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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

What was the original value proposition of the ESL?

News articles keep citing 'greed', but nobody offers numbers or estimates of numbers. How much do clubs earn today, and how much extra were they promised to join the ESL?

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For many of the clubs in the ESL a major problem is that participation in the champions league is not guaranteed. Currently, the top four clubs from the English Premier League qualify for the following season's Champion's League. The EPL currently has six "big" clubs who agreed to participate in the ESL - some of which have not qualified for the CL in quite a few years. The ESL would have guaranteed their participation every year.

I'm glad the ESL idea has fallen through as it seemed to be poorly thought out, but I hope this doesn't stop all attempts at innovation in European football. I think there are far too many uncompetitive games (both in the CL and EPL), and I'm quite fed up of the top teams buying up all the best talent, even just to sit on the bench.

Well the new Champions League format (4 more teams) that they just agreed on basically guarantees that these big teams will get in. Especially with the "historical performance coefficient" bullshit they forced in to ensure that.

https://www.uefa.com/uefachampionsleague/news/0268-12157d69c...

Wow, it makes the Super League thing sound like a distraction.

I'm surprised at this angle not being probed. The changes to Champions league are being pushed through without sufficient media scrutiny. Unlike ESL which was a private effort, Champions League is UEFA prerogative, and it should not be pushed through in a surreptitious, underhanded manoeuvre.

This is actually one of the things the UEFA big shots are really angry about. UEFA gave into most of the demands of these big clubs and as a reward for that they stab UEFA in the back and try to start their own league.

Only two teams can get in that way, and it's skewed towards successful clubs, not "big" ones. E.g. in 2020/2021 coefficients, Sevilla are at 10th, ahead of Arsenal (11), Chelsea ( 12), Tottenham ( 14), Inter Milan (26) or AC Milan ( 53), all of which would have had guaranteed places in the Super League. Ajax are 17th, for reference.

So, all in all, not that bad to have 2 extra clubs that were successful recently. It could be Arsenal, it could be Sevilla or Ajax or Atalanta.

3x based on the sources [1][2]

I think the biggest selling point was the lack of relegation which removes the huge risk and 32.5% guaranteed share of the tv and advertising for the founding 15 plus additional 32.5% for the 20.

[1] https://www.marca.com/en/football/international-football/202...

[2] https://www.givemesport.com/1677624-european-super-league-ev...

Relegation isn't really a concern for the clubs involved, though not qualifying for the champions league certainly is

I was referring to the lack of a relegation within The Super League.

Yeah I got that. But I don't think that was a driver for these clubs wanting to form the super league, as they wouldn't be worried about relegation (and its financial implications) in their domestic leagues any way.

Compare that with the English rugby premiership where they want to ring fence the league so that none of the teams can be relegated, and it very much is driven by the financial implications of being relegated. (Of course they will wait until one of the biggest clubs gets promoted again, after being relegated due to fragrantly breaching spending rules)

Generally, it would be a franchise, like the US system.

Guaranteed placement in the league, no risk of demotion.

And always having games between well-known high-level clubs, no games against smaller clubs that don't bring in the attention.

>Guaranteed placement in the league, no risk of demotion.

I can see it from the clubs point of view, but the risk of demotion adds excitement. Imagine the NFL if the two worst teams got demoted.

Unsurprisingly[1], Ted Lasso addressed this in a great way:

Player: Coach, do they not have relegation in America?

Ted: Oh, no, no, no.

Player: So what happens to all the shit teams at the end of the season?

Ted: They play out the rest of the schedule, going through the motions in meaningless games contested in lifeless, half-empty stadiums, and everyone's pretty much fine with that.

1. I swear, this is the most relatable non-current-events-driven show anyone has done in years.

This was the thing that killed it for me[0]: if you can't be relegated where's the incentive to bring your A game? And where does that leave fans? Even more ripped off than they are now by teams who, under the new system, simply can't be arsed because there are no consequences?

[0] Not that I'm particularly a fan of soccer - the English-style long-ball (aka hit and hope) game with possession carelessly given away all the time drives me up the wall to watch (admittedly much less in evidence under Gareth Southgate at the 2018 World Cup). There's also too much diving and associated on pitch drama/gamesmanship that has nothing to do with playing, and disrupts the flow of matches, for me to find it particularly enjoyable.

And that's exactly what makes US football different from European football (soccer as some call it). Yes, major teams enjoy a de facto superstar status, and the US model is exactly what they had in mind with the ESL. But here even the matches between minor teams live from the fans of the minor teams, as football is here not only for the show but a part of community life. Even big teams still have that community status and that's exactly what burned them now.

These are the largest clubs in UK and Europe. They is no risk of demotion but rather a risk of not qualifying to the Champions League, which in practice is both a planning and financial problem and a disappointment to fans.

In the UK only the top 4 in the Premier League qualify for the Champions League. So at least 2 of the 6 clubs that signed up for the ESL lose out every single year, which means very unpredictable income and matches.

