)  NO....because the whiff of a huge pay rise was too much to ignore. And to rub salt in the wound he had a few parting shots to the media about his former boss.

However how much does loyalty matter anymore? Is it that the people that love football i.e. the fans, that are behind the times and have to realise that footballers are like lawyers. Its a job for them and if a company offers a bigger salary then thats where they are going to go (hail the likes of John Terry).

If thats the case then how do we make it fairer on the lesser teams and stop the middle east/eastern block money men ruining football by paying average players over the odds wages to sign for them? Well what about a salary cap??

How would it work? Well let me make a suggestion. Lets say that it was tiered. So each club is allowed, for arguments sake, 2 players that they can pay between 100K-150K per week. Next tier 3 players 80K-99K. Followed by a few more tiers until under 50K is unlimited. You get the idea. In this scenario Real Madrid would have to sell a couple of tier 1 players to be within the guidelines. To who? Well whoever has the slots available. Therefore not Manchester United, not Chelsea, not Barcelona, not Manchester City....hold on...does this mean the best players in the world are shared across more teams?? Fairer or not?

Of course this would have to work over a period of time as immediately the lesser teams would not be able to afford tier 1 (and 2/3 in some cases)...however if no one has space to pay players tier 1..well guess what...they would have to take tier 2 wages!! Or tier 3....or quit!

Of course im sure there are other suggestions out there and its worth thinking about. The more i think about mine the longer it gets and the true depth of it could see me releasing a 500 page document.

Surely there is an answer out there? Football players are employees of a company. Lets start thinking of them like that.