Honest question and I'd most appreciate Brehme's perspective on this since he's the one who I've noticed is the most vocal about it.
Is the case of the Bosman ruling a situation where the problem comes from the unintended consequences of it, or for what the ruling itself was about? Because, in the United States, there was a pretty similar case - at least, it seems like it was a similar case based on surface details - about 20 years before it, with Curt Flood taking Major League Baseball to court to try and eliminate the reserve clause rule. In a nutshell, what the reserve clause did was bind you to your current team for as long as they wished to have you. Year after year, they could renew your contract, and that was that. You didn't have all that much leverage. Teams were inclined to trade you if you wanted out, and some players just as soon retired, if for nothing else than to wait it out until a new manager was hired who didn't hate them, or something like that. You didn't have to, you know, try and present yourself as an honorable club to try and appeal to prospective recruits, because you weren't signing free agents anyway. "Free agents", as they were, consisted of unwanted players. The occasional find could be had, but it wasn't a high percentage.
The point being, while I obviously wasn't around when the Curt Flood ruling came out, I would've 100% supported the decision eliminating the reserve clause. I don't agree at all with the idea of teams being able to hold onto players out-of-contract in perpetuity and restricting their options of employment and capacity to earn what the market says they might be worth. It's not that I'm anti-business, but I'm opposed to artificially depressing anyone's market value, if that makes any sense. So, based on my understanding of the Bosman ruling, I feel very much the same about that. They're the ones actually playing the game and providing the entertainment. The game literally would not exist without them (at least, not in a manner that we would care to watch as much). Nobody is more important than they are and they deserve to be rewarded as such.
The part that I'm not going to claim to have any understanding of would have to do with unintended consequences that the Bosman ruling created. I mean, even after the Curt Flood decision in MLB, there's still been 23* different organizations to win the championship of the sport in the 45 seasons since. The most any individual team has won is seven. Seven championships in 45 years - even acknowledging the obvious differences in championship structures in the sports, but I suspect if I were to look at how many different teams finished with the best record in the league each season, the numbers in general still wouldn't be hugely different in the broader scheme of things - looks positively quaint compared to Man Utd winning 13 Premier League titles between 1993-2013, or obviously Bayern winning nine straight Meisterschale's, Juve "winning" nine straight Scudetti, PSG and Man City's modern day dominance, etc. (Barcelona and Real Madrid are somewhat notwithstanding given their historic dominance in La Liga prior to 1995, but even then there were more championships that would pop up from the Basque Country or from Atleti then as compared to since 1995). The point being, free agency not only didn't hurt parity in the sport, but it actually exacerbated it. The Yankees won 20 championships between 1923-'62, literally half of them. Since free agency entered the NFL, it's been a sport renown for teams going from the Super Bowl one year to also-ran status the next, and then bouncing back again after that. I honestly wouldn't know what difference has been made to the NBA because it's always been a sport of dynasties even before Lebron/Wade/Bosh kick-started the "superfriends" approach to roster building.
I'm rambling at this point. My general question being about just what it was about the Bosman ruling that has led to the sport being the way it is today, and what could've been done to have had a more optimal outcome instead while that was still possible.
*22 if you don't count the lone Astros World Series championship.