Weird European Football Stuff
Okay, can someone please explain to me why I should care about this ESL thing? As far as I can tell it's a way for top teams to make more money, yes? Which is, I guess, maybe bad for balance or mobility in the rankings or whatever. So definitely something for football fans to have an opinion about.
My question is why government officials need to have an opinion about it? It seems to be exciting a lot of government discussion which is frankly baffling to me. Anyone want to help me out here?
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
Long story short - it is a horrid, unsporting anticompetitive closed shop that is a bastardisation and corruption of football that absolutely destroys the principles of football and should and must die a death. I'm a Liverpool fan and reacted with horror at this suggestion and am glad its dead within 48 hours.
Will write a longer version when I get a chance.
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
All good reasons for football fans to be up in arms. But why does Boris Johnson need to weigh in?
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
Maybe he is a fan.
He was proposing legislative or regulatory fixes. I would hope that government officials wouldn't do that just because they thought some action would be bad for a sport they love.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
No he's not. He's a Rugby fan. This is Boris Johnson's idea of playing football.
People claim Boris isn't honest but he's the first leading politician in my memory to be honest enough to admit he's not a fan himself. David Cameron famously forgot which club he supports and named the wrong one in a speech (a mistake put down to whoever wrote the script for the teleprompter but he read it out loud).
But voters care about football. Voters care about competition. And there's an election going on and he's just associated himself with the voters passions. Pure populism.
But being serious while I don't think this is an issue for politicians, there are laws already on ensuring competition and preventing cartels and anticompetitive behaviour.
I must admit I am taken aback a little as well. However fans in Europe can be passionate about their team and blocking the team owners from maximizing their profits could actually be good politics. You also have to wonder if society should be propping up an industry where a few take home millions. I think the people behind the SL understood that against this much insurgency they could lose a more than they were willing to risk.
I'm curious about what sanctions still may follow on Friday.
Congratulations America
Because it's an amazing opportunity for him. If he plays his cards right he might even get a photo with Marcus Rashford.
Longer version:
Football has operated for 150 years on a "pyramid" basis that is fundamental to the principles of sport, competition and fair play. Clubs get promoted and relegated based upon performances on the pitch. Clubs qualify for competitions based upon performances on the pitch. No club is above or below these rules. Any club can be promoted up to the Premier League which is the top league, any club can be relegated from the Premier League, out of professional football altogether and even further down the pyramid. Even an amateur football club playing in an amateur league can be part of that pyramid and amateur clubs can be promoted up the pyramid into the professional tiers and right up to the Premier League.
At the top of the pyramid is the Premier League and the top clubs of the Premier League can't be promoted any further because they're already in the top League but the top 4 clubs each season win the right to play in the Champions League the following season. Fifth (and sometimes others, long story) win the right to compete in the second tier of European football. This gives something for clubs to strive for even when they can't win the league and any club can strive for that.
In recent years the Premier League was won by Leicester which were formerly in the lower leagues. Wigan spent many years in the Premier League, competed in Europe and won the FA Cup - they were only a couple of decades ago a "non-league" amateur football club that rose up the ranks. Man City themselves one of the supposed "big 6" were in the third tier of football relatively recently and had to be promoted back into the Premier League. Some big clubs like Leeds that were consistently in the Top 4 for years in a row at the turn of the century got relegated two years after dropping out of the Champions League and only got back into the Premier League this season after nearly two decades out of top tier football. There is no fixed top set of clubs in sport, clubs have to earn the right to stay at the top and clubs can fight to reach the top - or fail and sink down.
The nature of competition and fair play, the nature of the pyramid, is absolutely fundamental to football.
What the owners of 6 self-selected "big" clubs tried to do, without discussing it even with their own players or managers or fans, was to tear up that whole system. To destroy the entire fabric of the sport. They wanted to create a "Closed Shop" system whereby certain "big" clubs would be guaranteed "Super League" football with no chance of relegation which would replace the Champions League, no matter where they placed in the Premier League. They would have no risk of relegation from the "Super League", no risk of failure to qualify. The race for the Top Four, the positioning within the Premier League itself - none of that would matter anymore.
