You're probably still not caught up to where I spoke about that more. Long story short: the more value each individual dollar has on the market (e.g., deflationary period), the bigger the advantage that higher revenues in higher divisions becomes.
Again that's only true for cash, not for other assets such as players. I'll make a simple example.
A guy in the top league had a team worth 10 million in S26 if he's able to make the team younger without losing talent now he has a team worth 17 million. Maybe let's say his team is worth 15 million because he had to settle for slightly worse players.
The guy who is in D4 and had a team worth 1 million has the same problem. Now if he's good enough he can do the same replacement exercise and now his team is worth 2.5 millions. However if earlier the gap vs the top manager was 9 million now it's 12.5 million and the revenues for both teams are still the same. Note that inflation for the first team was 70% and for the second it's 250%.
You're forgetting a key element about inflation: cash loses value, assets do not. Even with more inflation at the bottom you need exceedingly more cash to catch up (in terms of worth). It would be fine if the revenues (gates) were inflated too, but they are not linked to inflation and for a large part they are also out of the control and skill of a manager.
If you introduce a required % investment in order to maintain the value at the same level, then the advantage of the top teams reduces. When the required investment is high enough, higher than the inflation, then yes the lower teams will catch up more easily. However, sadly, that value is nowhere near the level of inflation seen over the last 4 seasons, and it's even debatable you need such investment to maintain the relative value of your team.
Also I think you're confusing inflation, which means increasing prices, and a generic environment with high, but constant, prices. We're not in this second scenario just yet and we might not be for the foreseeable future, if the game is structured so that the overall talent pool keeps getting worse and the managers number remains the same.
Last edited by Lemonshine at 3/24/2015 6:17:24 AM