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junker-town · 4 years ago

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The European Super League’s 48-hour lifespan, explained

Photo by Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Offside via Getty Images

Answering your biggest questions about the short-lived Super League.

Over the course of about 48 hours, the world of European soccer went through an absolute roller-coaster. On Sunday, plans were revealed that 12 of the richest clubs were breaking off to form their own Super League with the idea of supplanting UEFA’s Champions League as the preeminent club tournament in the world. By Tuesday afternoon, the plan was in tatters with at least half the teams disavowing involvement and several others ready to drop out. On Wednesday — with just four teams not officially pulling out — Juventus chairman and founder of the Super League Andrea Agnelli confirmed the obvious: the Super League was at least temporarily dead.

There’s a lot of ins and outs. But in the hope of helping a non-soccer fan better understand what happened, SB Nation’s hockey editor Steph Driver interviewed soccer editor Jeremiah Oshan. This is their conversation:

Steph: My understanding of the Super League is that all of the big teams decided to break off and start their own league for their own competition, is that right?

Jeremiah: That’s basically the gist of it, at least most of the world’s biggest clubs agreed to do it anyway. That’s the so-called “Big Six” in England (Arsenal, Chelsea Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham), the three biggest clubs in Spain (Atletico Madrid, Barcelona and Real Madrid) and the three biggest clubs in Italy (AC Milan, Inter Milan and Juventus). There were supposed to be three more “founding” members that had not yet been named and then five more rotating clubs. In hindsight, those three missing teams should have been a pretty big red flag but it now all seems a bit moot now.

Steph: And this made Big Soccer big mad?

Jeremiah: In a word, yes. In many words, very, very, very, very, very mad. Basically, the whole of the soccer world — with a few notable exceptions — lost their collective minds over this. We’re talking fans of the teams who broke away, fans of like literally every other team, players of all stripes, heck even some of the coaches and players of these teams — guys whose livelihoods depend on being employed by one of these same teams — were less than enthusiastic about it.

Steph: Hold on, it wasn’t just fans and players that weren’t included in the Super League that were mad at being excluded, it was everyone?

Jeremiah: I’ve been working in soccer media for over a decade and can say without a doubt that I’ve never seen the soccer world agree on anything quite like they agreed that this was literally the worst idea that someone had ever come up with (which sounds hyperbolic, but I think accurately articulates the tone of the collective reaction). When I say, “everyone” was against this, I should mention that AMAZON!!! Released a statement that basically said “Look, we love money but this is crazy.”

Steph: That’s incredible, I love when people get collectively angry at a thing. From what I saw, the soccer officiating bodies all said no thank you and started announcing plans to exclude the teams and players from big events?

Jeremiah: That part was more expected. This was a plan explicitly hatched to cut out many of those organizations, after all. I think the Super League folks planned for that, in fact, and figured that even if UEFA and FIFA went through with the nuclear options of expelling them from the current Champions League and banning the players from events like the World Cup that ultimately money would smooth everything over and they’d still have a product so popular that they’d be able to print money off of it. What they didn’t anticipate was the groundswell of outright hatred for the idea.

Steph: At the end of the day, was this all about money?

Jeremiah: Oh, undeniably yes. The powers can talk about how this was a necessity born out of Covid-19 or, more cynically, an acknowledgement of the soccer world order as it is, but this was from beginning to end a decision born and fueled by the desire to consolidate money into as few teams as humanly possible.

Steph: What happened Tuesday? I went out to get Taco Bell for lunch and by the time I was in front of a computer again, the whole thing was dead.

Jeremiah: I’ll be completely honest: I did not foresee such a swift reversal but it does now look like the Super League is dead. Led by Manchester City — a team effectively owned by the United Arab Emirates — all six Premier League teams have now pulled out. Manchester United’s chairman has apparently resigned over this fiasco and their owners — the Glazers of NFL fame — are saying they might sell. Barcelona is now claiming they’ll only join if their fans sign off on it. Basically, it appears as though everyone is having second thoughts as it becomes apparent that this might not be the wildly popular league they need it to be in order to make the Money Printer go Brrrr.

Steph: How did the talks get this far without anyone either finding out or anticipating this type of reaction?

