12 European clubs including England’s “big 6′” have signed a 23-year commitment to create their own football tournament, the Super League. The 15 founding members (3 more clubs are expected to join) will be permanent fixtures in the competition and act as its governors. These clubs will be joined annually by 5 teams, who qualify through their domestic achievements, to compete for the trophy. The format of this tournament will be two 10-team leagues, with the top 4 from each league proceeding to the knock-out phase.
This move is driven by one thing: money.
JP Morgan has committed $5 billion to the tournament and reports say that each clubs will receive €3.5 billion as well as an estimated £200-250 million a year in TV rights. To put this in perspective, winning the UEFA Champions League can earn a club £80 million.
This move has been met with widespread criticism in the football community. Fans have rallied to express their collective disgust at the project. Pundits have voiced their outrage at the greed of the elite clubs and its knock-down effect on the already struggling lower-league teams. Current Wolves player, Daniel Podence tweeted “dreams can’t be bought” alongside a picture of him playing in the UEFA Champions League, a post which has been liked by Manchester United superstar Bruno Fernandes. Managers, meanwhile, have remained coy when questioned, unsurprising given they are employed by the people benefitting from this change.
The traditional sporting institutions of the Premier League, FA, Italian FA, Spanish FA and UEFA have threatened to punish teams who participate in this tournament by banning them from their domestic leagues and banning their players from representing their respective countries. These threats appear to be empty words as the revenue of these 3 leagues is completely reliant on the global fanbases of their major clubs.
As well as widening the financial gap between the richest and poorest clubs, this move is the end of football’s sporting integrity. Some clubs enjoy the advantages of a vastly bigger budget for infrastructure and staff. However, the football pyramid offers the chance for smaller clubs to reach the highest possible level on the merit of its sporting excellence. A non-league club could theoretically climb to the Premier League and even qualify for the UEFA Champions League simply by winning games of football. This move effectively shuts the door on the smaller clubs from ever playing against the elite European teams. This is particularly cruel on teams like Leicester and West Ham, who have earned the right to play at the highest possible level after sustained sporting excellence in the Premier League this season.
The move exemplifies the disconnect between the owners of elite football clubs and the fanbases who value the history and fairness of the sport. This is not a sudden divorce between the football industry and the fans but rather a culmination of three decades of greed from individuals who profit from the sport. English football’s tipping point into becoming a money-driven industry was the inception of the Premier League in 1992.
The Premier League was founded when the first division clubs dismissed 100 years of tradition and broke away from the Football League to secure lucrative TV deals from SKY. A decade later, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club. This started an era of foreign billionaires and American investment firms buying English football clubs, replacing the local industrialists who had longstanding emotional attachments to their clubs.
The money brought into football by SKY’s TV deal and foreign ownership has seen football turn into a money making machine. Gargantuan commercial sponsorships, preseason tours to the US and China, relentless increase in ticket and kit prices, academies constantly overlooked in favour of glamourous and more marketable foreign stars, super-agents making 10s of millions and the endless sackings of managers who fail to deliver the revenue of European football. These are all examples of what the game has become. It is still adored by billions and the passion fans show their clubs is ceaseless despite their constant marginalisation.
The criticism by the Premier League and Sky Sports pundits is well founded but also hypocritical. The Super League is the monster they created. Decades of owners running football clubs as businesses made it inevitable that they would eventually fill their pockets and neglect the tradition and fairness of the sport. This is a fantastic business opportunity for Arsenal as the team has been miles away from challenging in Europe for 15 years and this offers them a chance to permanently reap the rewards of European football without the requirement of domestic sporting success.
This move is a watershed moment for the sport as the merit based system which has been its foundation has been scrapped. It should be criticised and stopped at all costs as it is a cynical cash grab by football’s wealthiest owners at expense of the sport’s fairness. However, it is also important to recognise the context which created this unprecedented move. Football has been stripped of its soul for 30 years, with owners ignoring their fans in order to maximise their profits. This tournament is the symptom rather than the cause of the greedy commercialisation of the beautiful game.
Groves Media 