8 ms·

Europe’s Super League scores an own goal

41 points by jkuria 6y ago

metahost 6y ago
Non pay-walled link: https://archive.is/accYU https://archive.is/accYU
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  You can also just disable javascript for the site and it lets you read the full article. This trick works on a ton of other news sites as well. It's fairly easy to disable just for one domain...e.g. on chrome, click URL bar lock icon -> site settings -> javascript: disabled.
erikstarck 6y ago
The dynamics of this is quite fascinating. As a startup, figuring out what your product actually is - what is it your customers _actually_ pay for - can be challenging. Clearly, it's the same for football clubs that's been around for decades. They seem to have forgotten what their fans like about them. What they pay for. That's an expensive mistake for any company.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  I don't think the local fans really made a difference here. All the Super League teams are global franchises, and it was the threats from broadcasters (who they depend on for revenue) and governments that torpedoed the projects.
  - erikstarck 6y ago
    Yeah, well, that's where the fascinating dynamics kick in. The "customers" for the clubs are of many different kinds. The sponsors are one, the broadcasters another. The list is long and they are connected with each other in a complex web. But at the end of they day, if the fans are gone nothing else remains.
    - hkt 6y ago
      Football in the UK can be quite political at times, especially around issues of ownership and regulation. There is a set of elections coming up in May and this was probably why the UK's prime minister threatened to use a "legislative bomb". Football fans are also voters, after all, and even people who don't watch the sport don't want bad things to happen to it.
      - thom 6y ago
        I am not sure we have all the information yet, it seems entirely possible that Boris Johnson and Ed Woodward’s meeting in the run up to the announcement was to ensure the government were on side.
  - hakfoo 6y ago
    I wonder if there's a different "customer development" process you get with multiple leagues. Being American, I'd tend to think about minor league baseball as comparison. You put a team in every whistle-stop town, with $5-10 tickets and "free bat night". Families could attend several games a year and the kids grow up with baseball as part of their life. Maybe once or twice they go to a big league game at $200 per seat. Similarly, you've got people whose families who have supported the same third-division football team through generations of direct attendance. A sport with major leagues only has a very different model for building relationships with a new generations of fans. It's something they're really only experiencing through TV, and I wonder if that will have the same degree of customer connection. It works for the NFL and NBA but they're much more telegenic games than baseball is.
    - maweki 6y ago
      In Europe there are minor (regional) leagues all the way down to the city level. Most cost maybe 2 to 5 euro to attend. But they are all within the same football governing body and you can climb these leagues up to the Bundesliga or premier league or whatever.
      - tshanmu 6y ago
        That's the aspiration. But reality is very different. The interesting aspect was when the that reality was being called out, everyone rebelled!!
        riffraff 6y ago
        the thing people seem to have forgotten is that reality _was_ different until 20 years ago, when the powerful clubs pushed for the creation of the Champions League, then for unbalanced dividends that rewarded the already powerful, then killed the Cup Winner's Cup. In the '80/90s the Champion's Cup was won by Red Star Belgrade, Porto, Hamburg, Steaua Bucarest, Aston Villa, Olympique Marseille, Ajax, PSV etc in addendum do the "big ones". Then the big clubs bullied the UEFA and the local leagues into giving them more and more money in proportion, and changing the rules so they'd basically never be excluded. This latest attempt is just another step towards a future where the reality of the small team getting to the top needs to be completely erased in the interest of the big teams.
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    But certainly the government wouldn’t get involved unless they thought there might be a vote or two in it for them.
    - edjw 6y ago
      This is campaigning. You show decision-makers why they should make the decision you want them to and sometimes that includes playing into the decision-maker’s self-interest.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Eh, I think it will have had something to do with it - instant boycotts were happening for all involved teams in the U.K. by many of their fans.
  - thom 6y ago
    Profit margins in football (where profits exist at all) are nowhere near large enough to suffer interruptions to either broadcast _or_ match day revenue, so I don’t think this is an either/or thing.
  - username90 6y ago
    Governments represents local fans.
- estomagordo 6y ago
  They haven't really "forgotten" in the traditional sense. It is more a case of the present leadership of billionaire investors breaking the hundred-year lineage and representing a new, tone-deaf and usurped versions of the clubs.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
alessioalex 6y ago
Sooner or later the ESL will happen. Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL. They want to watch the top teams competing together. The disparity between the Premier League teams and the other leagues is huge already. ESL was meant to shorten that gap.
- hewrin10 6y ago
  The reason top team clashes are so anticipated is because it happens rarely, if it happened every season it loses its attraction.
