As a football fan living in Canada, I have been hoping that Major League Soccer (MLS) would abandon the draft and exchange system to adopt a promotion and relegation system. To imagine the Premier League adopting the American draft system makes me shudder.
For the draft system to be at all successful you need to have an unaffiliated place to draw the players from. In the MLS they have the National Collegiate Atheletics Association (NCAA), where universities compete and players are developed there. In Britain the young players are being developed by the Clubs themselves. Could you imagine Wayne Rooney being trained at Everton and then being drafted by another Club when he is 18? There would be no benefit to Everton for having developed him as a player. Another problem with the draft system is that there could no longer be promotion and relegation, as the 1st draft pick goes to the last place team. This would mean locking the top twenty teams in the Premier League, and spell disaster for the other 72 league teams. The other 72 league teams would be trapped in minor leagues with the best players, what would this mean for famous clubs like Sheffield Untied, Nottingham Forrest, Leeds, etc? It would mean financial destruction the attendances that these clubs get would plummet as there would be chance of visiting Bramall Lane and seeing top flight football would be gone. Locking the leagues to allow for a draft system would destroy the set up of league football in Britain and is a horrendous idea.
The idea of the player exchange is more complicated than the current buying and selling, and requires league isolation to be successful. This is because under the current system a club can buy a player from a club at a price. The selling club can then use some or all of that money to purchase another player. With an exchange system you have to get all of the teams in the deal to agree with the exchange, if player X is unhappy and wants a new team, you have to find a team that will take player X and has a player of equivalent value that you want. This is much more difficult than the current system where you are able to sell player X and use the money to buy a player from a team other than the team that bought player X. If the league is not isolated from other leagues than the exchange system will ultimately fail. This is evident in the MLS today, when a team from outside the league makes an offer to buy a player and it is accepted a team is left with a hole in their lineup. A perfect example of this is the recent transfer of Maurice Edu from Toronto FC to Glasgow Rangers for $5,000,000. Toronto FC receives 2/3 of the money, but has to use it on player development, and not on the purchasing of a new player, this has left a hole in their midfield. They have become weaker against other teams in the league because of actions from outside the league.
The draft and exchange system works well in isolated locked (no promotion) leagues. Examples of these are Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, National Basketball Association, and the National Football League. To make this work in the Barclay's Premier League would be nearly impossible. You would have to lock the league, which would destroy the league system in Britain that has existed for 100 years. You would have to wait over a decade for the current roster imbalance to disappear before you could start to see any parity. By the time that parity becomes a reality, the Premier will have deteriorated into a feeder league with the top players getting bought by clubs in Spain, Italy, Germany... So the system would take decades to make the league more competitive internally, and would destroy the competitiveness of the league externally. This would be disaster for English football, and the especially the for the fans.