As it stands right now with four games left in this year's season, if the season ended today then the 4 Champions League spots belong to Man City, Man Utd, Leicester and West Ham because they're in the top 4 slots. But instead under this anticompetitive scheme the "Super League" replacing the Champions League would have had 6 spots: the two Manchester clubs, Liverpool, and 3 London clubs: Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur.
West Ham and Leicester who could have earned a spot in the elite next season would have seen their prize ripped out of their hands by a self-serving, unsporting cartel taking the prize for themselves instead.
As it stands fans of any club, anywhere in the country can dream of their club being promoted - or see them be relegated. Fans of any club, anywhere in the country can dream of their club one day reaching the pinnacle and playing at the international level in the Champions League. But a cartel of clubs wanted to end that dream for every club but 3 in London, 2 in Manchester and Liverpool. That cartel is anticompetitive, unsporting and unacceptable.
The notion of relegation, promotion and qualification may be an alien concept to an American where football clubs are "franchises" that can change cities even. But clubs are part of the fabric of the community here and not franchises. The sport doesn't belong to a self-serving elite shutting out the rest of the nation.
PS Tim of this site is a West Ham fan from memory. This time last year they were facing potential relegation from the Premier League. A year later they are in the Top 4 - as a Liverpool fan I hope we can overtake them by fair play on the field, but if we don't and if nobody else does they fully have earnt and deserve their spot in the elite international sport next season. It is absolutely unacceptable for them to see that stolen from them by a cartel.
What I missed from this story was that NOT playing in the Champions League, as occasionally would happen to Super League clubs could cost them millions in revenue. Not having to deal with the chance of being kicked out by an upstart would have meant a more secure stream of money.
Congratulations America
This would have replaced the Champions League if it had progressed. This was meant to be a midweek competition not the national league, ie it was a replacement for the Champions League. The clubs would not have occasionally not played in the Champions League, they were planning to never play in it again.
In one way a replacement for the Champions League is not the worst idea in the world. UEFA are not exactly without flaws themselves - and the money that would have been made in the Super League would have been a lot more than they get from the Champions League.
In 2018/19 UEFA got €3.25 billion in revenues from the Champions League. Of which winning club Liverpool got €111 million - all other clubs got less obviously. If the Super League had progressed they would have cut out UEFA and others from the equation and the clubs would have got hundreds of millions per season potentially.
Were they went greedy and screwed up was not just cutting out UEFA, but cutting out other clubs too. Trying to make it a closed shop.
All 6 English clubs have now formally pulled out of the Super League. The Evergreen was stuck in the Suez longer than the Super League existed for.
Also vastly more revenue. $400 million/year vs. $100 million after a successful Champions League campaign.
Hope is the denial of reality
So... in other words, no reason for the government to get involved. Also, correct me if I'm wrong but aren't all sports leagues essentially anticompetitive cartels? They control the supply of the product (games for broadcast or attendance), coordinate on pricing, share revenue, tightly control costs (especially labor costs). There's nothing remotely competitive or capitalistic about modern sports leagues, the ESL is hardly some big fundamental change.
Sure in principle there's movement in the current system, but the ESL is essentially a codification of what already exists - an elite class of well-funded teams that scoop up talent and revenue and everyone else who gets by with what remains. I'm amused you think that football (that is, European football) is a meritocracy without a self-serving elite. Of course it has a self serving elite. Do you think the Yankees get to be the Yankees just by grit and determination (and an unreasonable dislike of facial hair)? Pull the other one.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
You're not entirely right. The present UEFA system keeps the big clubs vulnerable to demotion.
