Bad sport

The European Super League will harm football

European football, the epicentre of global sport, is facing a Kerry Packer moment with the creation of a breakaway European Super League. But unlike Packer’s experiment, which enhanced the sex appeal of a waning sport and eventually ensured professional cricketers were paid better wages, this league launched by 12 stellar clubs from England, Spain and Italy — Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Inter Milan and Juventus, to name a few — is likely to do immeasurable harm to one of the most dynamic of global sports.

This new tournament is styled on the American-style baseball leagues and is underwritten by the giant US investment bank J P Morgan, involving money that outstrips any of the current pan-European club competitions. Participating clubs will get a whopping 3.5 billion euros — greater than the broadcast revenues of the three major pan-European interclub tournaments put together — to support their infrastructure investment plans and to offset the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The winner of the tournament will get 400 million euros, more than three times the UEFA Champions League prize money of 120 million euros. The 15 founding clubs will “invite” another five clubs based on a yet unspecified qualifying mechanism to create a 20-team tournament divided into two groups playing home and away fixtures. The top three teams in each group automatically qualify for the quarter finals and the fourth and fifth teams play a knock out for the remaining positions.

The point about this tournament that has enraged football commentators and fans — including leaders such as Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron — is that it wields money power within a “closed user group”. Unlike the European leagues, there is no cycle of relegation and qualifications from the lower divisions involved here. This traditional cycle is driven by the relatively democratic manner in which revenues (mainly from broadcasting and sponsorships) are divided among the clubs (except Spain, which has a notoriously unequal system). In the English Premier League, for instance, half the money is divided equally among clubs and the rest paid on a graded system, which gives clubs an incentive to maximise their position on the league table. It is a merger between money and talent that can spur a relatively modest club like, say, Leicester to win the tournament in the 2015-16 season over the sumptuously moneyed Manchester City.

The Super League, which is expected to start with the new 2021-22 season in August with mid-week matches, eliminates this democracy of talent that makes European football so exciting and offers huge opportunities to players in the lower leagues. It is interesting that French and German clubs have not yet opted in. So far, the tournament has had an unpropitious start with the Union of European Football Association stating that participating players will be banned from the World Cup and the European Championships.  

It can be argued that the Super League represents the endgame of a process that began with the innovative premier league formats in the 1990s that drew global audiences and replaced quirky local proprietorships with moneyed West Asian sheikhdoms and professional US sports businesses. This combination undoubtedly created the most exciting football on earth even as money power widened inequality among clubs. So the Super League may well become the IPL of European football but it will also weaken many of the healthier traditions on which the sport has rested in the process.