You can also just disable javascript for the site and it lets you read the full article. This trick works on a ton of other news sites as well. It's fairly easy to disable just for one domain...e.g. on chrome, click URL bar lock icon -> site settings -> javascript: disabled.
The dynamics of this is quite fascinating. As a startup, figuring out what your product actually is - what is it your customers _actually_ pay for - can be challenging.
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.
I don't think the local fans really made a difference here. All the Super League teams are global franchises, and it was the threats from broadcasters (who they depend on for revenue) and governments that torpedoed the projects.
Yeah, well, that's where the fascinating dynamics kick in. The "customers" for the clubs are of many different kinds. The sponsors are one, the broadcasters another. The list is long and they are connected with each other in a complex web.
But at the end of they day, if the fans are gone nothing else remains.
Football in the UK can be quite political at times, especially around issues of ownership and regulation. There is a set of elections coming up in May and this was probably why the UK's prime minister threatened to use a "legislative bomb". Football fans are also voters, after all, and even people who don't watch the sport don't want bad things to happen to it.
I am not sure we have all the information yet, it seems entirely possible that Boris Johnson and Ed Woodward’s meeting in the run up to the announcement was to ensure the government were on side.
I wonder if there's a different "customer development" process you get with multiple leagues.
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.
the thing people seem to have forgotten is that reality _was_ different until 20 years ago, when the powerful clubs pushed for the creation of the Champions League, then for unbalanced dividends that rewarded the already powerful, then killed the Cup Winner's Cup.
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.
That's right. There was a literal football school in Moscow that got a good coach and shot from division 4 to division 3 to division 2, finished third last year, but didn't get to fight for promotion to the top division because of Covid.
This is campaigning. You show decision-makers why they should make the decision you want them to and sometimes that includes playing into the decision-maker’s self-interest.
Profit margins in football (where profits exist at all) are nowhere near large enough to suffer interruptions to either broadcast _or_ match day revenue, so I don’t think this is an either/or thing.
They haven't really "forgotten" in the traditional sense. It is more a case of the present leadership of billionaire investors breaking the hundred-year lineage and representing a new, tone-deaf and usurped versions of the clubs.
Sooner or later the ESL will happen. Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL. They want to watch the top teams competing together.
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.
There are still important matches between pairs of top teams every year as it is now. ManU plays Liverpool 2+ times. Madrid vs Barca probably 4 times or so. But with ESL, every match would be between the dirty dozen. Then it loses its charm.
Yes, every matchup would be with teams that have accumulated a ton of elite talent and know each other well enough that they will have to compete harder if they want to win. I will never understand European purists and their desire to watch a lesser product for tradition's sake. When Louisiana State University plays The University of Alabama in a game of American Football on the first weekend in November every single year, the worst that they've ever done in TV ratings is the same as Liverpool vs. Man City's record viewership. This is a game of two elite amateur teams, mind you, that happen to be in the same division in the same conference (I guess you could call it a regional league).
As you said it's tradition which people value here and football teams are not seen as products, they are your like cultural centers, what often defines your community.
Tradition is cheap. It's especially funny to see fans of lesser EPL teams up in arms given that the EPL itself is just a smaller iteration of the ESL. Nobody watching the EPL today wants to go back to the old way of doing things. The same thing would happen with the ESL.
It's more about what's at stake. Nobody cares about the Lakers playing the Clippers in game 35 of the regular season, it's all about the playoffs, i.e. when they're playing for the championship.
You're wrong. A lot of people want to see underdogs in the UCL. (And the new UCL format should provide a good mix of both underdog matches and matches between top teams)
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.
Seeing a good team beat a bad team is fun. I've watched soccer where everyone knew "our" team would win, the question was if it would win small like 4-0 or big like 10-0. Watching sports isn't just about the suspense over who will win, there is so much more to it than that.
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.
A great team proves themselves by beating great competition, not bad competition. Anyone can throttle a punching dummy. I don't know why people sit there and pretend like if you put the 12 squads together in their own league that the games would all be evenly matched. That's never the case. It's much more interesting for most people for a game to be close than to watch a blowout with an overmatched opponent.
> Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL.
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 think your analysis describes the casual viewer more than the fan. Sure, the Lazio fan may watch Barcelona vs Manchester if their team didn't make it and they want to know how the season ends. But I'm suspicious that they would pay to watch a league in which they have no personal investment.
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.
I think this is akin to children wishing everyday was their birthday. Watching Juventus vs Man City for the 6th time in one year would get boring very quickly.
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.
There are other ways of shortening that gap without creating such a disconnection between teams and their respective leagues, such as salary caps, 51% fan ownership and proper financial regulations that aren't as much of a joke as FFP.
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.
Interestingly, the fans were some of the harshest critics of this attempt. Personally, and I don't watch much football, the tale of a town-level team winning against a national champion (and that happens every once in a while) makes the sport better rather than worse.
> The disparity between the Premier League teams and the other leagues is huge already
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.
I think you interpreted GP in the opposite way: the Premier League is _ahead_ of other leagues, as it has way more money and has acted as a drag for talent for many years.
What are you talking about? Since the Premier League was created in 1993 four teams (Man Utd, Chelsea, Man City, Arsenal) have won 25 of the 28 titles.
> Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL.
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.
> Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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"
A closed you can't loose American round robin competition does not appeal to soccer fans - we want to see clubs doing poorly get relegated and those that play well have a chance to compete in the champions league.
What this attempt really revealed, IMHO, is how desperate for fresh cash a lot of these top clubs are. In particular, Juventus and Real Madrid (and Manchester United while the Glazer looters stay at the helm) have monstrous debts that risk destroying them as soon as they don’t dominate any competition for a few years. This is what they are saying when they talk about “saving football”: Florentino Perez and Andrea Agnelli are genuinely trying to save their clubs from self-destruction. Their sense of entitlement is such that they cannot fathom renouncing their position (i.e. selling big players and being weaker for some time), but they know sooner or later the debts will be due.
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.
Sadly it shows how far the sport has moved from the founding principles when playing for money was considered dirty and caused even arguments between football clubs across UK, about 100 years ago.
A lot has changed with the advent of TV. Suddenly you could have millions and millions of fans instead of thousands. And a corresponding advertising opportunity.
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.
Perez, Agnelli and others have often mentioned "football can't go without this", but what they mean is "I can't go on like this".
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.
Surely a salary cap would only benefit the big club owners? Unless you count non-consequence for financial mismanagement of the biggest clubs as a win.
If the cap is per-team, it would stop top clubs from building “galactico” teams packed with superstars: if you spend a ton on Ronaldo you then have to pay peanuts for other team members. This is basically the NBA model, where any franchise can typically afford a superstar only in one or two roles. Hence why very few NBA franchises have historically managed to win back-to-back titles for several years: every season you have to cut corners somewhere.
Not that I'm a big advocate of the players' economy or anything, but effectively a salary cap is a financial transfer from the players to the ownership, no?
Plus, I assume a salary cap wouldn't be EU compliant.
On a per-player basis no, it wouldn't be legal. But IMHO it must be doable in other ways; Formula1 for example has just introduced one, and I've not heard any noise about getting challenged from drivers or engineers.
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.
The F1 spending cap excludes driver and executive pay, so it's not surprising the drivers are not squawking.
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.
I think most probably the situation will sort itself out. If clubs such as Real Madrid finally implode, then football will remain ever as strong. Those players will just go somewhere else and a different club will start to win championships. And really, as money are involved, I do have to expect that no matter what your name is, there has got to be a point where the loan givers and stakeholders finally have had enough.
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.
Barcelona’s ownership model is weaker than Real or Juventus: directors depend on actual club member-owners who can vote them out. As such, they are forced to keep an ear to the ground - which is why the Barça top-man, Juan Laporta, negotiated an extra clause in their ESL contract to subordinate their joining to popular acceptance via a vote. Hence why they kept a low profile: Laporta got back on top only two months ago, after the previous board was basically kicked out in disgrace; he’s still too weak to make big waves.
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.
