I played a trial game for Reading against Brentford. Then the coach told me that they couldn't afford to take me on. So I went to see Brentford. I couldn't believe it when they signed me - they were in the league above Reading.
Everyone has a budget, I don't care who you are. But they said if we are in a pennant race in the middle of the summer they are going to get some help with added payroll.
On the U.S.A. team our income wasn't coming from U.S.A. It was coming from sponsors, it was coming from how we made money elsewhere.
As much as we disliked the Yankees, fans and players alike, they were good for baseball. They consistently unsuccessful teams like the Browns, Senators, and A's paid a lot of their bills with those big crowds that poured through the gates when the Yankees came to town.
Major League Baseball's labor negotiations involve two paradoxes. The players' union's primary objective is to protect the revenues of a very few very rich owners - principally, the Yankees'. The owners' primary objective is a more egalitarian distribution of wealth. The union believes that unconstrained spending by the richest three teams pulls up all payrolls. Most owners believe that baseball's problems--competitive imbalance, the parlous financial conditions of many clubs--result from large and growing disparities of what are mistakenly treated as 'local' revenues.
My pat line about the Cubs and payroll is that the amount of merchandise the Cubs would sell off a world series championship would more than cover for a big payroll.
The first thing about Houston is it's an organization run from a different perspective. In Cincy, the team lives off money it earns from football. Houston's owner has other business interests, and he controls the money.
In the 1990s, we had seven great teams - Milan, Inter, Juventus, Parma, Lazio, Roma, Fiorentina. If you look at the players, they were great players, but there was some crazy investment, and some teams went bankrupt, like Parma and Lazio.
We are continuing to look for ways that we can do something that's good for both of us. Good for both of us being the Cowboys relative to relief as to our cap management and good for him that would maybe be some pluses for him on his contract.
If you understand our salary cap, you have to be logical. If Barry Sanders , for instance, came out of retirement, if we were interested we probably couldn't get real interested. So you've got to temper your enthusiasm with the reality of our situation.
Many teams in Europe have no money.
But if you look at teams that want to share more revenues, they're teams that don't have a lot on the table. They've long since not had any serious investment in their team.
Italian sides will find it hard to attract the world's top players while there is a salary cap.
