What could football learn from American Football? – Telegraph Blogs

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Alan Tyers


What could football learn from American Football?

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain of Arsenal poses with Johnny Hekker of the St Louis Rams

Football fwend! New fwend! Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain of Arsenal poses with Johnny Hekker of the St Louis Rams. Picture: GETTY

This weekend sees the annual NFL game at Wembley Stadium, contested this year between the St Louis Rams and the New England Patriots. I don’t claim to know a lot about American Football, but I know what I like, and there are several things that our football could learn from the NFL. As I see them, they are…

1) The Draft System
In football, the talent gravitates inexorably towards a small handful of teams. Turning from top-level football to the Scottish Premier League, fans of the non-Glasgow teams, such as my own club Hibs, have long been used to seeing our best young talents cherry picked to sit on the bench at Celtic and, as was, Rangers. In England, the situation is becoming hardly less farcical: it now only takes a decent season or two in the EPL for a Joe Allen or an Ashley Young to be snaffled by one of the top four, or Liverpool. American football’s draft system ensures that the bottom ranked teams get first pick of the best young players. Sure, they can trade these picks away and the system is far from perfect, but the principle of the weakest teams getting a shot at the hottest young talents has a lot to recommend it in terms of keeping things competitive.

2) Salary Caps
While the draft might be impossible to introduce here because players are signed up by clubs before they have been weaned, rather than out of a college football system, would it be so hard to implement one of the NFL’s other great boons: the salary cap? Squads are limited to 53 players, and franchises have to spend no more than USD 120 million per year on players (and no less than 88% of that sum). Sure, there are ways of fiddling things by hiding players on the injured lists that do not form part of the cap, or by structuring contracts with bonuses. But largely, you don’t get the absurd competitive imbalance you get in the EPL, where the salary of a couple of Manchester City players on the pitch might be the equivalent of an entire XI of relegation strugglers. It’s weird that Americans get so horrified about imagined “socialism” in their politicians when their sports are run, to some degree at least, on collectivist lines.

3) The Rooney Rule
Nothing to do with the most desirable age for a veteran lady of the night, but instead the name for the affirmative action policy introduced in 2003 which states that NFL teams must interview at least one minority candidate when appointing a head coach. It was named for Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and credited with increasing the overall number of African American coaches from 6% to 22%. In our football, a sport where there is a large minority of black players, but hardly any black managers, many black footballers have said that they feel there is a ceiling. If clubs were obliged to interview black managers, and this led to more black gaffers, surely this would do as much as anything to send out the message that racism has no place in football?

4) Video replays
Your American TV executive rightly assumes that his punters haven’t got much in the way of an attention span, but nevertheless American viewers manage to sit through the 20 or 30 seconds it takes to establish whether a player crossed the goal line or hit the deck before he was knocked out of bounds. Nor do fans at the stadiums report any unhappiness at having to wait a few seconds to ensure that a correct call is made. Even hidebound old cricket has embraced the accurate joys of the video replay, so why is football so resistant? With such large sums of money, powerful emotions and careers in the balance on a goal-line decision or a penalty call, why not take half a minute to get them right?

5) Celebrations
With all due respect to Mario Balotelli and his “Why Always Me?” our lads have got a long way to go to match some of these touchdown triumphalists. Oh, and American Football has better snacks. Much better snacks.

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