Reactions to the latest proposal for a European football superleague cannot be described as positive. On Thursday, the so-called sports development company, which has devoted much of the last two years present the idea has produced its latest vision of what European football could – no, should – look like.
The proposals were based on months of conversations with more than 50 clubs across Europe, according to the consultancy’s chief executive Bernd Reichart. These discussions, he said, were summarized in a series of 10 “principles”, most of them are based on generic buzzwords like “sustainability”, “competitiveness” and “income distribution”.
The central idea, however, was to replace existing competitions run by European football’s governing body UEFA – notably the Champions League, which returns with its round of 16 this week – with a “multi-player” European competition. divisions” composed of 60 to 80 players. teams and controlled, owned and operated by the clubs themselves.
It’s fair to say it didn’t go well. Javier Tebas, La Liga president and famous wallflower, described the superleague organizer as “a wolf disguising itself as a grandmother.” The European Club Association called the latest ideas “distorted and misleading”. The European Leagues, the umbrella body for the continent’s domestic tournaments, has said the current model of the game is “far from broken and in no need of repair”.
The award for best statement, however, went to the Football Supporters’ Association, a British organization representing supporters’ interests. “The walking corpse that is the European Super League is contracting again, with all the self-consciousness one associates with a zombie,” his statement began. It was, overall, a good start.
Still, some minor setbacks. Reichart, the architect of the Super League who is currently handling the revisions his company is developing, said the revised principles were only intended to be a starting point, a way to start a conversation with a range of even wider range of football “stakeholders”. After all, it’s one thing to have an idea fail. It’s another thing to come up with another in its place.
In this spirit of openness and construction, here is another series of proposals, an alternative project for the future of football which takes into account each of the latest superleague suggestions.
1. Meritocracy
The same teams – four from England, two from Spain and one each from Germany and France – are expected to qualify for the Champions League quarter-finals each year. Legitimate fans of these teams should complain that the group stages are “boring”. All other clubs should be locked out, both sportingly and financially. The Europa League and Europa Conference League are also expected to take place.
2. National competitions
National championships should be won by the same teams, over and over again, until those triumphs themselves lose their meaning. England benefits from a special dispensation allowing it to have a maximum of three potential champions at any one time.
3. Stable resources
The big teams should win most of the money and take home all the trophies. The Premier League is expected to dominate the financial landscape, allowing all other domestic leagues to wither away. Clubs should be encouraged to be as irresponsible as possible in order to follow in his footsteps.
4. Player Health
Various organizations should insist on as many games as possible, paying lip service to the idea of player health. Players must not, at any time, be consulted on this subject.
5. Financial viability
Owners should be welcomed with open arms, regardless of the number of people dismembered. Football should effectively become a competition where investment banks direct which clients to which clubs. Once in place, these princes and private equity firms should be encouraged to spend as much as possible in the transfer market, forcing their rivals to risk bankruptcy to keep pace, distorting the idea of value and making their own clubs entirely dependent on their continued and unlimited investment. largesse.
6. The best competition in the world
All the top players should play for the same handful of clubs, mainly in England. Entire leagues should be transformed into informal competitions. The most prestigious teams in these leagues should be turned into talent factories for clubs whose accidental wealth has made them lazy, and everyone else should be bought out as part of a network of teams that essentially functions as a bullpen for potential transfers.
7. Fan Experience
Any suggestion of growing disinterest among supporters should be put down to the fact that young people no longer have the attention span, rather than the fact that football’s existing structures have turned the vast majority of matches into meaningless processions.
8. Don’t forget women
We have to mention women’s football, although the fact that it is at the bottom of the list indicates where it lies in our priorities. Women’s football should continue to be an afterthought, modeled entirely on men’s football – whether men’s football works effectively or not – because who has time to think about it more deeply than that?
9. Solidarity
Any team that loses its status should face financial ruin. Ideally, the constituent clubs of the Champions League would be indistinguishable from one year to the next. Relegated Premier League teams should receive parachute payments that essentially guarantee their immediate return, but everyone should continue to pretend that there is a pyramid that makes organic growth almost impossible.
10. Respect for the law
Teams that violate the fragile financial rules we have in place should not be punished. Instead, cowardly organizations should let them get away with piecemeal fines, subtly asserting that you can do whatever you want as long as you’re rich enough. Clubs and leagues should claim to be self-regulating, rejecting any oversight, despite all evidence to the contrary.
These 10 alternative principles, of course, are the hurdle that a superleague – or anyone proposing a radical change to the status quo – must overcome. Reichart must explain his ideas. He must integrate them into an action plan. He must try to make them acceptable. He must persuade people to buy into his vision.
It is questionable whether this view has much merit. His only concrete suggestion – a vast league tournament situated above national competitions – is a matter of taste at best. From a subjective point of view, a European superleague seems like a downgrade from the current Champions League system, but it is probably no worse than the so-called Swiss model. expected to come into force next year. (Oddly, it works much better as a paradigm for how to develop women’s football in Europe, even though it clearly doesn’t care about that aspect of the game.)
The problem with criticizing new proposals is that no one is ever obliged to present an alternative. No one in the alphabet soup of governing bodies and lobbying groups ever needs to explain where they think the game is going to go; how they see its future; how they plan to address the blatantly obvious flaws in the “model that is not broken and does not need to be fixed”, those which – as UEFA’s own financial report, published on Friday, points out – have made with football increasingly dependent on capital injections from owners and turning a blind eye to growing debts.
As long as they can avoid making their own plan for the future, the game’s current leaders can instead label anyone proposing change as greedy, cynical and selfish and hope that no one points out the hypocrisy of those accusations.
They can count on the fact that some supporters desperately yearn for a return to a lost past, one where the European Cup was a knockout tournament and Nottingham Forest were champions of England, and others, those whose teams monopolize the glory. or if you’re in the Premier League, I feel like things are going pretty well as they are.
They can rely on every fan’s understandable and largely justified suspicion that anyone suggesting something new has an ulterior motive, without ever questioning why all these bodies are so furious at the very idea of their authority being questioned.
There is no reason to believe that Reichart and his consultancy, A22, have the best interests of European football at heart, just as there was no reason, in 2021, to adhere to Florentino’s suggestion Pérez according to which he was trying to save anyone except Real Madrid.
But when you take the lead, it’s worth asking yourself not only what your opponent wants, but also what your allies want. It is worth assessing the reality of what you are defending: a reality in which the gap between the Premier League and the rest of Europe turns into an abysswhere the Champions League takes place a closed store, where the rich have everything and want more. This is what they are fighting for. They just never need to explain it.