America is built on the concept of capitalism; people work for themselves and reap the rewards of their own labor. You'd think that the professional American sports would mirror that ideal; teams would try to make money and then use that money to make more money. As you might have guessed, the NFL is anything but; in fact to find a true capitalist sports league, you have to look across the pond to Europe, speficially the "football" aka soccer in order to find a laissez faire sports league.

NFL teams are locked into a strict salary cap and floor that they must adhere to; while the Cowboys bring in more money than the Jaguars, they aren’t allowed to use more than the salary cap to make their roster better. European soccer on the other hand has tried to implement a true salary cap to no success, meaning Manchester United has gigantic player salaries compared to Lester City (who happened to win the championship this year)

The implementation of free agency results in it becoming increasingly difficult to retain your own talent. Not only does a team have to contend with its own salary cap, but weaker teams with smaller salaries will be able to outbid you on the open market for your players. European soccer has no true free agency, at least not what we Americans would consider free agency.

The NFL has a common draft where the worst teams are allowed to pick first while the best team (or the one who wins the Super Bowl) get to pick last. Furthermore the NFL has compensatory draft pick system, which give teams who lost more premium talent than they gained in free agency more draft picks. European soccer has a farm system similar to the MLB; obviously when you are scouting and developing 10 years olds across the planet, teams with more resources to devote to the endeavor usually get better players, which of course costs money.

Finally, the NFL has a very socialist revenue sharing system set up where every team gets exactly the same amount of national TV revenue; last year the dysfunctional Cleveland Browns made $226 million simply by existing. The Denver Broncos on the other hand won it all at the Super Bowl and took home the exact same amount. European soccer has a revenue sharing as well but nothing nearly as equal as in the NFL; soccer teams share revenue based on their popularity and success.

Finally, European soccer has a mechanism called relegation; the bottom 3 teams of the league are demoted to the minor leagues while the 3 best teams in the minor leagues get promoted to the major leagues. That keeps the best teams together while constantly bringing in the best from the lower division. That would be like the Titans being sent to the CFL or FBS while Alabama got promoted to the NFL.

So is the NFL decidedly un-American? In a sense yes, the NFL strives for parity and equality and in a way hinders the success of good teams while distuributing the wealth communally regardless of effort or productivity. In a way though, Packers fans should be happy with this basically communist system, without it the Packers would never exist. Historically, the small town of Green Bay was unable to financially support a football team (at one point getting help from the Chicago Bears’ George Halas) and in the 1980s when the team was terrible, there would have been no way that the Packers could stay solvent without the rest of the league propping them up.