FCSP President & DFL Vice
©IMAGO
Club president Oke Göttlich from FC St. Pauli has welcomed the introduction of an upper limit for personnel costs in German professional football. “Limiting squad costs to 70 percent of sales is an important first step,” said the 50-year-old, who is also a member of the executive board and second vice-president of the DFL, to the “dpa”. “We need clear rules of the game to ensure competition and economic stability in the league. Other instruments such as squad and salary caps can contribute to this.” With these measures you become “independent of external money and therefore act more sustainably”.
Divine had previously suggested such a limitation several times. The 36 first and second division clubs decided on Tuesday at the general meeting of the German Football League that in the future they would be allowed to spend a maximum of 70 percent of their relevant income on personnel expenses (to the news).
However, this cap on squad costs should not be confused with the so-called “salary cap”, which is common in US professional sports. There, leagues such as the NFL (American football), NBA (basketball) and NHL (ice hockey) agree in negotiations with the players’ unions on a maximum amount that the teams can spend on the salaries of their players. This cap is the same for every team and does not depend on sales.
In a recent interview with Transfermarkt, Göttlich spoke about, among other things, the biggest challenges for German professional football and also discussed the “salary cap” as a possible option. “The big challenge – given the identical problems that FC Bayern and FC St. Pauli have at other levels – is how, with a view to competitiveness, we can jointly create framework conditions and regulations that help everyone. And this regulation is very obvious to me: Of course we have to talk about a salary cap, a quantitative squad limit and the limitation of multi-club ownership, loan player quotas and financial fair play. With the question of how much of the total turnover you as a club can put into a squad and we always have to be guided by the question of what people are most interested in and why they follow football (…).”
