European Super League announced; collapses

[DavidMarrio]

I do think people would be naive to think if other teams were asked to have been in it they would have. E.g if someone had gone to Wolves here you are wanna be part of this they would have. 

End of the day we've been in a period of football being very much a business and it's nothing new. You've got people wanting to own football clubs to get a share of the cake for different reasons whether it's money, whether it's part of a portfolio, whether its sportswashing etc. It's been the course for over 10/20 years. 

I do think the Champions League needs reforming. And hopefully people go against these new reforms. That's the next step not just a well we don't want a ESL let's all stop. Fans need to come together to fight change. 

10 minutes ago, metalman said:

 

The general incompetence of Spurs despite the tremendous advantages thrown their way doesn't really disprove my point. Nor does anecdotal evidence. 

There is almost an absolute correlation between the teams with the highest wage bills and the teams that qualify from the group stage. If that's not boring and predictable I don't know what it is. The same teams are almost always in the quarter finals and semi-finals every year.

The thing is what's boring for you isn't boring for others. Jimmy and a lot of the Spurs fans will have great memories of the run they had to the final in 2018 and other times they've had in the competition. I'm the same I've had plenty of great memories with the group stages etc. 

End of the day they're fans, they're not part of the business side of how the club's ran or what they've done. None of us are. You get dull league games, you get dull league's where it's the same team winning it virtually every year. You get dull Champions League games. That's sport. There's high level of excitement and sometimes excruciating levels of boredom. What some people like is different for everyone. 

I don't know exactly how you want  to change. Do you want every club to get given a set budget and amount of wages across a competition? Do you just suddenly take away money from the rich clubs and give it to the other teams in a competition? It's a difficult position. 

If West Ham finish 4th good for them. It's earnt. If we miss out, sound we didn't earn it. Come back next time and try and get it. 

I do think on the same hand it's pretty much turning back into tribalism of "you're a fan of the big 6 you don't appreciate a, b, c" which of course I do. Just because I'm not a fan of The Dog and Bone FC doesn't mean I can't appreciate and understand things. 

[METALMAN]

1 minute ago, DavidMarrio said:

The thing is what's boring for you isn't boring for others. Jimmy and a lot of the Spurs fans will have great memories of the run they had to the final in 2018 and other times they've had in the competition. I'm the same I've had plenty of great memories with the group stages etc. 

End of the day they're fans, they're not part of the business side of how the club's ran or what they've done. None of us are. You get dull league games, you get dull league's where it's the same team winning it virtually every year. You get dull Champions League games. That's sport. There's high level of excitement and sometimes excruciating levels of boredom. What some people like is different for everyone. 

I don't know exactly how you want  to change. Do you want every club to get given a set budget and amount of wages across a competition? Do you just suddenly take away money from the rich clubs and give it to the other teams in a competition? 

That's good, and I'm glad you got to have those moments. But shouldn't fans from outside England, Spain, Italy and Germany get to see teams from their country do the same? Or at the very least compete? In the 60s, 70s and 80s we saw teams from Scotland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Romania and Serbia win the European Cup alongside the teams from the big countries. That won't happen again any time soon, because the biggest countries and biggest clubs have taken more and more for themselves.

I don't mind boring games because teams aren't attacking or whatever. I do mind games that are boring because one club has a budget 100 times the other and the result is in no doubt.

And to be honest I don't know what I want to change. I don't mind there being a set of traditionally big clubs that win more often than others. But the gap we have now is obscene, and I'd like to see it reeled in a bit, at least to the extent that teams from smaller countries entering the tournament can have higher ambitions than parachuting into the Europa League. Salary caps? Homegrown restrictions? Maximum wages? Income redistribution? Sharing European places out more fairly? I really don't know, but something like that I guess.

[Lineker]

Quote

There are rumours that the players of Cádiz, who face Real Madrid tonight in La Liga, are planning some sort of t-shirt protest similar to the one we saw on Monday night with Leeds United players, prior to their match with Liverpool.

 

 

[JasonM]

As a Dutch football fan, I can say that the past few years of CL/EL have been all but boring. Sure, dissapointed that Ajax weren't able to get a title when they had the chance, but the path there was exciting as hell.

I think one reform that would help is to cut down on the amount of guaranteed slots in the group stages. Just do away with the fact the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A can send 4(!) teams straight to the group stages every year, it's utter bollocks and further creates a financial divide.

Give the champions of the 8 (or even 16!) best domestic leagues a seeding for the group stages, then after the other qualifiers get into the group stages you shuffle them around unseeded. That way you already have champions from 8 different nations represented in the group stages. (currently that would be England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Netherlands, and Russia/Belgium) That's a very competitive spread of champions.

