How "super" would a European Super League be?
Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern have won 17 of the last 18 league titles in Italy, France and Germany, and there is a similar hegemony in Spain and England. Could the creation of a Super League be the solution?
Say what you will of Arsène Wenger, but he is both an icon of the modern game and a visionary with very few equals in football. As manager of Arsenal, he revolutionised the players’ training and diets when he arrived in 1996, and he changed the way the game was played in Britain by developing a fluid style of attacking football.
Despite the governing bodies’ ignorant denials on the topic, Wenger has also been very outspoken about what he believes to be widespread and systematic doping in soccer, a topic we have previously covered on Pick Your Passions.
Arsène Wenger is also convinced that we will have a continental European Super League for football within a few years. Speaking to The Guardian in May 2018, Wenger said a Super League comprised of top clubs from the top leagues is both “certain” and “inevitable”.
Could the man with the crystal ball be right once again?
Previous Attempts
Arsène Wenger is not the first person to propose a Super League, mind you. There have been serious attempts at getting such a system off the ground as early as in 1998. That proposal was made by an Italian company called Media Partners. It died when UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, decided to make broad, sweeping changes to their continental club competitions: expanding the Champions League from 24 to 32 teams and merging the UEFA Cup and Cup Winner’s Cup into what is known as the Europa League today.
Another Super League proposal was made by Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, in July of 2009. "We have to agree [to] a new European Super League which guarantees that the best always play the best - something that does not happen in the Champions League", president Pérez said at the time. Ironically, Real Madrid would fail to advance past the Champions League Round of 16 for the sixth year in a row that coming season.
Now 20 years removed from the first Super League proposal being shot down, the idea of a European Super League is once again part of the public conversation. So what are the arguments in favour of a Super League?
An Economic Endevour
A part of the reason Arsène Wenger believes that we will move toward a pan-European Super League system is the increase in both revenue and quality that such a league would bring. “(…) the big clubs will say that if two smaller clubs are playing each other nobody wants to watch it. People want to watch quality“, Mr. Wenger stated in his Guardian interview.
That is certainly a fair point. El Clásico, where Real Madrid face Barcelona, is consistently the most viewed club football match in the world. With all due respect, it should be plainly obvious that a game between Cardiff City and Huddersfield doesn’t draw the same audience.
These big ticket games also create more revenue and profit for everyone involved. The best teams have more supporters, and more supporters means more money: more people willing to pay premium prices for tickets and merchandise, and more people to watch the games, which increases income from the sale of broadcasting rights to television companies.
Despite the Champions League being the premier club football competition, it doesn’t really bring in a whole lot of money from broadcasting. According to Goal, the global broadcasting rights for the Champions League is only worth $1.57 billion, dwarfed by both the rights to the Premier League (5.7 bn USD) and the NFL ($4.95 bn USD).
Wenger believes that a Super League system will supplant the current Champions League format. And, naturally, with the world’s best teams in one league, this will be played on weekends to maximise viewership. The now smaller and weaker national competitions would have to be played mid-week.
It’s easy to imagine the forces of free-market capitalism pushing for these changes to happen. The strongest argument in favour of a Super League, in my opinion, lie elsewhere.
Photo by Humberto Santos on Unsplash.
Domestic domination or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Super League
Clear as day, for all to see, we are now in the age of European super clubs. There have always been “super clubs”, in a way, because success breeds success. You win prize money, invest the gains into better players, infrastructure and leadership, and the cycle repeats itself. That’s the way it’s always been.
However, what we are seeing now is different from Real Madrid in the 1950s and Il Grande Inter in the 1960s. The amount of money in the game now, particularly for the top clubs, is so staggering that the top clubs truly have become too big to fail. And that is without mentioning the absurd amounts of money available to clubs owned by foreign oil barons.
The current “super clubs” are simply a cut above the rest of the competition. Let’s take a closer look at the state of Europe’s five top leagues.
Serie A
Juventus have won eight consecutive Italian League titles. They don’t look like they are close to done, either, having just spent €110 million on Cristiano Ronaldo. With Inter and AC Milan seemingly in perpetual stages of rebuilding, AS Roma investing in young talents, and Napoli losing both midfield maestro Jorginho and manager Maurizio Sarri to Chelsea this summer, it is hard to see anyone challenging The Old Lady at the moment.
Bundesliga
Bayern have won six league titles in a row, and 11 of the last 16 in Germany. They are an institution in Germany, and almost every top German talent that rises to the top aspires to play for them. They’re currently having a “bad” start to the 2018/19 season under their new manager, although they are only four points behind the league leaders.
Ligue 1
Paris Saint-Germain have one five of the last six leagues in France. PSG are backed by Qatari oil money, and currently hold the record for the world’s two most expensive signings. Perhaps the most toxic club in the world in terms of killing domestic competition and inflating the global transfer market.
La Liga
Atlético Madrid managed to snag a league title by a miracle in the 2013/14 season, but La Liga is a two-horse race, and will likely remain a two-horse race for the foreseeable future. 13 out of the 14 last seasons have been won by either Barcelona (9) or Real Madrid (4). These two colossal clubs are football royalty, no doubt, and their pockets are deeper than the Mariana Trench.
