Here's where things get tricky.
Looking at ticket price, media and merch contracts, gate revenue, season ticket revenue, and owner cash adjustments.
First ticket price. This is something that individual teams control. The first thing to note is that the sim starts with all ticket prices equal. I don't know why that is. You would think that the percentage adjustments made at league setup would affect ticket prices as well. Ticket prices remain essentially equal for the first half of the sim. Even by the end, we only have a $4 spread between the cheapest and most expensive average tickets. This is the first big issue. Clearly, the most meaningful way to control revenue is to pull this ticket price lever. For whatever reason, the game has not done so.
Looking at local and national media contracts, the situation gets even stranger. We have parity across all leagues for the first couple years. By 1999, we are practically backwards from what we'd expect. The top league has a combined average of $14.8M and the bottom league is at $15.9M. Again, this is a powerful lever that the game can use to regulate revenue, and it's pulling it the wrong way! By the time the sim ends in 2005, there's a $5.4M spread in media revenue in the wrong direction.
Finally, let's look at the bluntest instrument in the shed: Owner cash. I would have expected this to be a fallback to keep team budgets in line with their leagues. Regardless of revenue and payroll, owners make adjustments to team budgets to suit their whims. What happens in our leagues?
Not much until 1994. Before then, owners pretty consistently pulled the same amount from teams' budgets each season. By 1994, we start to see L1 owners putting cash into their teams. 218K against a spread of -2-3M in the lower leagues. But this pattern does not hold for more than a couple of years. By 1999, all owners are pulling money from team budgets. The lower leagues have more money pulled, but even at a factor of 2, as it is by 2005, it is not enough to create the stratification between leagues that we want.
So, it looks like we're building a case for a few things that have to be tweaked in the next sim:
1 - Ticket Price. Whatever the % offset between leagues is, we have to make sure that ticket price matches it
2 - Media Contracts. Same.
3 - Owner cash adjustments. We can't go in and police these adjustments for each team, but we also should find out how these are being or can be used to make sure that teams stay within the budget norms of their leagues.