That gives a fair advantage to the champions of the champions league not having to face each other, whilst making it unpredictable and guaranteeing upsets and a random spread of 'death groups' and 'chaos groups' that can create a wide field of teams that make it into the final 32/16.

I think just that alone will make the CL more interesting, because one issue is just that too many teams are guaranteed their spot at the expense of 'lesser' league champions washing out before they even get into the group stages.

No guarantees, if anything, champions need to be given advantages over any other club, regardless of stature or league.

[DavidMarrio]

7 minutes ago, metalman said:

That's good, and I'm glad you got to have those moments. But shouldn't fans from outside England, Spain, Italy and Germany get to see teams from their country do the same? Or at the very least compete? In the 60s, 70s and 80s we saw teams from Scotland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Romania and Serbia win the European Cup alongside the teams from the big countries. That won't happen again any time soon, because the biggest countries and biggest clubs have taken more and more for themselves.

I don't mind boring games because teams aren't attacking or whatever. I do mind games that are boring because one club has a budget 100 times the other and the result is in no doubt.

And to be honest I don't know what I want to change. I don't mind there being a set of traditionally big clubs that win more often than others. But the gap we have now is obscene, and I'd like to see it reeled in a bit, at least to the extent that teams from smaller countries entering the tournament can have higher ambitions than parachuting into the Europa League. Salary caps? Homegrown restrictions? Maximum wages? Income redistribution? Sharing European places out more fairly? I really don't know, but something like that I guess.

No I agree wholy. I was made up seeing Ajax get to the semis and was hoping we would have got them in the final. 

I think unfortunately capitalism pretty much got a grip of "the big leagues" and emphasised a huge gap in TV deals, sponsorship and commercial deals compared to teams from countries you've mentioned. 

Maybe, coefficients from the big league's could be spread to other countries. So instead of 4 teams from England in the Champions League maybe it should be 2? I remember when the UEFA Cup wasnt viewed as Champions League lite. And the Cup Winners Cup meant something. UEFA haven't done themselves any favours 

 

I do think income redistribution is a good idea and teams getting a fairer share of the pie. Maybe the big league's could do something like give so much money to then be distributed to other countries league's and split from there. It is definetly a conversation that needs to happen and should happen. But what is the ideal plan is something that would take time to sort out

[JasonM]

On another note, I think making player registration harsher and more punitive might also help in avoiding 'superteams' from forming. If the homegrown rules were expanded to require more players to be from club and/or country, then this inherently can curb spending by big clubs (after all, you can't just sign 15 lads from abroad to build a team if 7 have to be residents), and also gives advantages to smaller clubs that have to rely more on their academy or domestic players to fill their team with.

I'm not fully for the idea, since the idea is inherently discriminatory in nature. But to at least force teams to have players for a set period of time before they can be registered might motivate teams to focus on long term teambuilding, rather than letting the elites to build and maintain superteams through mega-transfers. Knowing that a new player might not be CL eligible in their first year would already limit the attractiveness of mega-transfers.

Of course, that would also not be popular because you'd be actively stopping good players from competing among the best...

Another idea is a type of 1for1 system like the Serie A operates, but not base it around EU or nationalities. A new player can be immediately registered if you also sell on another previously registered player? This in turn forces teams to move a talent down the line so their shiny new galactico can be registered.

But fortunately I don't have to think up any of these rules to improve football, because it's genuinely a hard thing to do.

 

[METALMAN]

23 minutes ago, JasonM said:

I think one reform that would help is to cut down on the amount of guaranteed slots in the group stages. Just do away with the fact the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A can send 4(!) teams straight to the group stages every year, it's utter bollocks and further creates a financial divide.

Yeah, I think even that would be a good start.

And look, I'm not a total misery guts here. I like Klopp and his team and was happy to see them win. And Tottenham getting to their first Champions League final was great and the sort of thing we should be seeing more teams having the opportunity to do. I enjoyed last year's Champions League knockouts (probably because they were one leg which makes individual games a lot more meaningful and exciting). I will never tire of seeing Barcelona getting eight slung past them, even if it was another mega-super-giant that did it.But the long-term trends trouble me. I think a few years ago when Juventus got to the final and we were supposed to think of them as a plucky little underdog was the all-time low for me.

Anyway, this by Jonathan Wilson probably says it better than I can: https://www.si.com/soccer/2021/03/31/champions-league-future-format-expansion-swiss-system-criticism

With the exception of baseball I don't like American sports because they are boring, most of the teams are rootless and they have more advertising breaks than action. But there's something to admire about the way they attempt to maintain a reasonable level of parity between competitors. I'm not sure if any of their approaches would work outside a closed system though.

