Europe’s Super League scores an own goal
economist.com
economist.com
I hate the ESL/NBA concept for football, but something still has to be done to reduce these excesses. Financial Fair Play has not worked well enough for top clubs, the market for players remains fundamentally inflated by a handful of oligarchs. I hope that UEFA takes the legitimacy capital earned this week to make some real changes in this area.
Few people would let such an opportunity lie on a pavement without picking it up, especially given the fact that the recollections of the Great Depression were still within living memory.
Some of the big clubs have basically been financially mismanaged for years, but it's not about "football" it's about Juventus, Real Madrid etc.
I wish we'd use salary caps (but those are trivial to hack around) and max transfer caps (ditto) and reduced shortlists with a mandatory % of youths. And surely the UEFA can be managed better.
But the truth is these clubs are the "badly managed too big too fail bank" of football.
Plus, I assume a salary cap wouldn't be EU compliant.
Financial Fair Play was initially conceived as a way to basically create such caps informally (since clubs would not be supposed to spend beyond their means) but it was then implemented to effectively be a moat for currently-rich clubs; in that form, it was eventually destroyed by the sheikh owner of Manchester City. If UEFA were to try again to build a sincere level-playing field for rich and poor clubs alike, I reckon governments and judges wouldn't stand in the way ("sport law" is a bit of a grey area in practice).
Whether a cap is a "financial transfer from players to ownership", really depends on how the surplus is then channelled. If it goes towards actual development of the club and the sport (better long-term financial investments to keep clubs solvent, higher solidarity payments down the pyramids, more money for academies, etc), I wouldn't see it as objectionable.
Any salary cap needs to include revenue sharing agreements between the players and ownership to remotely work, and even then it's pretty touch and go. The NHL and NBA both have strong salary caps and have faced multiple lockouts in the past few decades.
As an aside, I am not surprised to see this spearheaded by Real Madrid and Juventus. I am however a bit surprised to not see Barcelona take a more active role, seeing how their financial peril seems to possibly be the worst out of the lot.
In theory Real Madrid has similar constraints, but Florentino Perez, over the years, has developed an iron grip that is very hard to remove (he can/could guarantee massive loans from friends in the banking system, which are then used to buy the “galactico” players that members crave).
The Agnelli/Elkann family owns Juventus outright. As far as I know, no Italian club has “democratic” elements - a few are publicly floated but most are just private businesses.
It's simply mismanagement. You do not need to buy every promising player to be successful.
It is also not the job of all other European teams to bail you out.
You're looking at the wrong league table. The owners don't care about winning that league, they care about winning this league: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes%27_list_of_the_most_val....
The ESL claims to be a league of the best, but the ranking it actually conforms to is a league of the "valuable, but in debt" teams (seriously, check the ranking on wikipedia).
If you'd want to have a closed league of the best teams, why are there (internationally speaking) third rate teams like Tottenham, whereas there were zero German or French teams?
What was the CL final last year? Bayern and PSG?
Well, you say, they tried to invite them. However, Bayern and PSG are interested in making money. Nobody in France or Germany would be happy with a league comprised mostly of British teams, calling itself "best in Europe". How do you sell that to the largest countries in the EU?
One thing the premier league teams do better is international marketing. British teams are more likely to be known in China, India and the US. This is, in the end, where the money would come from. Again, fewer incentives for French and German teams.
Nevertheless, if it would have gone past the pesky "legacy fans", it would have been profitable as a show competition for international audiences.
But it did not get past the local fans, because it did not even have the slightest plan of appeasing British fans, nor the slightest fan of inciting German and French teams to join.
It's discussed elsewhere why this was a transparent money grab. Perhaps more insulting is how badly it was executed!
Clearly, it's the same for football clubs that's been around for decades.
They seem to have forgotten what their fans like about them. What they pay for.
That's an expensive mistake for any company.
But at the end of they day, if the fans are gone nothing else remains.
Being American, I'd tend to think about minor league baseball as comparison. You put a team in every whistle-stop town, with $5-10 tickets and "free bat night". Families could attend several games a year and the kids grow up with baseball as part of their life. Maybe once or twice they go to a big league game at $200 per seat.
Similarly, you've got people whose families who have supported the same third-division football team through generations of direct attendance.