Congratulations America
Sure, of course that's possible. But sufficient funding and market size generally means that the biggest clubs are going to stay at or near the top. You'll get the occasional shock demotion or Cinderella team but that doesn't change the fundamental dynamic. More broadly, I think there's a distinction between the idea of competitiveness as a sport (which the current system may be okay) and competition as an economic concept (which this sport, like pretty much all of them, isn't even close to being a good model of).
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
Wiggin, European football leagues are much more meritocratic than American leagues, as they are open. The flipside is that teams that perform well get more money which in turn enables them to perform better (and get better infrastructure, i.e. bigger stadiums leading to even more revenue).
I wouldn't mind if that is spread more over the other european leagues. Now, for example for the Dutch competition, there's 1, max 2, teams in the CL who even with a bad european campaign still make 30 million or so more than the other teams in the competition, which for a small league is a lot. As a result the split between the haves and have nots just keeps growing, making it even harder for other teams to stand a chance.
Btw, I find the champions league matches between the same old teams each year a bit boring and predictable as well, CL is most fun when there's an upset. Who (outside Madrid) wasn't loving ot when Ajax had an improbable comeback and knocked out Real? If you only have the same big teams, there will never be a real upset anymore.
What surprises me most is how quickly the teams went back on the idea - did they honestly not expect any fallout when announcing this? How poorly thought out is a proposal with that much impact.. that they drop within days? That's a serious fuckup, now it's only cost them in public opinion, while leaving them exactly where they were.
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Government's get involved in competition laws, that's not new. Also football is not just of passionate interest to much of the country, it is not just part of the fabric of society itself - it is also a major sector of the economy generating billions of taxes, billions in exports and underpinning hundreds of thousands of jobs across the nation. Football is worth more to GDP than the entire Fisheries sector combined and that is something people don't blink an eye at Government getting involved in.
You're wrong about the lack of some 'big fundamental change', football is competitive and capitalistic and the abolition of the pyramid is a fundamental change that strikes at the very heart of sport as we know it. The idea that clubs are rewarded for who they are, regardless of how they perform on the pitch, has never been a notion in our sport.
Also you're wrong that the sports leagues are an anticompetitive cartel. Yes they supply the games for broadcast but the pyramid nature means that they're not in control. The clubs that currently make up the Premier League negotiate contracts for the future with the TV studios but those clubs will not be the clubs to compete in future Leagues, others will take at least some of their place by the nature of the pyramid.
They do not coordinate on pricing, the pricing varies wildly. If you think they tightly control labour costs then you haven't looked much at European football. The best players can be bought and sold for hundreds of millions of pounds/euros and earning hundreds of thousands of pounds/euros per week.
No not in principle, in practice. In both principle and practice there is movement in the current system. This season the top 4 as it stands and the top 6 if it were to be that don't include all of the so-called "big 6". Nor did it last season, last season Arsenal finished 8th so in no way would have qualified as a "top 6" club by merit.Sure in principle there's movement in the current system, but the ESL is essentially a codification of what already exists - an elite class of well-funded teams that scoop up talent and revenue and everyone else who gets by with what remains. I'm amused you think that football (that is, European football) is a meritocracy without a self-serving elite. Of course it has a self serving elite. Do you think the Yankees get to be the Yankees just by grit and determination (and an unreasonable dislike of facial hair)? Pull the other one.
Its the same across European football. One club English teams have frequently played at the European level against is the German club 'FC Schalke 04'. They were consistently in the Champions League and were ranked as one of the best clubs on the continent a few years ago. As recently as 2019 they were playing against Manchester City in the Champions League knock out stages. They then failed to qualify for the Champions League for the 19/20 season and this weekend they got relegated out of the Bundesliga (German top league) altogether in the following 20/21 season. In 3 years they've gone from the Champions League to out of the Bundesliga.
The Yankees are a good example of the difference between US Sport and European football. Looking at the table as it stands for the Yankees they are bottom of the AL East Division right now. If the season ended like that in Europe then the Yankees would be relegated and not playing in the AL East Division next season. They would go down the pyramid and need to earn their right to get back up to the top tier again.