[Lineker]

 

[Hobo]

Listening back to The Anfield Wrap's show recorded last night about the Super League and the absolutely excellent point gets raised regarding the idea that younger people are less engaged with football that came out from some of the guys behind the Super League.

Young people can access Fortnite or FIFA or clips of games online but they might not have access to BT Sport or SkySports or wherever. If you set up barriers to accessing something of course less people will be engaged.

[Nerf]

@metalmanUsing the Spurs/Liverpool final, both of whom have spent less than Newcastle and Fulham, as your example of the financial advantage is a bit mad tbh.

There's an awful lot of (understandably) emotional hot takes here, but it's ultimately just distracting from the bigger picture. The only punishment for these clubs should be passing legislation for 50+1 to stop these vultures abusing their power again. United fans are as much victims of this as Leeds and Bury fans were of their owners, and as Newcastle fans are of their owners.

There's a fixation on the six clubs as if your Moshiris and Bradys and Ashleys of the world wouldn't have done exactly the same thing given half the chance. This isn't a "big six" problem, it's a fundamental problem with club ownership in football. It wasn't that long ago that the meme was you'd have to be an idiot to buy a football club because they just hemorrhage money, and there was an unspoken agreement that owners genuinely did the right thing most of the time (with a few notable exceptions). At some point in the last decade or so (I'd say it started with the Glazers) that suddenly changed.

Making it a tribal Big Clubs vs. The Rest thing is exactly what these owners want you to do because it takes attention away from the very urgent reform that English football needs from top to bottom. Besides, a lot of the proposed punishments will probably hurt smaller teams more than it hurts the six in question anyway.

[Malenko]

So, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus triple threat match for the first ESL title atm?

[Colly]

But then if those barriers are the method by which these billionaires make money how can they be taken down? It's not as if the Super League was going to free to air. Making football more affordable is absolutely the way to get young fans engaged (again, anecdotal, but my daughter gets bored watching it on TV but I've taken her to 3 cup games at £15 for the both of us and she's loved it), but this league was never going to do that.

[METALMAN]

12 minutes ago, Nerf said:

@metalmanUsing the Spurs/Liverpool final, both of whom have spent less than Newcastle and Fulham, as your example of the financial advantage is a bit mad tbh.

If that were true, which I doubt (I don’t recall Newcastle or Fulham breaking the record for the most expensive goalkeeper of all time), it’s beside the point anyway. The correlation is between wage bills and success, not transfer spending. I would imagine Spurs and Liverpool are able to spend several times more on wages than Newcastle and Fulham and wage bills amount to much more than transfer fees.

Not to mention that it wasn’t my chosen example. It arose in a discussion with a Liverpool fan and a Tottenham fan who invoked it, not me. There are far more obscene examples, though let’s not pretend that it was just open competition that got those Premier League teams to the final and that their financial power didn’t play a part.

[Colly]

4 minutes ago, Nerf said:

@metalmanUsing the Spurs/Liverpool final, both of whom have spent less than Newcastle and Fulham, as your example of the financial advantage is a bit mad tbh.

There's an awful lot of (understandably) emotional hot takes here, but it's ultimately just distracting from the bigger picture. The only punishment for these clubs should be passing legislation for 50+1 to stop these vultures abusing their power again. United fans are as much victims of this as Leeds and Bury fans were of their owners, and as Newcastle fans are of their owners.

There's a fixation on the six clubs as if your Moshiris and Bradys and Ashleys of the world wouldn't have done exactly the same thing given half the chance. This isn't a "big six" problem, it's a fundamental problem with club ownership in football. It wasn't that long ago that the meme was you'd have to be an idiot to buy a football club because they just hemorrhage money, and there was an unspoken agreement that owners genuinely did the right thing most of the time (with a few notable exceptions). At some point in the last decade or so (I'd say it started with the Glazers) that suddenly changed.

Making it a tribal Big Clubs vs. The Rest thing is exactly what these owners want you to do because it takes attention away from the very urgent reform that English football needs from top to bottom. Besides, a lot of the proposed punishments will probably hurt smaller teams more than it hurts the six in question anyway.

I don't really follow how this is a "big clubs vs the rest" thing, when Leeds and Bury have both been punished for financial reasons with footballing punishments?

Why should they be punished but these 6 not?