A sport with major leagues only has a very different model for building relationships with a new generations of fans. It's something they're really only experiencing through TV, and I wonder if that will have the same degree of customer connection. It works for the NFL and NBA but they're much more telegenic games than baseball is.
But they are all within the same football governing body and you can climb these leagues up to the Bundesliga or premier league or whatever.
In the '80/90s the Champion's Cup was won by Red Star Belgrade, Porto, Hamburg, Steaua Bucarest, Aston Villa, Olympique Marseille, Ajax, PSV etc in addendum do the "big ones".
Then the big clubs bullied the UEFA and the local leagues into giving them more and more money in proportion, and changing the rules so they'd basically never be excluded.
This latest attempt is just another step towards a future where the reality of the small team getting to the top needs to be completely erased in the interest of the big teams.
People see Super League as some sort of failure. This is a free market success. The fans reign supreme through the power of their wallets.
If you take the profit away, you risk misaligned incentives.
That kills the brand after a while, young people will stop watching and ultimately sports will die with that strategy.
If billionaires are desparate to become even more billionairy, I'm sure they can go invest in sausages, car engines, microprocessors or nylon plants instead.
Plus, I'm not so sure about the causation you suggest either. Many other countries approach a 50+1 approach, but I'll just comment on Sweden, which I am most familiar with. There sure is no dominance of that kind at play in Sweden.
The disparity between the Premier League teams and the other leagues is huge already. ESL was meant to shorten that gap.
Some American sports teams clash every year and the buildup each year is still huge. We're talking powers in their respective sports that have played each other for almost 100 consecutive seasons, even at the collegiate level. Texas vs. Oklahoma, Auburn vs. Alabama, Ohio State vs. Michigan... even when the teams are doing less than stellar, there's still a gigantic buildup and anticipation for these games because of the rivalries involved. Being on the same level and having that familiarity makes the games more fun to watch and it makes the teams more competitive with each other.
As to the likelihoods of this happening, the premature and hamfisted attempt to roll it out, together with the severe backlash, will make it very difficult to try again any time in the next decade or two at least.
They want to see an underdog BEAT a global power. Which means that the average game is a bitter disappointment. Gone long enough, the ESL would have presented a gigantic competitive advantage for its own teams when vying for star talent. And they're still likely to do it in the future anyway. They just needed a longer runway.
If the Premier League can't have its "tradition" without Man U and Man City, then it isn't tradition that they care about in the first place.
And it is hard to appreciate how good a team is without seeing them play against worse teams. Similarly from the bad teams side it is fun seeing them just make a single goal against a good team, you don't have to win.
They absolutely do. It keeps the big teams honest, and it keeps the dream alive for the tiny clubs. A game between two top teams can be great, but it's not everything.
I heard many fans praising soccer because "anything can happen" and "even a small team can beat a big one". While I don't know whether this is true, I think any move away from this core idea will not sit well with the fans. And good luck getting the casual viewers to pay enough to offset the difference.
In the last 25 years, only 5 were won by EPL teams. La Liga has 11. Serie A and the Bundesliga have 4 each.
https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/mw8jqp/tv_money_dis...
The reasons the later rounds in the champions league are so great is because the teams so rarely play each other, and also there's the outside chance that a team like Ajax will surprise you and beat one of the giants.
I agree that the ESL has only been postponed, but when it arrives I don't think it will be here to stay.
Besides which, the genesis of ESL has nothing to do with which teams play each other. It's because the bigger teams have dug themselves deep financial holes - to be fair to them partially due to the lack of things like a salary cap - that they want to get out of.
As others have said you're completely wrong in saying that "people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL". I'm not saying that nobody does, but they're a very different kind of fan than the people who buy season tickets.
It wasn’t the case earlier. Between 2008 and 2012, English clubs did extremely well. That time can come again. Even right now, 2 of the 4 European semi-finalists are English teams, one of whom isn’t even doing that well in the domestic league. That does not strike me as a struggling league.
The real advantage that Barcelona, Real Madrid and others have is the lopsided way they allocate domestic broadcasting revenue. The English league splits it equally, for most part. This leads to an extremely competitive domestic league. In Spain, the big 3 clubs gobble the lions share of the TV revenue, leading to boring, easy games for them and more money to spend on players compared to the English. In the long run, the English strategy is superior - it leads to a more interesting League that draws more viewers.
The hegemony of big money in football needs to be broken.