Last season the Red Sox finished bottom of the AL East Division but weren't relegated, they are still playing in the same division again this season. That is an absolutely alien concept to us, over here the Red Sox should have been relegated and out of the top tier and made to compete against lower league clubs the following season, while another club would have earnt the right to replace the Red Sox at the top of the pyramid. Do you see the difference?
Staying at or near the top is acceptable. Abusing the market to ensure they literally can't be competed against even if another club performs better is not OK. Microsoft abusing their market dominance to be anticompetitive is not OK, nor are Liverpool and others abusing their dominance OK to break up sport as we know.
When it comes to competition as an economic concept this sport has that. Yes clubs may dominate because they're popular and perform well but if they lose popularity or perform badly they can fall away. Today's top clubs have no divine right to engage in anticompetitive behaviour. "Closed shops" tend to be illegal in this country, Thatcher herself made "Closed Shops" illegal in employment, so why should a never before seen "Closed Shop" at the top of elite sport be legal?
When the Premier League was formed they took more of the revenues for themselves, but they kept the principle of promotion and relegation. They kept the pyramid. Of the 22 founding members of the Premier League, sixteen have subsequently been relegated out of the league at least once. Only six have been ever-present and that is not the so-called "big 6" since Man City were relegated.
Last edited by RandBlade; 04-21-2021 at 07:26 AM.
Just incredible that these clubs so badly judged the fans reaction to this. Really, really baffling.
Makes me even happier to support such an awesome club in Leicester City.
Do you think they weren't in by choice, or because they weren't invited to the big 6?
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Oh, I can't imagine they were invited.
But I'd like to think they would have turned it down. I don't know, of course, but we seem to have good owners that care about the fans. I'd hope they'd have done the Right Thing.
Thing is the clubs weren't involved, it was the owners. Even the Manager of the club, was completely blindsided by it too.
John W Henry (owner of Liverpool) has done a good video personally apologising for this. In the video he apologises by name as well to Jurgen [Klopp obviously] and Billy who is the CEO of the club, saying that he alone was responsible for it.
Which again begs the question how they could announce such a major plan without any apparent consideration of the impact and reactions. You'd imagine owners of what are essentially major companies to have some common (business) sense.
Of course it's possible that with all the backlash the owner is taking the hits and protecting the manager if he was involved, since you don't want your manager to be hated by the fans (which is less important for the owners).
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Nice summary
Yep!
Neener neener
Last edited by Timbuk2; 04-21-2021 at 12:48 PM.
I'll see your neener neerer and raise you a *raspberry*
Neener neener
It's not really a meritocracy when there's a massive built-in advantage based on things that happened decades ago. US sports are certainly much more competitive (due to drafts, salary caps, and revenue sharing). The same teams rarely win repeatedly. Even winning consecutive titles is rare. Compare that to some European soccer league where the same team wins for nearly a decade at a time.
Hope is the denial of reality
I will take exception to your characterization of this as anything other than a cartel. It has little to do with individual teams, but with the way the inputs and outputs for this industry are tightly controlled by the likes of UEFA and FIFA and other organizations. The inputs are labor - essentially player talent. Rookie players are essentially owned by their clubs and are generally tied up in contracts that drastically underpay them. These prices are tightly controlled by the teams and associations in a given league (obviously the highest profile players out of initial contracts get big payouts but that's the exception to the rule... and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if they were still underpaid). Their outputs (essentially broadcast rights, actual ticket sales are relatively small in comparison) are negotiated as a bloc, and the number and type of broadcasts available is not controlled by the teams but rather by the cartel. That's more of a cartel than OPEC!