Premier League
Ah, the Premier League. Everybody’s favourite league, right? So open and hard to predict, with any of it’s “top six” looking like potential winners come May. Right? Well, if we overlook Leicester City’s 2015/16 win, which is likely to go down in history as the biggest underdog story of all time, the fact is that only three different clubs have won the league during the last 14 seasons: Manchester City (current holders), Chelsea, and Manchester United.
In fact, 24 of the 26 league titles since the inception of the Premier League have been shared between Manchester City (3), Chelsea (5), Manchester United (13) and Arsenal (3). It’s also worth noting that Chelsea and Manchester City only became serious league contenders after being injected with Russian and United Arab Emirates oil money, respectively. Without this artificial boost, it is unlikely that these clubs would have any of the success they are currently enjoying.
Juventus, Bayern München, Paris Saint-Germain, Barcelona and Real Madrid have won a combined 22 of the possible 24 domestic league titles the last six seasons in Italy, Germany, France and Spain. These elite clubs have only been bested by a young and unbelievably talented Monaco squad that was promptly picked clean by Europe’s vultures, and an unlikely win from Atlético Madrid, the eternal Spanish underdogs.
27 of the 30 league titles the last six seasons in the top five leagues have been shared between eight clubs.
In essence, the question is this: would it be better for the health of these domestic leagues if we created a Super League and removed the clubs that are a step above the competition? That’s what the promotion/relegation system in the national leagues do, after all. Sunderland are in League One because they weren’t good enough to play in the Championship. So what do we do about clubs that are too good for their respective leagues, but can’t be promoted? Are these super clubs butting their heads against a glass ceiling?
The Reverse Robin Hood
Tinkering with a Super League concept as a thought experiment is fun, but there are a number of very difficult questions that would have to be answered before such an idea becomes reality. Who gets in initially? How many get in? What happens to those left behind?
Sure, you could have a promotion/relegation system of sorts to keep the Super League from becoming stagnant. But with the 20 best teams in the world all playing in one league and taking the lion’s share of the money in football, what will happen to the ones deemed not good enough?
It’s certainly feasible that a La Liga without, say, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atlético Madrid would see a steep decline in viewership and income from broadcasting rights. Surely the quality of the league would suffer greatly from this lack of income. Wouldn’t a Super League therefore be a reverse Robin Hood that steals from the poor and gives to the rich?
It isn’t fun to see one team dominate their domestic league, and I believe it is unhealthy for the sport overall. Wouldn’t it be great to see other clubs start to take on super clubs in the same way that Borussia Dortmund, Monaco and Atlético Madrid have done?
Turns out there’s a big hurdle between mid-sized clubs and real success.
Photo by Marcos Moraes on Unsplash.
Financial Unfair Play
UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations is the name of UEFA’s financial laws that started to be implemented in 2011. Originally created to stop clubs’ rampant overspending and debt creation, the set of regulations have come under heavy fire multiple times.
As researcher Rasmus Storm writes in an article for Play the Game:
Overall, there seems to exist three main strands of critique against the Financial Fair Play-program:
FFP hinders necessary capital injections to financially distressed clubs.
FFP prevents competition in the player market and serves as a U.S. salary cap without improving competitive balance.
FFP ‘freezes’ the existing club hierarchy and makes it impossible for small clubs to break the existing hierarchy.
The third critique of FFP is particularly salient in this article. It turns out that stopping owners from injecting money into their medium sized clubs means that these medium sized clubs have a hard time competing with super clubs. No cash, no competition. Who would’ve thought?
In effect, Financial Fair Play stops new clubs from becoming a part of the super rich elite, and it preserves the elite as it is now. This hardly seems fair because clubs like Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester City and Chelsea - all certified members of the new elite - weren’t much more than mid-table clubs before being bought by rich owners, and they were all bought before the full implementation of Financial Fair Play. PSG finished 13th in the league two years before being bought. Manchester City finished 14th in the season in which they were bought, and Chelsea had recently gone from a midtable club to top 6 mainstay when bought.
In their brilliant book Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski demonstrate that there is a correlation between amount of money spent on players’ wages and success in the Premier League. The more money you spend on wages, the better you do because good players demand high wages.
So how exactly is a midtable club supposed to break into the super club tier when they aren’t allowed to receive money from their owners and spend it on better players? All the worse is that super clubs have ways of circumventing the Financial Fair Play rules. Just this summer it was heavily rumoured that the only reason Juventus could afford Cristiano Ronaldo is because their sponsor, Fiat, would pay his astronomical wages. Both Fiat and Juventus are owned by the same holding company.
I’m not going to pretend to have any of the answers here, because I don’t. These questions are far too complex for me.
Something should be done, though. Eight clubs have won 27 out of 30 possible league titles during the last six seasons. We can’t expect UEFA to implement effective economic legislation. We’ve all seen what Financial Fair Play is at this point. It doesn’t hinder the already rich clubs, it just stops other clubs from becoming rich the way PSG, Manchester City and Chelsea did.
I also don’t think that creating a Super League would be the right way to go. Taking the best clubs from their respective domestic leagues would surely be like draining the lifeblood from that league.
How can we solve the problem of super clubs that win without competition? Can it be solved?
Featured image by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash.