Maybe not every day, but that is exactly the motivation for the Cups (FA Cup, DFB-Pokal etc.): you have small clubs you rarely hear about play against the giants.
And sometimes (surprisingly often actually), the small clubs win. Not the whole cup. But they win once. Or twice, and it's great drama and a lot of fun.
The ESL encourages what you say people don't want. As founders can't be relegated they play every year even if they currently have a bad squad. The current UCL ensures the top teams in Europe the previous season compete.
Americans here cannot grasp the huge difference between the European top 10 clubs and the rest. In american sports teams are much closer to each other.
90 min of very little action. Most of the discussion happens around the games (Sports journalists in Football will lose their job to GPT-3 mark my words).
Most of the talk was generated by needless controversy/drama (not exclusive to that sport, sure, but see the discussions on how VAR would "end" football)
Sports need to adapt to the new times or lose audience.
It's like a boxing match. The formations are constantly jockeying for tactical advantage, taking calculated risks, outplaying and outsmarting each other on a micro scale etc. [1] Perhaps it's boring for someone who doesn't care about that and only wants to see goals scored.
[1] Of course, this is most true in a match of two top teams, the less skill involved the more the match starts to remind a pinball game - i.e. with much less tactics and control, and much more of just reacting and randomness.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/21/jp-morgan-c...
This was 100% about money and 0% about sport.
They forgot they exist, because of the fans not the other way around.
European football is not guaranteed for any team at the moment, you need to finish in the top places of your domestic league to qualify.
The ESL guaranteed European football for a some teams, making the domestic leagues less important as it doesn’t get you access to European football, and also stops growth of smaller teams (how do they get into the ESL etc).
For me it was a grab by the top teams to de-risk their financials by having guaranteed European football, nothing to do with seeing the best teams play each other etc (if they are the best they’d meet in champions league..).
I guess it would be like if 10 teams said we are making our own playoffs or something, and no other teams can join our playoffs unless we let them, the regular season is suddenly worthless (sorry if this is a terrible analogy - I don’t really know American sports).
I couldn't judge your analogy, as a Swede I too know very little of American sports. I know they say football but don't mean it, and that's about all I know.
Concretely, the ESL wouldn't be a sporting competition, it would be an entertainment spectacle.
When there is nothing to lose in terms of relegation or missed qualification for performing poorly across one or several seasons, we are no longer dealing with a competitive sport.
And football fans, i.e. the grassroots, don't typically take kindly to attempts at crafting new artificial rivalries and watering out those rare, big occasion games by playing them with absurd frequency.
Add to that the frankly quite disgusting narrative of "doing this to save football" and it's just a perfect shitstorm, really.
The “problem” with the closed-league concept is that it removes the hope, for supporters, that ”life will get better”. The football pyramid is the European version of the American Dream; turning the top competition in a closed league would be like amending the US constitution to introduce castes: everyone knows it wouldn’t be that different from the status quo, in terms of actual social mobility, but taking away for good the possibility would be an affront to the cultural fabric of society.
The bonus of winning the league would have been minuscule compared to the profits from merely participating (and this goes only for the founding members).
Hence it would have definitely reduced competition.
The ESL would have been a show league, possibly even more so than the American leagues from which it took the ideas.
This was an all too transparent money grab.
Yes, the most annoying factor was that it cut off the Football pyramid and would have had incredibly negative consequences consequences for all other teams and countries.
However, even if you are a fan of the participating teams, I wonder how long you’d be excited watching a league where winning is a sidequest.
It’s just bad all around.
It's even worse that that since there are incentives to finishing near the bottom of the table since it gives you access to better players in the next season via the draft. There are several occasions where bottom ranked teams have been accused of throwing late season games so they can finish even lower in the tables.
That's why it's deemed "not competitive" by European standards.
On the other hand if you look at the diversity of teams that have made it to the Super Bowl the past 20 years and compare that to the diversity of teams that have finished in the top two in the EPL or La Liga the past 20 years, then it looks a lot more competitive.
Now, naturally, "fans" is a bit different concept in North America, as they're typically peons who start cheering for their newly relocated team because they have a funny logo.
The top 12 teams would play each other every year regardless of past seasons performance (some other teams would be invited each year, but the selection process wasn’t disclosed), there was no sense that clubs would earn the right to play in the league.