Ironies, ideology, and football

On my Belgrade-Frankfurt flight I got a free copy of the European edition of The Wall Street Journal. It had an interesting article, European Football goes feudal, which begins with the following fascinating paragraph:

The dichotomy between European soccer and the National Football League has presented a stark philosophical contrast over the past few decades.

Despite the deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism pushed on the U.S. economy at large since the Reagan Era, the NFL's strict, centralized model geared at achieving parity has always recalled socialism. And while most Western European nations turned to some variation of a social-democratic economic system, with a welfare state and plenty of government intervention and regulation, soccer remained a largely unfettered free market. You could spend your money any way you liked, you could accumulate debt if you so chose and the natural state of affairs was one where wealthy, long-established soccer aristocrats lorded it over the little guy.