[DavidMarrio]

13 minutes ago, Colly said:

But then if those barriers are the method by which these billionaires make money how can they be taken down? It's not as if the Super League was going to free to air. Making football more affordable is absolutely the way to get young fans engaged (again, anecdotal, but my daughter gets bored watching it on TV but I've taken her to 3 cup games at £15 for the both of us and she's loved it), but this league was never going to do that.

This all over. 

They should have sections in grounds for people under a certain age like a young person's section where the max cap for the ticket is say £20.  Premier League games, European games whatever. Price is fixed and allows young people an opportunity to actually attend a match. 

Subscriptions as well it's like you need a Sky Sports package and then a BT Sport package and then the games on Prime you need an Amazon subscription. I think they could easily do a free game a match week and every team needs to be shown atleast a set amount of times. 

[Nerf]

10 minutes ago, Colly said:

I don't really follow how this is a "big clubs vs the rest" thing, when Leeds and Bury have both been punished for financial reasons with footballing punishments?

Why should they be punished but these 6 not?

Well, first of all, going into administration isn't a remotely comparable situation to conspiring to betray UEFA. Second of all, they shouldn't have been punished, because they shouldn't have been in that position in the first place. That was, y'know, the entire crux of my post.

[The Kraig]

1 hour ago, metalman said:

 

There is almost an absolute correlation between the teams with the highest wage bills and the teams that qualify from the group stage. If that's not boring and predictable I don't know what it is. The same teams are almost always in the quarter finals and semi-finals every year. I'm not going to go back and check this but I'm pretty sure the only semi-finalist from outside the big five leagues in the last decade was Ajax a couple of years ago. That's pretty shit.

That's right, it felt like a big deal I immediately wanted them to win. I looked it up at the time and PSV were the last Dutch side to reach the semis in 04/05. They also happen to be the next most recent non-big five club to reach the semis.

The year before (03/04) it was Porto famously winning the whole thing. Before that, Dynamo Kyiv made it to the semis in 98/99. Ajax, Panathanaikos, Porto, Rangers*, Club Brugge*, CSKA Moscow*, Gothenburg*, PSV*, Red Star*, Anderlecht*, Sparta Prague*, Benfica* and Spartak Moscow were all involved in the semi-final stages. (* is the pre-final group stage).

Kind of interesting having a look at the record books.

52 minutes ago, JasonM said:

As a Dutch football fan, I can say that the past few years of CL/EL have been all but boring. Sure, dissapointed that Ajax weren't able to get a title when they had the chance, but the path there was exciting as hell.

I think one reform that would help is to cut down on the amount of guaranteed slots in the group stages. Just do away with the fact the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A can send 4(!) teams straight to the group stages every year, it's utter bollocks and further creates a financial divide.

Give the champions of the 8 (or even 16!) best domestic leagues a seeding for the group stages, then after the other qualifiers get into the group stages you shuffle them around unseeded. That way you already have champions from 8 different nations represented in the group stages. (currently that would be England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Portugal, Netherlands, and Russia/Belgium) That's a very competitive spread of champions.

That gives a fair advantage to the champions of the champions league not having to face each other, whilst making it unpredictable and guaranteeing upsets and a random spread of 'death groups' and 'chaos groups' that can create a wide field of teams that make it into the final 32/16.

I think just that alone will make the CL more interesting, because one issue is just that too many teams are guaranteed their spot at the expense of 'lesser' league champions washing out before they even get into the group stages.

No guarantees, if anything, champions need to be given advantages over any other club, regardless of stature or league.

I've pined for this for ages. I think if anything, any country should be allowed to send two champions (league winner, cup winner) and that's it. 2nd place in the league should get the second spot if both domestic titles are won by the same club. It's the only way to ensure the best two teams from each country make it and add stakes to the titles.

36 minutes ago, JasonM said:

On another note, I think making player registration harsher and more punitive might also help in avoiding 'superteams' from forming. If the homegrown rules were expanded to require more players to be from club and/or country, then this inherently can curb spending by big clubs (after all, you can't just sign 15 lads from abroad to build a team if 7 have to be residents), and also gives advantages to smaller clubs that have to rely more on their academy or domestic players to fill their team with.

I'm not fully for the idea, since the idea is inherently discriminatory in nature. But to at least force teams to have players for a set period of time before they can be registered might motivate teams to focus on long term teambuilding, rather than letting the elites to build and maintain superteams through mega-transfers. Knowing that a new player might not be CL eligible in their first year would already limit the attractiveness of mega-transfers.

Of course, that would also not be popular because you'd be actively stopping good players from competing among the best...

Another idea is a type of 1for1 system like the Serie A operates, but not base it around EU or nationalities. A new player can be immediately registered if you also sell on another previously registered player? This in turn forces teams to move a talent down the line so their shiny new galactico can be registered.

