Earlier this week, it was announced that 12 of Europe’s biggest soccer teams would be forming a breakaway Super League. The league will include: Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan. A statement from the founding clubs said three more teams would be announced shortly.
The move has been met with widespread criticism, with FIFA expressing its "disapproval" of the new European Super League (ESL) competition, and the UEFA saying that "the clubs concerned will be banned from playing in any other competition at domestic, European or world level, and their players could be denied the opportunity to represent their national teams."
We spoke to Professor Peter Donnelly of the University of Toronto Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education. An expert in sport policy and politics, Donnelly is also a soccer fan.
Why is this happening now? What is the driving force behind the creation of this Super League?
The very top levels of professional team sport are enormously profitable and the players are paid very well. But as in all profitable businesses, the workers/players are paid far less than the profits they generate for the 'owners'.
The 12 teams who have announced their intended membership in the Super League are among the most profitable in Europe. Several are 'owned' by billionaires such as Sheik Mansour (Manchester City) or Roman Abramovich (Chelsea), but most are owned by holding companies, investment companies or hedge funds. Only Barcelona still has a traditional club affiliation, and is owned by the 140,000 members of Barcelona FC.
For a number of years now, the top clubs have been complaining about the structure of the Champions League -- the elite European competition that this season (2020-21) included 32 teams from 14 different European countries. UEFA, the European arm of FIFA which organizes the tournament, distributed more than two billion euros to the 32 teams that participated in the 2019-20 Champions League, with 82.4 million euros going to the winning team. The majority of that money is from the television contracts for this enormously popular competition.
So this is about top clubs wanting to make more profit?
The first complaint is about money. The top clubs do not like to share – not with 32 clubs, and not with UEFA, which uses money not distributed to tournament teams to support the developmental levels of soccer in European countries. The Super Leaguers realize that if they just played each other in a smaller competition in a league they owned, they could each receive all of the television and sponsorship money.
Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United all have American owners who also own teams in North American professional sport leagues. Unlike most other countries (where teams are promoted or demoted between tiers in a league depending on their level of success), the top North American leagues (MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL, NHL) function as profit-sharing cartels, deciding who and how many teams can join. It is not necessary to win in order to be profitable, as the Toronto Maple Leafs know so well, and losing does not mean demotion. That model is clearly appealing to 'owners' who are more concerned about profit than about sport, and the Super League appears to be the first attempt to replicate the North American model in Europe.
Other complaints concern extensive mid-week travel (e.g., to Russia or Turkey) between weekend domestic league games, teams playing too many games and the likelihood of injury, especially in games against teams that are not so Super and are unlikely to make it past the group stage of the competition.
Will ESL be able to take off with so much resistance from UEFA and the leagues and associations of the countries concerned? What will it take to win the public over?
I suspect that this Super move is more of a shot across UEFA's bows. I'm not sure it was ever intended to work, and it certainly looks unrealistic to propose a league, beginning competition in the Fall with 20 teams, when there are only 12 teams who have suggested that they may play. I think it is much more likely that this is an attempt to force UEFA to re-negotiate the Champions League terms, with far more money being directed toward the top clubs, and perhaps permitting the leading clubs to enter the competition at a later stage. However, I suspect that the Super clubs will continue to explore ways to develop a European soccer cartel.
Fans, national soccer organizations, and non-Super teams and leagues all seem to recognize that the consequences of permitting this to happen could be catastrophic. A Super League is likely to 'buy' all of the best players, impoverishing and diminishing the talent available to other teams and leagues. The cartel model may appeal to increasing numbers of non-Super team 'owners', which would lead to the end of one of the most popular features of the non-cartel system ¬– the possibility that one's team could win a place in the top league. The direct connection between the top league in a country and the grassroots level of the game in that country is a powerful tradition. For example, the enormous popularity of Leicester winning the Premier League in 2015-16 (and consequently a place in the Champions League the next season) despite having been demoted twice from the Premier League earlier in the 2000s testifies to the success of the current system.