I was reading a story about the English Premier League that stated only four teams have won a league title in 20 years. That suprised me because in the US it seems to be a given that not having numerous teams being able to win a title is a big problem. The NFL’s huge popularity is often attributed to salary caps allowing small market teams more of a chance to compete; in contrast it’s often said baseball’s lack of a salary cap hurts its popularity in smaller markets. Why don’t overseas fan bases seem to care as much about all teams being competitive? And no matter where you live, does parity or the lack of parity affect your rooting interest.
I’d argue that non-US fans do care about parity to some extent. I think most domestic competitions in other sports do have parity rules and the EPL is quite unusual. The dominance of the English Premier League by a small number of clubs is often criticised, see the section on the Big Four in the Premier League article for starters.
I think that Americans tend to forget that for most other sports the domestic competition is not the be-all and end-all. International games are even more important and there are no parity rules for internationals.
In rugby there are four layers of competition I can follow - local club teams, the New Zealand domestic rugby competition (currently called the ITM cup), Super 15 (between Australian, New Zealand and South African regional teams) and international rugby. I don’t have any strong club affiliaiton (I spent my playing years away from where I now live) but I do follow my local provincial team in the ITM cup and attend most home games. I vaguely follow the Super rugby competition but don’t feel any particular attachment to my nominal regional team which isn’t based where I live. I’m far more interested in the results of the national team in international games - particularly the four yearly Rugby World Cup.
In terms of parity at each of these levels:
-club rugby is amateur and has no parity rules that I’m aware of.
-the ITM cup does have a salary cap (but tends to be dominated by teams form the bigger centres).
-I think that Super 15 has a (much higher) salary cap.
-International rugby has no parity rules at all.
So of the two levels that I’m most engaged with we have a domestic competition with parity and a non-parity international game.
I’d quibble that the NFL’s parity is achieved through a combination of salary cap and the revenue sharing program, so that for the most part, Green Bay gets almost as much revenue as the Giants and Cowboys, despite being in a dramatically smaller market.
As lisiate says, though, I think the example of the Premier League is regarded as the stand-out bad example of lack of parity. It gets lots of attention by fans and media alike, and lots of people think it’s broken and needs to be fixed.
Arguably, the best thing that’s happened in the National Hockey League (NHL) in the last … forever, is the new CBA that introduced salary caps.
Now small market teams in Edmonton, Ottawa, and soon Winnipeg can compete on the same level as cash-rich teams in New York and Toronto, for example.
I love, love, love, the new salary cap in the NHL. Any team can compete on equal terms with any other team.
I am a Detroit Lion fan. What is this parity you talk about?
I’d say that parity actually decreases interest in the sport. Take college basketball, for instance. A little-known Butler team made the last two championship games. Does anybody really consider Connecticut vs. Butler a compelling matchup for the championship? On the other hand, if this year’s final had been UConn vs. Kansas or UConn vs. Florida, any college basketball fan would recognize both teams and know a little bit about their history. Each has won multiple titles in recent years.
Now take the NBA finals. In 2008, 2009, and 2010, my favorite team (the Lakers) made the finals each time, and Boston made it two of those years. These are two of the NBA’s “glamor” teams that each have millions of fans and even more people who hate them because of past successes. If your team wasn’t in the finals, but you hated Boston, you may have still watched the finals hoping to see Boston lose. Unfortunately, the Lakers didn’t make the finals this year, but many Laker fans and fans of all other teams may still watch the finals just because they hope to see a stacked Miami team lose. If the finals matchup had been Atlanta vs. Oklahoma City, there would be little interest because nobody really gives a shit about either team one way or the other.
Agreed; the salary cap has only been in effect in the NFL since 1994; Rozelle instituted revenue-sharing on the network TV contract in the 1960s.
Bad luck and bad management counteract parity. 
If you don’t have some level of parity, then you’d better have promotion and relegation and other competitions (Champions League, Europa League, FA Cup, Carling Cup) to give everyone else something to care about.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why the Sacramento Kings and Golden State Warriors have fans. Ditto the Winnipeg Jets - I hear that they’re making a comeback.
I suspect that there is a optimum number of teams that have parity to maximize fans’ interest. In the NFL, there are 32 teams, eighteen of which have Superbowl titles, and a serious fan will know a little of the history of each team. In college, though, there are 346 teams competing. There is absolutely no way that even a serious fan can keep tabs on all of them, and so parity is a problem, as you point out. There’s probably a number or range of number that is the most a fan can reasonably keep track of, and parity within that range in desirable. In a larger league, parity might be a problem.
Everybody in Seattle would have tuned in to see Oklahoma City lose.
Speaking as a fan of the prem, I’m not sure I want parity-but it would be a he’ll of an improvement to what we have now. I liked it how it was 30 years ago- no regulations so you still had princes and paupers, but the whole operation was so much smaller in scale that finance didn’t completely dominate. Excellence in coaching could bridge the gap, a classic example being forest winning the european cup (twice !).
It’s an interesting subject - the NFL also has the draft of course which is another element of control for parity. No analog to this with the prem. It does seem amazing that a handful of NFL teams manage to continually defy the cap, revenue sharing and the draft, and suck balls year on year. It’s almost wilful underperformance.
But would these lesser teams be unknown if they were as good as these other teams?
I like the possibility of parity, but it seems pretty apparent that a lack of parity of results is good for the sport.
That is, I like revenue sharing, salary caps and other measures designed to help small-market teams compete with large-market ones. We’re all in this together, right? However, it’s also good for fan interest to have dynasties and teams that win consistently. If other teams can’t use the even playing field to win, I don’t have a problem with it–it’s their own damn fault.
There’s obviously a trade-off between having teams be more equal in standard, and the ultimate quality of the best teams. In soccer, everybody’s been talking over the last few days about how the current Barcelona team is maybe the best soccer team ever. If there were somehow a pan-European parity mechanism, we’d never see these all-star teams*. The European tournaments and the domestic leagues would be winnable by a far larger number of clubs, but playing a lower standard of soccer. I think it would be more entertaining (certainly the domestic leagues which tend to be long, drawn-out two- or three-horse races) but I’m not sure it would be better, if that makes sense. It’s good to have tournaments where it’s the best of the best competing against each other.
- I realise that several of Barcelona’s key players came from their academy system, but they had to be a rich elite club to have an academy of that quality in the first place. And they are nonetheless a big-spending club.