Jeremiah: I suspect that JP Morgan’s willingness to kick in $4 billion to this venture was what convinced them it was an idea worth trying over any objections. But beyond that, wealth has a way of creating quite a bubble. While the league’s announcement did come as a bit of a shock, the idea has been swimming around forever and it’s unpopularity should have never surprised anyone. But these are people who don’t hang out on Twitter or fan forums and probably don’t even pay attention to the punditry. They are not the class of people who are used to anyone telling them that their ideas are bad and certainly aren’t inclined to listen to what fans might want. I think this was soccer’s “Let them eat cake” moment and it could well result in a similar outcome, narratively speaking.

Steph: What’s next? Do you think they’ll try again?

Jeremiah: That’s definitely a big and interesting question. There’s a lot of talk of punishing these teams regardless. Maybe that means docking them points or kicking them out of European competitions or, heck, maybe even relegating them to lower divisions. I tend to think most of that is somewhat counter-productive since it mostly hurts fans and players, two groups who actually seem to have helped keep this from happening. We might see a bunch of the owners or leaders of these organization sell, resign or get fired — and it looks like we’re already seeing that — which probably gets us closer to a resolution most soccer fans actually want.

But will any of this stop future billionaire owners from trying something similar? I doubt it.

Steph: Do you think any of these ideas will have a ripple effect across other sports or other leagues?

Jeremiah: Somewhat ironically, the Super League is broadly modeled on a more American vision of sport where you have teams who don’t move up and down between divisions. So, in a sense we already see this model at work in places like the NFL and NBA. I suppose it’s good for sports teams owners to be reminded that their investments are only as valuable as the people consuming their product allow them to be, but I don’t have much hope of some sort of grand awakening or anything. Even before the Super League imploded, UEFA announced changes to the Champions League that gives big teams even more sway and was probably designed to keep this from happening.

This proposal failed in part because it was so brazen. I’m sure some future owners will try something similar but maybe a bit more plausibly equitable. Money, as they say, always finds a way.

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mastcomm · 5 years ago

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It’s Time to Ask What Africa Needs

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The ideas just keep coming. From Europe’s leading clubs: a proposal to expand the Champions League, to squeeze four more lucrative matchdays into the competition’s format. From UEFA: a whole new trophy to win, but one for countries that feel (rightly) excluded from the Champions League.

From FIFA: another new tournament, this one in the summer and based on the Club World Cup — the one that was, in itself, an expansion of the old Intercontinental Cup — but bigger, richer, and more in China. And, as my colleague Tariq Panja reported this week, from Stephen M. Ross and his Relevent Sports team: a version of the International Champions Cup that is conspicuously more than a meaningless preseason moneymaking exercise.

They are all, for now, under consideration, despite the endless warnings from FIFPro — the global players’ union — and from a number of leading managers, not least Jürgen Klopp, that players are already facing the risk of burnout, that soccer is in danger of strangling its golden goose. The meetings still go on, in locked rooms and hushed tones in five-star hotels, the workshopping, the brainstorming. There is no such thing as a bad idea.

Last week, it was confirmed that this year’s African Cup of Nations — Africa’s equivalent of the Copa América, or the European Championship — would, in fact, be next year’s African Cup of Nations: Cameroon, the host, has noted that it is far too hot to play the tournament in June and July, and so it has shifted it, quite understandably, to January. (The fact its summer dates would have clashed with the new Club World Cup was a factor, too).

This is, in many ways, not a new idea: the Cup of Nations always used to be played in the (European) winter, until it was decided in 2017 that it should be played, instead, in the (European) summer.

The thinking was flawed — it did not require a meteorologist to work out that temperatures would rule out a swath of countries as potential hosts — but the logic was simple: pretty much all of Africa’s highest-profile players work for clubs in Europe. Switching it to the off-season made sense for them, and for their employers.

The switch back, then, is not exactly popular: Everyone in the corridors of power might be willing to contemplate almost any other proposal for new tournaments or ruining existing ones, but the restoration of a historic, important competition to its usual dates is universally seen as A Bad Thing. Have the African authorities not thought about what effect they will have on the integrity of the Premier League at all?

There will come a point when this Eurocentric thinking has to stop. Yes, that is where all the money is. Yes, that is the economic engine financing the global game. But it is not the limit of soccer’s horizons. It does not own the game.

