Morning Belz, April 20
Why the "super league" stinks.
You may have heard that Europe is in uproar over a proposal by 12 of its biggest soccer clubs to form a breakaway “super league,” in which the richest teams will compete with each other on something like a weekly basis.
The idea has united almost everyone outside the C-suites at the rebel clubs in opposition. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came out against it. So did French President Emmanuel Macron.
So, why is this such an offensive idea? To understand the outrage, you have to understand how soccer works in Europe (and most of the world). American football, baseball and basketball are not built the same way. They’re closed leagues. In the U.S., owners buy into a franchise, and they own that franchise in the biggest league until they decide to sell it.
In Europe, soccer clubs must win to stay in the top leagues. Every year, the clubs at the bottom of the standings in the English Premier League go down to England’s second division (think minor league) for the next season, and the teams at the top of the standings in England’s second division go up to the Premier League. This process plays out every year between the first and second divisions, second and third divisions, third and fourth divisions, and so on down to the amateur pub leagues in East Anglia. It’s called promotion-relegation. And it’s the system in the domestic leagues in Germany, Spain, France, Italy and everywhere else in Europe too. As a result, theoretically, someone could start a new club, run it well, attract investment, and eventually make it to the top, based on merit.
At the very top of this pyramid is the UEFA Champions League. It’s a “super league” that already exists. The clubs at the top of the standings in the domestic leagues across Europe qualify for a special tournament that runs concurrent with the regular season. The games are at night in the middle of the week, rather than on the weekend, and despite its flaws it’s a wonderful competition. The Champions League is, with all due respect to the World Cup, the highest competitive level of the sport, and its annual final draws a global television audience that doubles that of the Super Bowl.
But — and this is crucial — nobody automatically qualifies for the Champions League. A club can go all the way to the final in one year, but if it isn’t simultaneously winning games in its own domestic league, it won’t get to compete in the Champions League the following season. Clubs have to win to stay in the top league in their country, and they have to win even more to stay in the Champions League. Fans love this. Every club has a chance, however miniscule, and the big clubs must perform or they stay home.
It’s true that the massive clubs who want to form a “super league” — Liverpool, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Juventus and a few others — do almost always win the Champions League. They are so much richer than the smaller clubs in their own leagues, that they are, for all intents and purposes, their own category. But what they’ve proposed would codify that and make it permanent, creating a new closed system based not on competitive merit but on the amount of money they have.
For soccer fans in Europe who’ve grown up with clubs that go back more than 100 years, and for global fans who’ve grown to love the anything’s possible nature of a Leicester City Premier League run, or Ajax coming within a miracle of the Champions League final, the “super league” would be a travesty. Real Madrid President Florentino Perez (an Emperor Palpatine-type character) and the reticent American owners of Manchester United want more financial stability for their clubs. But they would undercut and dilute the existing Champions League, and ultimately betray the foundation their clubs were built upon. Manchester United could not have become the powerhouse global brand that it is today without the help of West Bromwich Albion, or Sheffield Wednesday, or Sunderland, less successful clubs now competing at various levels of English soccer.
There are tons of financial and legal considerations. There are personal vendettas between key players in the drama. There are complex, overlapping television deals and changing consumer habits and the financial strain of COVID. The fact that billionaire owners from the United States, Qatar and Russia seem to be driving the proposal is obnoxious, especially given the working class roots of some of the biggest clubs, like Liverpool.
But the core of the anger is that it feels like the rich are cheating. They want to create a monopoly that only they get to participate in, and in so doing they are both messing with something that’s pretty great, and stabbing in the back every smaller club and its supporters across Europe. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next.
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Very close to finishing the video about anti-Asian racism. Hope to publish it to Patreon later today. Subscribe to see it first and help me decide on a final version.
No links today except that the jury is in its second day of deliberation in the Derek Chauvin trial, and Walter Mondale has died. Here’s a picture of my then three-month-old son Gideon with the former vice president at Zen Box Izakaya, a restaurant in Minneapolis, in 2015.
Quote
“What makes the competition great is the possibility that one of the weak teams develop, not the excessive growth of those with power. But the logic around the world at the moment, and football isn't excluded from this, is that the most powerful get richer and the rest get poorer.” — Marcelo Bielsa, the oracle-like Argentine manager of Leeds United
About: I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years, most recently at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I explained why my family left Minneapolis here. Now we live just outside Chattanooga and I work on Scuffed News, a project that either succeeds by July or will have to be abandoned. This is my newsletter. Please share it with anyone you think might enjoy it. And please consider supporting this work with your money on Patreon.