Premier League clubs will be warned against introducing a salary cap in a key speech at Monday’s TUC Congress.
Maheta Molango, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, will say that top-flight teams cannot “cherry-pick” the parts of the American system that they like.
His speech also criticises the game’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR), under which he says players are reduced to being “assets to be moved around on a balance sheet”.
A majority of Premier League clubs have voted to trial ‘top-to-bottom anchoring’ (TBA) in the current season, which caps how much teams can spend on squad-related costs as a multiple of the amount of central league funding going to the lowest-earning club.
The PFA said it would oppose any measure which amounted to a salary cap and was understood to have instructed Nick De Marco KC – who led Leicester’s successful appeal against a Premier League PSR complaint – to act on its behalf.
Molango will tell delegates in Brighton: “We will be told these kind of salary controls work in US sport, so why shouldn’t they work here?
“But we won’t hear how, in the US, they are just one element of wide-ranging Collective Bargaining Agreements negotiated between leagues and player unions.
“These agreements recognise the value of the players and formalise and protect a whole raft of rights and conditions. They are strictly enforced and have been the subject of major labour disputes.
“If leagues and club owners want those types of agreements in English football, then by all means let’s have that conversation. What they cannot do is just cherry pick the parts they like because it suits their financial purposes.
“And this won’t just be an issue for the small group of players at the very top. It will eventually impact the majority who have short careers and who do not earn elite wages.
“The introduction of a salary cap would set a precedent that a group of business owners can come together to unilaterally and artificially control the market to limit what they have to pay to their employees.
“Any trade union, in any industry, would be alarmed by those kinds of plans.”
Molango will ask unions to support a motion calling for players to be at the heart of decisions about football’s future, telling Congress that the game’s stakeholders too often forget that footballers are “people, not just players” and that football “cannot continue to act like it is not bound by the same rules as every other workplace”.
Players developed within a club’s academy system count as pure profit in accounting terms, making them an attractive option to sell in order to comply with PSR.
Premier League chief executive Richard Masters said last month that accounting principles meant that was unavoidable, but added: “I think the huge opportunity for homegrown players is one of the great stories of the last 10 years.
“The fortunes of the England team have been transformed by the investment in the academy system, not just across the Premier League but the EFL as well.
“We’re now generating young players who are not just technically gifted, but well-rounded individuals able to perform in the Premier League more quickly, to generate value and to get opportunities to play in the Premier League and represent their country.
“So I think the story around young players in this country is a really positive one.”
