While the NFL had the first hard salary cap, the NBA became the first professional sports league to implement a salary cap in the 1984–1985 season. The cap was designed to promote competitive balance, limiting the ability of wealthy, large-market franchises to control the top talent of the league with the highest spending power. However, the cap was introduced as "soft" from the beginning, meaning it contained many exceptions that allowed teams to exceed the salary cap. The m

The National Hockey League’s induction of a salary cap came from a lack of hockey. For the 2004-2005 season, the NHL was shut down due to a league-wide lockout. While lockouts have become more frequent across the major sports leagues, the NHL was the first professional major sports league to lose a full season of play. While many other agreements were reached in the lockout settlement before the start of the 2005-2006 season, the focus is on the creation of the salary cap.  I

The National Football League was the first major professional sports league to institute a hard salary cap. Throughout the 1960s to the 1980s, players and owners participated in back-and-forth strikes and lockouts that ultimately contributed to a salary cap. Across this time period, the National Football League  Players’ Association, NFLPA, was involved with five strikes and lockouts. The first, in 1968, was one of the first labor strikes in all of professional sports, leadin

The absence of a salary cap in Major League Baseball is a unique feature among the four major North American professional sports leagues. The NFL, NHL, and NBA have each, through varying degrees of labor lockouts and conflicts, negotiated salary caps designed to promote competitive balance and financial sustainability. The historical example of each of these leagues supports that the resistance within the MLB to a salary cap cannot be further grounded in either economic or co