  - MisterBastahrd 6y ago
    Not hardly. Some American sports teams clash every year and the buildup each year is still huge. We're talking powers in their respective sports that have played each other for almost 100 consecutive seasons, even at the collegiate level. Texas vs. Oklahoma, Auburn vs. Alabama, Ohio State vs. Michigan... even when the teams are doing less than stellar, there's still a gigantic buildup and anticipation for these games because of the rivalries involved. Being on the same level and having that familiarity makes the games more fun to watch and it makes the teams more competitive with each other.
    - matsemann 6y ago
      There are still important matches between pairs of top teams every year as it is now. ManU plays Liverpool 2+ times. Madrid vs Barca probably 4 times or so. But with ESL, every match would be between the dirty dozen. Then it loses its charm.
      - MisterBastahrd 6y ago
        Yes, every matchup would be with teams that have accumulated a ton of elite talent and know each other well enough that they will have to compete harder if they want to win. I will never understand European purists and their desire to watch a lesser product for tradition's sake. When Louisiana State University plays The University of Alabama in a game of American Football on the first weekend in November every single year, the worst that they've ever done in TV ratings is the same as Liverpool vs. Man City's record viewership. This is a game of two elite amateur teams, mind you, that happen to be in the same division in the same conference (I guess you could call it a regional league).
amarant 6y ago
What were fans, media and governments upset about? What was wrong with ESL? i don't get it...
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Money. This was 100% about money and 0% about sport. They forgot they exist, because of the fans not the other way around.
- gehsty 6y ago
  European football is seen as the most prestigious tournament, and also has significant financial rewards for just getting into it. European football is not guaranteed for any team at the moment, you need to finish in the top places of your domestic league to qualify. The ESL guaranteed European football for a some teams, making the domestic leagues less important as it doesn’t get you access to European football, and also stops growth of smaller teams (how do they get into the ESL etc). For me it was a grab by the top teams to de-risk their financials by having guaranteed European football, nothing to do with seeing the best teams play each other etc (if they are the best they’d meet in champions league..). I guess it would be like if 10 teams said we are making our own playoffs or something, and no other teams can join our playoffs unless we let them, the regular season is suddenly worthless (sorry if this is a terrible analogy - I don’t really know American sports).
  - amarant 5y ago
    Ah gotcha, didn't know about those guaranteed spots! I couldn't judge your analogy, as a Swede I too know very little of American sports. I know they say football but don't mean it, and that's about all I know.
- estomagordo 6y ago
  Where to even begin? Concretely, the ESL wouldn't be a sporting competition, it would be an entertainment spectacle. When there is nothing to lose in terms of relegation or missed qualification for performing poorly across one or several seasons, we are no longer dealing with a competitive sport. And football fans, i.e. the grassroots, don't typically take kindly to attempts at crafting new artificial rivalries and watering out those rare, big occasion games by playing them with absurd frequency. Add to that the frankly quite disgusting narrative of "doing this to save football" and it's just a perfect shitstorm, really.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
A closed you can't loose American round robin competition does not appeal to soccer fans - we want to see clubs doing poorly get relegated and those that play well have a chance to compete in the champions league.
toyg 6y ago
What this attempt really revealed, IMHO, is how desperate for fresh cash a lot of these top clubs are. In particular, Juventus and Real Madrid (and Manchester United while the Glazer looters stay at the helm) have monstrous debts that risk destroying them as soon as they don’t dominate any competition for a few years. This is what they are saying when they talk about “saving football”: Florentino Perez and Andrea Agnelli are genuinely trying to save their clubs from self-destruction. Their sense of entitlement is such that they cannot fathom renouncing their position (i.e. selling big players and being weaker for some time), but they know sooner or later the debts will be due. I hate the ESL/NBA concept for football, but something still has to be done to reduce these excesses. Financial Fair Play has not worked well enough for top clubs, the market for players remains fundamentally inflated by a handful of oligarchs. I hope that UEFA takes the legitimacy capital earned this week to make some real changes in this area.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Sadly it shows how far the sport has moved from the founding principles when playing for money was considered dirty and caused even arguments between football clubs across UK, about 100 years ago.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    A lot has changed with the advent of TV. Suddenly you could have millions and millions of fans instead of thousands. And a corresponding advertising opportunity. Few people would let such an opportunity lie on a pavement without picking it up, especially given the fact that the recollections of the Great Depression were still within living memory.
- riffraff 6y ago
  Perez, Agnelli and others have often mentioned "football can't go without this", but what they mean is "I can't go on like this". Some of the big clubs have basically been financially mismanaged for years, but it's not about "football" it's about Juventus, Real Madrid etc. I wish we'd use salary caps (but those are trivial to hack around) and max transfer caps (ditto) and reduced shortlists with a mandatory % of youths. And surely the UEFA can be managed better. But the truth is these clubs are the "badly managed too big too fail bank" of football.
riffraff 6y ago
one of the interesting outcomes of this kerfuffle is how JPMorgan got a downgrade in ESG ratings[0] because they financed this. Oddly enough, the teams themselves which are traded didn't, maybe they just had not had a grading before. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/21/jp-morgan-chase-gets-sustainability-downgrade-standard-ethics-after-funding-failed-super-league https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/21/jp-morgan-c...
nindalf 6y ago
A previous discussion of this topic was flagged. I think this link is better because it compares the economic models of American and European sports teams. That’s interesting for a general audience, not merely sports fans.
erfgh 6y ago
They tried to do the same thing that happened in basketball 20 years ago. Back then no fan objected to it. I wonder what changed.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I am not aware of similar stunt with European basketball.
