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Comment by amarant | Hacker News Reader

What were fans, media and governments upset about? What was wrong with ESL? i don't get it...

European football is seen as the most prestigious tournament, and also has significant financial rewards for just getting into it.

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).

Ah gotcha, didn't know about those guaranteed spots!

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.

Where to even begin?

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.

I don’t like the closed-league concept, but to say that it means “we are no longer dealing with a competitive sport” is clearly not true. Are you going to tell me LeBron James is not practicing a competitive sport? Of course he is.

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.

On this proposal, incomes of the clubs in the ESL would not have depended on winning.

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.

Do people care about second, third... last place in nfl, nba etc? After all, it hardly matters. No trophy, didn't cost your team a qualification to a more prestigious tournament. No relegation to avoid. What do even the middle of the pack teams play for in the US system? I don't get it all. That's why it's deemed "not competitive" by European standards.

Last place is big deal when relegation might happen. That option being there leads to bitter fight and the last games at end of the season really do matter to fans.

Players (and coaches, managers etc) play for themselves - to get a better contract with a more prestigious team, to become popular enough to command rich personal-sponsorship contracts, and eventually to get closer to the chance of winning actual “rings”. That’s why a lot of US fans are actually supporting a given player rather than “the shirt”, in reverse proportion to the European tradition. It’s still a hard and extremely selective competition.

What do even the middle of the pack teams play for in the US system? I don't get it all.

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.

Obviously "competitive sport" is a continuum in this sense. And clearly, LeBron James places in a very artificial environment. By design, the NBA is a league where millionaire players are serfs without a say in where they live, and where poorly managed teams get rewarded by high draft picks. It's great for the people who designed it. But those people are not the fans.

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 endgame of the ESL is to make enough money to leave those other leagues and just have an elite european soccer league full of the very best players and coaches. The fans would get over it. This sort of thing has happened repeatedly in American sports, and the result has always been positive.

I don't think any European football fan thinks your leagues are positive. So owners can move AC Milan to Budapest when they see a market (since you can't qualify) and call it AC Budapest Raiders? It's not competitive sport, it's cheap showbiz with hot dogs.

I think it's quite funny that you think that competitive sport can be accomplished when one team spends $25M on their entire team and another spends $20M on a single star player.

Leicester was not too long ago not in premiere league, now they constantly spend 25 mil a player. There are plenty of teams who do that and clubs absolutely do reborn from ashes. Nothing like that with ESL.

The vast majority of clubs in the EPL can't afford to spend like that and stay financially afloat.

It was an invite only league with no relegation.

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.

Money.

This was 100% about money and 0% about sport.

They forgot they exist, because of the fans not the other way around.

The most important issue was that it was supposed to be a closed league. Promotion and relegation are key in european sports leagues. Closed franchises are just not acceptable for european audiences.

Basically it was a power grab from the big club owners (most of them billionaires) to wall garden their status and try to save their poorly run finances + destroying the essence of the game about the merits of reach the maximum competition (the Champions League) through the national leagues. Also, trying to establish the American Model of sports doesn't work well when the teams where created a century ago by the communities and are not just "franchises"

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