
424 ◾ Sports Finance and Management
and the same teams tend to win year after year. Figure12.2 shows the correlations
of winning percentages for the NFL. It appears that the league has gotten slightly
more competitive over time, but the trend is not entirely obvious. On average, this
correlation is lower during the salary cap years, but not by that much.
Figure12.3 shows this metric for MLB. As with the NFL, there is no obvious
trend. e correlation seemed to be relatively low in the 1990s, but then increased
again. While MLB has had varying revenue-sharing and luxury tax policies, they
have not had the dramatic shifts in policies of som