The ESL might have been incredibly bad for European football as a sport, but its real crime was challenging UEFA for control over the most lucrative broadcasting rights, where a subset of teams wanted to increase their output outside the auspices of the cartel in order to increase revenue. They were summarily smacked down, with threats of draconian sanctions (disallowing players in these teams to participate in other revenue-generating events like the World Cup, enlisting the help of three major governments to threaten the teams with regulation/investigation, etc.). This is hardly a market where players or teams are free to produce their product and sell it at will.
I would imagine that someone has done a statistical analysis to figure out how much movement there really is for the best and worst teams - sorta like a sports version of stats looking at income mobility across quartiles. I'm no expert on association football but I'd bet serious money that the teams at the very top - essentially the ones we're talking about - rarely get relegated, and when they do they're frequently back at the top in no time. There's always going to be a bit of churn in this system, but it's heavily weighted to favor the entrenched elite.No not in principle, in practice. In both principle and practice there is movement in the current system. This season the top 4 as it stands and the top 6 if it were to be that don't include all of the so-called "big 6". Nor did it last season, last season Arsenal finished 8th so in no way would have qualified as a "top 6" club by merit.
Its the same across European football. One club English teams have frequently played at the European level against is the German club 'FC Schalke 04'. They were consistently in the Champions League and were ranked as one of the best clubs on the continent a few years ago. As recently as 2019 they were playing against Manchester City in the Champions League knock out stages. They then failed to qualify for the Champions League for the 19/20 season and this weekend they got relegated out of the Bundesliga (German top league) altogether in the following 20/21 season. In 3 years they've gone from the Champions League to out of the Bundesliga.
Baseball is far more stochastic than soccer with many more opportunities for parity than you get in European association football. It is viewed as a strength of the league's parity efforts when teams that are frequently at the top due to their market size can still underperform in a given year.The Yankees are a good example of the difference between US Sport and European football. Looking at the table as it stands for the Yankees they are bottom of the AL East Division right now. If the season ended like that in Europe then the Yankees would be relegated and not playing in the AL East Division next season. They would go down the pyramid and need to earn their right to get back up to the top tier again.
Last season the Red Sox finished bottom of the AL East Division but weren't relegated, they are still playing in the same division again this season. That is an absolutely alien concept to us, over here the Red Sox should have been relegated and out of the top tier and made to compete against lower league clubs the following season, while another club would have earnt the right to replace the Red Sox at the top of the pyramid. Do you see the difference?
I don't think one system is better than another, but ranking in the leagues being semi-meritocratic does not mean that the sport in general is competitive from an economic perspective. There's a difference between being competitive in a sport and being a competitive industry. I think it's important to recognize the clubs aren't people, they are businesses. And businesses banding together to force each other to producing only a commonly agreed amount of a product is pretty much the definition of a cartel. All of the talk about 'closed shops' assumes that we view the clubs as employees, which they most assuredly are not.
It's a little more complex than that, Loki. There are perennial contenders, mostly due to their market size allowing them more money to overpay for free agent talents. So most of the teams that have better records most years tend to come from larger markets with bigger fan bases. Revenue sharing, luxury taxes, and drafts aren't enough to fully eliminate this advantage. The only real exceptions are when you get truly exceptional talent accruing to a single team due to luck. Even then, though, it's rarely enough to single-handedly overturn all of the other advantages that big market teams enjoy. Just look at Mike Trout, easily the best player in baseball, in a team that will never rise above mediocre.
It's also not really true that you don't get dynasties in American sports. Long term contracts for rookie players allows teams to build a stable of young and exceptional players that can dominate a sport for 5+ years at a time - think Kane/Toews, Jordan/Pippen, Brady/Gronk (much as it pains me to admit), etc. The late 90s/early aughts Yankees, or the early 2010s SF Giants. They might not win every year (you only get lots of repeat championships in basketball), but that's mostly because games like baseball or hockey are much more stochastic and best of 7 series aren't really enough to determine which team is 'better', let alone shorter series earlier on in the playoffs. Soccer, like American football, might have an 'any given Sunday' kind of chance to it, but individual game outcomes are much more predictable so better teams more frequently triumph.