So I perfectly understand why they want a bit more certainty and a guarantee to bring top games to fans every year.

I'm not into football so I understand much less why fans were so opposed to this. And I am also shocked that the PM wanted to intervene within 24 hours of the announcement on an issue that seems completely private and irrelevant compared to all the issues the country is facing.

> And I am also shocked that the PM wanted to intervene within 24 hours of the announcement on an issue that seems completely private and irrelevant compared to all the issues the country is facing.

I'm not a UK citizen but I follow UK politics, and to me Johnson's actions here are perfectly on brand.

> And I am also shocked that the PM wanted to intervene within 24 hours of the announcement on an issue that seems completely private and irrelevant compared to all the issues the country is facing.

I remember a conversation I had about the UK economy years ago, before Brexit.

London doesn't seem to be much of a financial hub anymore, so football and English royalty are the two main exports the UK has to offer the world these days.

Fans are opposed because it's the final straw of their clubs being turned in to money making corporations rather than about football.

Boris Johnson is opposed because the conservatives gained a lot of northern working class seats in the last election and they want to keep them. Happy as I am to criticize him and his party, I'm not sure why they shouldn't deal with this as well as the other issues

Because that ESL would pull most of the money from other leagues. At the moment also smaller teams have chance to compete in Champions League and even smaller sucess in first qualification rounds brings enough money to small team to try very hard to get into it next year. This, on the other hand, fuels and improves quality of teams in smaller european countries. All the money is distributed across more teams. This is not something big teams look for, of course.

> All the money is distributed across more teams.

And this is very important for the future of the sport. Without a portion of the money being funneled like this to the smaller teams there is no space for future talent to grow.

In Europe we effectively do not have collage sports so we have to actually pay our athletes in the lower levels so they can keep on improving until they are good enough to join the top level (or just keep on playing at that level if they already peaked as a good opponents for new talent to train against)

They would get an initial ~€300M for signing on [1], then a further €130-200M per year [2]. That presumably doesn't include matchday income, which could be a lot higher per match than now due to the higher quality opposition / teams involved. This would also presumably grow alongside the popularity of the competition.

Right now Premier league clubs get around €100M from broadcasting rights [3: this source is from a few years ago but gives a good breakdown of the clubs' income]. Broadcasting income is a lot lower in Spain and Italy, hence those clubs needing the ESL more. The ESL clubs planned to continue in their own domestic leagues too.

Here is a breakdown of the Champion's league money (which the ESL proposed to replace): [4]. Each decent team which reached the knockouts (so most of the teams involved in the ESL) would earn around €40M, with the winner earning around €80M. So winning the Champion's league would be worth less than simply competing in the ESL.

This all doesn't include sponsorship money.

Edit: I also want to note that of the 6 English teams, only 4 can qualify for the Champion's league every year. The others usually go to the less lucrative Europa league, for which the payout for winning is less than for simply participating in the Champion's league. This year those clubs were Tottenham and Arsenal - so even more benefit for those two clubs.

1: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/20/business/money-european-s...

2: https://www.givemesport.com/1678145-european-super-league-ho...

3: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/may/22/premier-lea...

4: https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/how-much-money-champions-lea...

There were reports in the press that the winner of the existing Champions League makes less money than the ESL would have guaranteed each member, just for competing.

Edit: Just looked up another report that says that every club would get 100 million Euros, just for competing, while in the Champions League (which you have to qualify for) your base line is 15 million Euros.

Which then raises the question, where was all this extra money going to come from?

3.5 billion from J.P. Morgan for a start, and in the future all those T.V. rights (no need to share money with the lesser clubs), many more matches (ESL proposed a league system as a first round, so many more games), and all kinds of merchandising and...

So cannibalising all smaller clubs to make the big ones bigger, to the sole benefit of shareholders.

I think I won't mind this scheme collapsing.

As Matt Levine pointed out today, the JP Morgan money is a loan with a 2-3% interest rate. They worded it in a really weird way, presumably for PR reasons, but it was just a loan

I think it's obvious that J.P. Morgan won't simply donate the money. I had assumed they'd take an ownership stake, but the loan makes more sense. Thanks for that info!

Don't forget that the ESL would have bypassed the UEFA, which would probably have freed a lot of cash to be redistributed to the clubs.

There's a reason the UEFA was so outraged at the proposal.

Football is the most popular sport on earth.

The idea has been, presumably, to acquire much more TV licensing money from outside Europe, where people are not so much interested in the smaller "local" clubs; so they would pay more for seeing high-profile clubs against each other all the time.

In comparison: in current leagues, each team plays each other team twice per year. If you have only 2-3 internationally known top clubs (like in the German Bundesliga), that adds up to 2 to 8 "top games" in a season.

Also, these top clubs in the ESL would distribute all that additional money among themselves instead of sharing it with the smaller ones.

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