Making sure everything works well for Europe will, eventually, have damaging consequences elsewhere: in terms of attendance and interest in local competitions (which has already happened across Africa) and, possibly, down the line, in the development of players. Europe has to start thinking of itself as the tip of the pyramid: the summit, yes, but in quite a bit of trouble if the rest of the edifice is not secure.

There is one idea for a new competition that appeals. It came, back in November, from an unlikely source: Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, the concept that a stopped clock is right twice in a day fitted out in a finely-tailored suit. On a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, Infantino suggested that a Pan-African league should be under consideration.

His theory was, obviously, based on money: he thought that such a competition might be able to command revenues of $200 million a year. But there is a sound logic behind it.

Africa is home to a couple of dozen major clubs: Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates in South Africa; Al Ahly and Zamalek in Egypt; Espérance and Étoile du Sahel in Tunisia; DR Congo’s TP Mazembe; and Ghana’s Asante Kotoko, among others. A league of 20 teams, as Infantino suggested, would be of a far higher standard than any of the national competitions they currently call home.

That would be beneficial, of course, for players, and the prospect of selling continental broadcast rights would help improve facilities and infrastructure. It might, even, enable teams to hold on to some of their brightest prospects for just a little longer, delaying the exodus for Europe.

It might, in other words, provide the basis for another pole to emerge in soccer’s firmament: not enough to compete with Europe, but to rebalance things just a little. Soccer is weaker if western Europe has a monopoly on talent, on wealth, on power, as it does now. It is healthier if Africa — and Asia, North and South America and the rest — can make decisions without having to think how Europe will react. This might be a step on that road.

United’s Problem Is Not the Glazers’ Wallet

The ire at Old Trafford is mounting. Two defeats in the space of three days — first, painfully, at Liverpool, and then, humiliatingly, at home to Burnley — have brought Manchester United’s fans to the brink of mutiny. They want Ed Woodward, the man who runs the club, gone, and they want the Glazer family, the owner that employs him, out as well.

That neither will happen encapsulates United’s problem. The complaint against the Glazers has long been that the club would have been able to spend far more in the transfer market, strengthening its squad, if the Glazer family had not continually drained its finances to service debts and pay off interest.

And yet, since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, Manchester United has spent more than £1 billion on transfers. That is an eye-watering sum, and not just because it has been so consistently wasted. United’s recruitment in the last seven years has been so bad it’s a leap to believe that all it needed was another few hundred million pounds.

No, the issue is not the lack of spending, it is the lack of culture. The Glazers will not fire Woodward because he is good at making United a commercial powerhouse, at keeping the money rolling in.

They have created a club where sporting decisions have a secondary importance to financial ones, where the rapid decline we have seen in the last few years can be tolerated if the balance sheet remains healthy, and where nobody has the expertise or knowledge even to recognize the causes of the slide, let alone halt it. United lacks a clear on-field vision and a defined, modern off-field structure. It has invested money in players, but not in itself.

A Basic Understanding of Causality

At the risk of taking something that is supposed to be lighthearted fun rather too seriously, allow me to address one of the worst developments of this Premier League season: the rise of the League Table Without VAR.

You will, I suspect, have seen one, either on your social media feed or in a variety of publications, both major and minor. The premise is simple: this is how many points each team would have if English soccer had not introduced a video assistant refereeing system at the start of the season.

The premise — and, yes, I know it’s meant to be nothing more than curiosity-as-content, not taken to heart — is also, sadly, deeply stupid, and for two reasons. One is that VAR is merely a method for enforcing the actual rules. It has mostly made decisions correctly (even if we do not always like how correct those decisions are). Would anyone think to publish a league table if the offside rule did not exist? A league table if you were allowed to pick the ball up and throw it? A league table if everyone on the field had a sword? No, they wouldn’t.

The second reason, though, is that this kind of thing encourages a fundamental misunderstanding of causality. Let’s use, as an example, the penalty Manchester City was eventually not awarded against Crystal Palace last week. If it had been given (and scored), it does not necessarily follow that City would have won, 3-2. Maybe Palace would have shut up shop more effectively. Maybe City would have won by 6-1. Maybe Sergio Agüero is not in position to score either of his subsequent two goals.

What’s the phrase? Oh yes. Goals change games. Or, as analysts put it, they affect the game-state. Does any of this matter? Yes and no. That it is intellectually vapid is not important, but the fact that it adds to an atmosphere of suspicion and credulity and conspiracy is not helpful at all.