I think that American sports do a better job of ensuring parity across a league, but are far from meritocratic.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
The way teams in most US sports end up with young superstars is by sucking for years at a time. Basketball and baseball are exceptional in some ways: basketball due to the recent trend toward super teams and baseball due to a lack of a salary cap. Still, you regularly see the "top" teams end up in mediocrity. The Yankees have one title in 2 decades. The Red Sox alternate between winning titles and finishing last. Only the Dodgers seem to be using their money wisely (the same Dodgers who were mediocre for decades before the past 5 or so years).
In football, the only thing preventing full parity are otherworldly skills of a handful of QBs and coaches. It's a feat for teams to make the playoffs every year, let alone to win there. In hockey, a different team wins every year. Heck, an expansion team almost won the Cup. In baseball and basketball, some teams do regularly make the playoffs, but true dominance rarely lastly more than 3-4 years.
Compare that to soccer, where every league outside of England has 1-2 teams that have any chance of winning. Not only that, but the disparity between the top teams and the mid-table ones is huge. Teams sometimes lose fewer than 10% of their games, something that doesn't happen in US sports outside of a rare 15-1 NFL season.
In sum, the NBA lacks parity for reasons unrelated to team resources. In baseball, some teams have more resources, but that only has a modest impact on their ability to win championships. The NFL would have parity if not for Brady. Hockey is pretty damn close to parity. In European soccer, the main question most years is whether the top 2 teams will finish 1:2 or 2:1.
By the way, more on the Super League: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/s...ue-soccer.html
Hope is the denial of reality
Isn't that the point of a meritocracy? They're on a better position because they won in the past. For American sports I'm only familiar with the NHL, and there performing poorly gets you better draft picks, i.e. poor performance is rewarded. Certainly makes for more competitive sports in the long run, especially combined with the transfer cap, but essentially the league is set up to keep the teams roughly level and not reward success. It has its advantages, but it's the complete opposite of the football pyramid where good performance is rewarded and poor performance is punished.
And make no mistake, this proposal was not to make things more exciting and competitive, they just don't want the risk of their poor performance resulting in missing out on the CL (and get more money st the expense of the subtop teams, widening the gap to them even more).
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Agreed.
When the sky above us fell
We descended into hell
Into kingdom come
wiggin and Loki I think you are somewhat mixing up the concepts of meritocratic and egalitarian.
English Football is meritocratic in that the best teams win and go up the pyramid, while the worst teams go down the pyramid.
Its not egalitarian in the sense of trying to ensure all teams are equal, but that's a different matter.
Liverpool and Manchester United are two of the most popular clubs in the world both with an estimated about six hundred million fans each globally. Its estimated more than a billion fans worldwide support either club, that's about 1/7th of everybody on the planet. That's inevitably going to bring in merchandise sales and revenues that other clubs don't get, allowing them to spend more on players.
But in recent years both clubs have been relegated out of playing in the Champions League. Liverpool may not qualify this year for next season. United failed to qualify two years ago. Arsenal were ever-present for well over a decade but failed to qualify in recent years and look certain to fail again this season. Chelsea and Spurs are unlikely to qualify this season too. Man City look set for the foreseeable future but its not that long since they were never present for years in a row.
Going the other way West Ham and Leicester are ambitious hoping to qualify, Leicester have a few times recently. Other like Leeds etc have their sights set on it too.
At the end of the season if West Ham or Leicester or A.N. Other do better then they deserve to be in the Champions League more than the bigger clubs they oust from the spots. The bigger clubs may have more money, but they can be and are defeated on the field. That's meritocracy.
As Flixy said our sport is not designed to keep clubs level. American sports are more socialist than meritocratic funnily enough, the worse you perform the better picks you get. There's nothing like that here. Here if you perform well you get promoted up the pyramid, if you perform badly you get relegated down. Pure cut-throat competition.
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