How do you tackle football’s financial inequality? Start with smaller benches
Robbie Jay Barratt/ Getty Images Imbalance of power: Bigger benches and more substitutions favour those clubs with the money to build deep squads. Competitive balance comes not from capping losses, but reversing the great shifts of the Nineties: stricter homegrown quotas, a limit on loan deals and, yes, reducing number of substitutions that managers can make It’s not possible to even out how much money teams have... far better to alter how they can use it 18 Oct 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport Rory Smith The problem then, as it is now, was the power of a Big Six. In the mid-1980s, Britain’s pubs were dominated by half-adozen breweries. Between them, the six – Allied, Bass, Courage, Whitbread, Grand Metropolitan and Whitbread – ran 34,000 pubs. They were all, in the argot, ‘tied’: compelled to sell only drinks from their rentier-brewer. As a result, the Malt Cartel held the beer trade in its grip. A three-year investigation by the Monopolies and Mergers Commis...