[edit]: found it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595199
Isn't that like Rule #1 from Systemantics, that systems grow to serve their perpetuation, not the features they were originally designed to supply?
Also, pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy
( disclaimer : I know nothing about football !)
Rosters have some restrictions in terms of size, in terms of home grown talent, talent from outside Europe, etc. There are also a ton of great football players out there. One team can't buy up all the talent, but a clique of elite teams can.
There is some concept of financial fair play too, but that still rewards bigger teams who are already rich.
There are probably studies written on this topic...
Tennis players portion of total revenue is the lowest among major sports- 17.5% (https://tennishead.net/tennis-players-receive-smallest-reven...)
I wish there was more funding and support for players below the top 250 and not just in countries with strong central tennis academies.
There's a nice experimental test of this where showing the number of previous downloads a song has makes it more likely to be downloaded (but not to the extent that it entirely overrides the quality of the song. <https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....>
jp57•2h ago
Now, in 2026, men's tennis is dominated by Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, both under 25 years of age
Also, I don't think women's tennis has shown the same cartel effect in the top 5 or top 10 as men's tennis has recently. It seems like there's much more churn there, and many more young players, though I haven't measured this and maybe it's just a feeling.
munificent•2h ago
Any time you have a system with feedback loops and economies of scale / network effects, the natural iterated behavior over time is an increasingly steep power law distribution.
With the digital world where zero marginal costs mean huge economies of scale and social interaction means huge network effects, we are clearly seeing a world dominated by a small number of insanely powerful elites. Seven of the ten richest people in 2025 got there from tech.
Our society wasn't meant to be this connected with this much automated popularity aggregation. It leads to huge inequality until we figure out damping or counterbalancing systems to deal with it.
tmn•1h ago
Edit. A quick investigation shows there is not a significant age difference between men and women for both top 10 player lists and top 100 player lists
bigstrat2003•1h ago
tmn•52m ago
ericmay•29m ago
I actually think it’s great. The level playing field can get a bit overrated. Hungary entrepreneurs will intuitively understand the parallels.
anthonyIPH•26m ago
globalnode•1h ago
vessenes•8m ago
Instead we got this young duo / lightning in a bottle situation; and I expect that both Sinner and Alcaraz are likely to be playing dominantly into their mid 30s barring injury, or maybe Alcaraz buying a nightclub in Ibiza and retiring.