Kicking About 21: The Fantasy Draft

Because sometimes you just have to imagine the best soccer teams in the world.

Salary caps are stupid. There, I said it. But, to be fair, I don’t actually mean it. There is a second part to that sentence. Salary caps are stupid for soccer. They kind of make sense in a regulated market of 20–30 teams where the talent pool is fairly limited and the best way to ensure a competitive environment is to maintain an arbitrary limitation on how much you’re allowed to pay the best players. Otherwise we end up with… well, the Golden State Warriors except with Kawhi Leonard coming off the bench or something.

In soccer, where the talent pool is basically everyone in the world who has feet and once kicked a round object, salary caps don’t make sense. Sure, you can argue that it creates disproportionate, top heavy system where the best teams always do well and the bottom feeders sit back, pray and occasionally pull what is now known as a Leicester. And yes, there is some argument to that. However, unlike the NBA, the NFL, the NHL and MLB (am I missing someone?), soccer competitions are both national and international, as well as cross-country elite tournaments. Each league has upwards of two domestic leagues and a structure that rewards staying in the top division, let alone winning it. There is more money turned over in soccer per day than most major franchises can hope to pull in a year.

As such, the concept of super team isn’t as distant as you may think. I mean, Bayern, Barcelona and Real already exist. So me and Cameron Climie take it a step further and have our very own fantasy draft. Only stipulation, you can’t pick from the same team twice.

Also on the pod:

• Champion’s League Quarterfinals First Leg
• EPL and the Arsenal Slide
• Can Barcelona beat Real Sociedad
• Is Juventus Defence the Most Precise Mechanism Since the Swiss Watch
• And more…