the.com/salary cap
The league's way of making billionaires pretend they can't afford a quarterback.
means A rule limiting how much a sports team can spend in total on player salaries in a given season.
from Straightforward compound: 'salary' (money paid for work, from Latin salarium — originally an allowance given to Roman soldiers, traditionally linked to money for buying salt) plus 'cap,' the everyday word for a limit on top of something, as in a cap on prices or spending. Salary caps as league policy are a 20th-century invention in professional sports, designed to stop the richest owners from simply buying every good player — the economics are modern, even though the word for the money itself is ancient.
- purpose
- forces competitive balance instead of richest team winning
- workaround
- teams use bonuses and deferrals to hide money
- nfl quirk
- cap is hard, cannot be exceeded ever
- nba twist
- soft cap lets teams pay luxury tax instead