Given the fact that teams like Bayern Munich, who also win the champions league regularly, have zero debt, I am less sympathetic to teams like Real Madrid, Barca or Juventus.
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.
But that is basically anti value, how much money they managed to suck out of the economy. If you can have the same soccer but society pays less money for it wouldn't that be better? It isn't like there is a lack of players.
one of the interesting outcomes of this kerfuffle is how JPMorgan got a downgrade in ESG ratings[0] because they financed this.
Oddly enough, the teams themselves which are traded didn't, maybe they just had not had a grading before.
A previous discussion of this topic was flagged. I think this link is better because it compares the economic models of American and European sports teams. That’s interesting for a general audience, not merely sports fans.
In 2000 some basketball clubs split off, made another league and FIBA was furious. FIBA managed to keep only 3-4 top clubs so basketball was split between the Euroleague (which had most top clubs) and FIBA's Suproleague which was the poor relative. After 1 year FIBA scrapped the Suproleague altogether and only the Euroleague remained. The Euroleague has been running as a closed league since then.
International basketball leagues in Europe are a mess, they went through several schisms and, if i remember correctly, some of them now work on an invite basis. You can reach the top rings of a national league and still don’t get into the European competition you’d deserve simply because you’re judged “not big enough”. The contrast between our system and the NBA has always been stark, but at least in the past century this could be justified by a love of competition; now it just shows that the European game is run by amateurs and bureaucrats.
The wider issue here is whether football clubs should even be run as for-profit corporations. It seems wrong that the owners of a club would regard a "successful season" as one in which they made the most money, rather than the one where they actually won stuff.
part of the problem is the opposite: the clubs have dug themselves in a hole financially attempting to actually win something (think of Juventus in the last couple years wasting a ton of money while failing to achieve any international success).
Entertainment is fundamentally one of the simplest forms of enterprise. One party has disposable income and gives it to another party for completely non essential services. The incentives align perfectly. If there was ever a market that should run as a for profit entity, it’s football.
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.
No, more profits doesn't mean more entertainment. People who are addicted to football pay a lot for it, increasing prices wont make them happier, increasing ads wont make them happier etc. You are basically increasing profits to make worse entertainment, having it not be profit seeking is so much better for the viewers.
You're missing the point: the fact that people are willing to pay a lot means that there is a large incentive to provide the best level of entertainment.
If you take the profit away, you risk misaligned incentives.
No, capitalism doesn't work for front brand loyalty situations. Sure in theory building a good brand should be worth it, but that isn't what is happening here, the money grubbers came in long after the brand was built, changed it into a money making machine and the poor souls who got addicted to the brand now gets as much money as possible extracted from them.
That kills the brand after a while, young people will stop watching and ultimately sports will die with that strategy.
Yeah. Clearly the 50+1 rule, as seen in Germany for instance, is a superior approach.
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.
The reality of the 50+1 rule is Bayern Munich dominating forever. Even if it were possible to extract the current owners from English football, 50+1 would really just solidify the current ‘big six’ even further with other teams very unlikely to be able to raise investment and break in. That may well still be preferable, but I’m not sure it’s the utopia people are picturing.
They're dominating because they're the best, then. Not sure why it would be preferable to have rubber band mechanics.
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.
In Sweden, the biggest clubs are less likely to retain the best talent, which keeps this more in check. That's less true in the big 5, from which the ESL would have been drawn. The German Bundesliga is an incredibly stale competition, for example. But hey, so is Ligue 1. I'm not really arguing either way, I just think people should be careful what they wish for, and there are plenty of clubs that are happy with their ownership.
The Champions League cannot compete with ubiquitous Netflix/Youtube. It will have to be replaced or radically change. The ESL's demise points to the latter.
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.
I'd argue even deeper than that. Football (Soccer) is boring. It is even more boring nowadays. (Sill less boring than Baseball but that's a discussion for another time ;) )
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.
I think another reason this did not happen is that the clubs who participated were not distributed well throughout Europe.
This also goes in terms of audience.
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!
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadClearly, 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.
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.
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.
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....
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/21/jp-morgan-c...
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.
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.
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!