But fortunately I don't have to think up any of these rules to improve football, because it's genuinely a hard thing to do.

 

I used to hate these rules, but it seems like the most direct was of forcing these big clubs to put their insane amount of money into developing the club, instead of just being a global talent funnel. The argument against it will be !aw, but look at what those Emerati clubs are doing, that's unfair against us if they have a financial advantage". The irony.

[Colly]

3 minutes ago, Nerf said:

Well, first of all, going into administration isn't a remotely comparable situation to conspiring to betray UEFA. Second of all, they shouldn't have been punished, because they shouldn't have been in that position in the first place. That was, y'know, the entire crux of my post.

On the first point I'm not actually sure which is worse, bearing in mind they aren't just betraying UEFA, they were conspiring to get an enormous advantage at domestic level too. Entering additional competitions is prohibited in the rules too so it's an actual rule break as well as a moral issue.

On the second, I agree with your main point that reform in football ownership is long overdue, however I don't see how that in any way removes the need for punishment in this case. It's that kind of "we're special" attitude that's got us here in the first place.

[Nerf]

Just now, Colly said:

On the first point I'm not actually sure which is worse, bearing in mind they aren't just betraying UEFA, they were conspiring to get an enormous advantage at domestic level too. Entering additional competitions is prohibited in the rules too so it's an actual rule break as well as a moral issue.

On the second, I agree with your main point that reform in football ownership is long overdue, however I don't see how that in any way removes the need for punishment in this case. It's that kind of "we're special" attitude that's got us here in the first place.

I mean, technically nobody entered an additional competition, so no rule has been broken. Technically. Don't get me wrong, I guarantee you that I'm more outraged than you are about what happened.

It isn't a "we're special" attitude at all. I literally said those other clubs shouldn't have been punished either, because their owners should never have had the power to do the things that they did in the first place. I'm not sure we can all in one breath say that what happened to Leeds, for example, was a travesty, but in another breath advocate for it happening again to different clubs.

FSG are fucking disgusting and I want them out of my club as soon as realistically plausible, but more than that I want national reform to the way football clubs operate to stop anything like this or anything like what happened to Bury and Rangers happening again.

[gunnar hendershow]

55 minutes ago, metalman said:

Yeah, I think even that would be a good start.

And look, I'm not a total misery guts here. I like Klopp and his team and was happy to see them win. And Tottenham getting to their first Champions League final was great and the sort of thing we should be seeing more teams having the opportunity to do. I enjoyed last year's Champions League knockouts (probably because they were one leg which makes individual games a lot more meaningful and exciting). I will never tire of seeing Barcelona getting eight slung past them, even if it was another mega-super-giant that did it.But the long-term trends trouble me. I think a few years ago when Juventus got to the final and we were supposed to think of them as a plucky little underdog was the all-time low for me.

Anyway, this by Jonathan Wilson probably says it better than I can: https://www.si.com/soccer/2021/03/31/champions-league-future-format-expansion-swiss-system-criticism

With the exception of baseball I don't like American sports because they are boring, most of the teams are rootless and they have more advertising breaks than action. But there's something to admire about the way they attempt to maintain a reasonable level of parity between competitors. I'm not sure if any of their approaches would work outside a closed system though.

I think the parity in US sports is mildly deceptive. For one teams spend years actively trying not to win while they rebuild from the ground up. It's especially prevalent in baseball and hockey. Most of the parity is occurring below the top tier of legitimate contenders, where the top teams from the year prior are typically the top teams this year minus one or two that decline due to attrition and one or two that ascend due to their rebuilds reaching fruition. In the NHL it looks like parity because there's 8 different playoff teams from the year before but all but 1 of those are no-hopers.

A lot of pushes to curb spending or create a level playing field have basically eroded the middle class of players. You're either a star player who gets big money for many years, a young player who has a low pricetag, or an average-to-good veteran in your late 20s bouncing from team to team for the minimum salary. The offset of this is the players are unionized and through collective bargaining (with the exception of baseball) are guaranteed a set percentage of league revenues every year in salary.

But I also have to agree the somewhat cynical nature of these big clubs basically having uncapped spending and what's largely a lack of checks against them bullying the smaller clubs to sell their best players to these bigger clubs where those players then just ride the bench or get loaned out to Estonia or something needs correcting. I don't know a great solution to it, FFP was supposed to address this but I don't think it really manages to do much. But when a 3rd goalkeeper at Real Madrid can take in more in weekly wages than an entire squad in, say, Slovakia might you have a serious problem.