Shocking news, right? Twelve of Europe’s top football clubs, six English and three each from Italy and Spain, are threatening to form a ‘Super League’ of their own. They hope to attract eight others to give them enough teams to run a good tournament, to showcase the sport.
Sorry, let me correct that. To make huge amounts of money. Mostly from television rights, though obviously the revenue from overpriced tickets to the matches themselves is not to be sneezed at
Two of the six teams, Real Madrid and Arsenal
battling it out
It’s not quite clear whether this is really going to happen or not. It may just be a bit of bluff, to force the Union of European Football Associations to reform the existing Champions League in a way that suits the top companies – sorry, clubs – better. We shall have to see.
The most wonderful aspect of the new proposal is that the twelve clubs currently involved, plus three more yet to join, would be guaranteed places in the Super League. That is to say, they couldn’t be relegated, even if they had a disastrous season. Only the five others would enter the competition by way of qualifying tournaments each year.
One of the things that companies most long for, and it seems football clubs too, is the elimination of competition. It’s a superbly comfortable arrangement, to know that whatever you do, you’ll be back next year, able to count on exactly the same revenue. It allows you to escape from that boringly old-fashioned system whereby you can be promoted or demoted based on your merit, which makes financial management so damned difficult, with the future not quite as certain as an accountant might like.
Not, in a sense, that there’s much that’s all that meritocratic about the present system. The wealthiest clubs can buy themselves the most expensive players, which are often the best. That means they tend to perform better than most and attract the biggest audiences.
Audiences matter, especially when it comes to TV. There are huge sums at stake. The teams that attract most viewers ultimately attract the biggest share of TV deals. And, with all that extra money, they can afford to keep buying the best players.
And round goes the cycle again…
Personally, I don’t watch football. Partly it’s because I’m not that enthusiastic about the game. Partly, though, it’s for something close to the reason a French friend gave me for not wanting to watch the Tour de France cycling race any more: “I’m not interested in watching an event which only establishes which team is taking the most effective and least detectable performance-enhancing drugs”. I’m not so keen on a game whose outcome is so massively dependent on a bank account.
I’d like to see clubs forced to take their players only from the region where they’re based. You know, Liverpool made up only of Liverpudlian players, Barcelona fielding only Catalans, Milan entirely Lombard. At least that would mean the clubs would have to train and cultivate local talent, which would anchor them far more tightly to their local populations and to the amateur games from which they’d draw.
It’s the reason that for a time I watched international rugby with a lot more pleasure. The Welsh team was made up of Welshmen. French players spoke French. The English fielded Englishmen. Well, more or less. The system was frittering at the edges, with England adopting players who were essentially, say, New Zealanders who couldn’t get picked regularly for the All Blacks – yes, a second rate All Black is generally pretty much up there with leading English players – accepting them as qualified to play for England on the grounds that one of their grandmothers knew the traditional pronunciation of the placename Tewkesbury (Chuksberry).
Still, Football’s never going to abandon the system of buying players. There’s far too much money in it. And money isn’t just wealth, it’s power. That’s something we’ve been discovering in recent weeks, or rather confirming, since deep down we knew it ages go, that the system of power in England (the nation providing six teams to the Super League) is about a series of distasteful associations between politicians (well, Tory politicians at least), senior civil servants fatally drawn to the main chance of enrichment, and private companies prepared to use their money to buy both in order to chase still further gain.
If that’s the way we organise our politics, why should sport be any different?
If I mean sport. The way things are in football, the game seems nothing more than an adjunct of the business. With business the main concern.
That makes the European Super League a perfectly apt symbol for our times. In turn, that would give it all the ingredients it needs for a long and successful existence. Financially successful, that is, the only kind that counts.
But that really has little to do with sport.
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