Super Bowl Sunday is upon us, the day of the year when America unites in front of the TV to eat copious amounts of junk food and watch their fellow countrymen give each other brain damage through the medium of a contact sport. Yet this emblem of the American Dream, which attracts more viewers than attend church services on Christmas, is arguably the most socialist of the major professional events.

The US is well known for its right-of-centre politics and love of unshackled free market economics. In some quarters the notion abounds that success and wealth is a combination of God's favour and personal effort and that there's no requirement to share this with anyone. Certainly not the pathetic scroungers at the bottom of the pile who are either too lazy or unskilled to have success. Taking money from the rich to support these feckless layabouts in the form of taxation and welfare will only encourage them to be even worse. It will reward their failure. Tough love is what they need, the cut-throat world of natural selection will force the best out of them.

In the UK, my home country, while those sentiments are increasingly present, there has generally been a more understanding view of social welfare and the benefits system – at least there was until recently. Taxes are higher than across the Atlantic and we have the NHS ensuring medical care for even the poorest. But when one examines the philosophical structures of the countries' two national sports, the situation is reversed.

Although known as "America's game", the National Football League's success has been built on the model of a socialist state. It has a salary cap which limits each team's spending, a revenue-sharing system – effectively a tax – which transfers money from the high-earning franchises to the poorer teams and most interestingly of all, the NFL Draft.

The Draft is the lifeblood of the NFL. Unlike British football where each club has its own academy system to develop young players, in America that job is left to the universities. The Draft is the three-day jamboree at which each team takes it in turns to select the best of the upcoming graduates from the college ranks. Like a huge American Football version of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat. But in contrast to the Randian economics of the Tea Party movement, it's not the best team that is rewarded with the first pick in the draft, but the worst.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

The most pathetic and miserable outfit is awarded the top pick. Next is the second most feeble until right at the end, after all the other 31 teams have snapped up the best of the talent, it's the turn of the previous year's Super Bowl champions.

What this rather socialist approach does is create parity. Which leads to hope. Fans of teams in the doldrums know that the silver lining of a few poor seasons will be a crop of good young players which could transform their team into winners again. This is how the New Orleans Saints could pick second in the 2006 Draft and win the Super Bowl four years later. And the players don't get any say in the matter. Unlike in Britain where the best players can choose to join already established powerhouses, in the US, the equivalent superstars have to join the teams most in need of their services.

The aforementioned salary cap ensures that Dallas Cowboys owner, billionaire Jerry Jones, can't simply buy his way to success like Chelsea's Roman Abramovich. And revenue sharing of the NFL's multi-billion dollar TV rights is split equally between the big market teams such as the New York Giants and the minnow Green Bay Packers of Green Bay, Wisconsin, population: 104,000.

The outcome of this socialist structure is one of the most competitive and equal sports leagues in the world. Since its formation in 1992 the unregulated spending and player acquisition of the Premier League has produced five winners, and that includes the one-win wonders Blackburn Rovers way back in 1995. Over the same period there have been 13 different winners of the Super Bowl. If the Seattle Seahawks defeat the Denver Broncos on Sunday, that will make it 14.

Fans of most British football clubs can only dream of seeing their team lift the Premier League trophy. And it's a delusional dream at that. But in the parity-strewn utopia of American football every team has a decent chance. On any given Sunday one team can beat any other and clubs often go from 'worst to first' within their divisions.

Although NFL bosses seem to have realised that equality is the best environment for the game to flourish – and is good for business – this doesn't seem to penetrate the minds of many of the American Football loving American Right.

The book The Spirit Level, by epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett shows, using evidence from 30 years of research, that more unequal societies have a much higher likelihood of social ills. From increased mental health problems and teenage pregnancies to crime rates, obesity and lower life expectancy. Even in rich and developed countries, these problems persist where inequality is high.

As Sunday's Super Bowl reinforces, we do better when we're equal.