  - erfgh 6y ago
    In 2000 some basketball clubs split off, made another league and FIBA was furious. FIBA managed to keep only 3-4 top clubs so basketball was split between the Euroleague (which had most top clubs) and FIBA's Suproleague which was the poor relative. After 1 year FIBA scrapped the Suproleague altogether and only the Euroleague remained. The Euroleague has been running as a closed league since then.
  - toyg 6y ago
    International basketball leagues in Europe are a mess, they went through several schisms and, if i remember correctly, some of them now work on an invite basis. You can reach the top rings of a national league and still don’t get into the European competition you’d deserve simply because you’re judged “not big enough”. The contrast between our system and the NBA has always been stark, but at least in the past century this could be justified by a love of competition; now it just shows that the European game is run by amateurs and bureaucrats.
fergie 6y ago
The wider issue here is whether football clubs should even be run as for-profit corporations. It seems wrong that the owners of a club would regard a "successful season" as one in which they made the most money, rather than the one where they actually won stuff.
- riffraff 6y ago
  part of the problem is the opposite: the clubs have dug themselves in a hole financially attempting to actually win something (think of Juventus in the last couple years wasting a ton of money while failing to achieve any international success).
- qeternity 6y ago
  Entertainment is fundamentally one of the simplest forms of enterprise. One party has disposable income and gives it to another party for completely non essential services. The incentives align perfectly. If there was ever a market that should run as a for profit entity, it’s football. People see Super League as some sort of failure. This is a free market success. The fans reign supreme through the power of their wallets.
  - username90 6y ago
    No, more profits doesn't mean more entertainment. People who are addicted to football pay a lot for it, increasing prices wont make them happier, increasing ads wont make them happier etc. You are basically increasing profits to make worse entertainment, having it not be profit seeking is so much better for the viewers.
    - qeternity 6y ago
      You're missing the point: the fact that people are willing to pay a lot means that there is a large incentive to provide the best level of entertainment. If you take the profit away, you risk misaligned incentives.
      - 6y ago
erfgh 6y ago
The Champions League cannot compete with ubiquitous Netflix/Youtube. It will have to be replaced or radically change. The ESL's demise points to the latter. Americans here cannot grasp the huge difference between the European top 10 clubs and the rest. In american sports teams are much closer to each other.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  I'd argue even deeper than that. Football (Soccer) is boring. It is even more boring nowadays. (Sill less boring than Baseball but that's a discussion for another time ;) ) 90 min of very little action. Most of the discussion happens around the games (Sports journalists in Football will lose their job to GPT-3 mark my words). Most of the talk was generated by needless controversy/drama (not exclusive to that sport, sure, but see the discussions on how VAR would "end" football) Sports need to adapt to the new times or lose audience.
  - killtimeatwork 6y ago
    > 90 min of very little action It's like a boxing match. The formations are constantly jockeying for tactical advantage, taking calculated risks, outplaying and outsmarting each other on a micro scale etc. [1] Perhaps it's boring for someone who doesn't care about that and only wants to see goals scored. [1] Of course, this is most true in a match of two top teams, the less skill involved the more the match starts to remind a pinball game - i.e. with much less tactics and control, and much more of just reacting and randomness.
zwaps 6y ago
I think another reason this did not happen is that the clubs who participated were not distributed well throughout Europe. This also goes in terms of audience. The ESL claims to be a league of the best, but the ranking it actually conforms to is a league of the "valuable, but in debt" teams (seriously, check the ranking on wikipedia). If you'd want to have a closed league of the best teams, why are there (internationally speaking) third rate teams like Tottenham, whereas there were zero German or French teams? What was the CL final last year? Bayern and PSG? Well, you say, they tried to invite them. However, Bayern and PSG are interested in making money. Nobody in France or Germany would be happy with a league comprised mostly of British teams, calling itself "best in Europe". How do you sell that to the largest countries in the EU? One thing the premier league teams do better is international marketing. British teams are more likely to be known in China, India and the US. This is, in the end, where the money would come from. Again, fewer incentives for French and German teams. Nevertheless, if it would have gone past the pesky "legacy fans", it would have been profitable as a show competition for international audiences. But it did not get past the local fans, because it did not even have the slightest plan of appeasing British fans, nor the slightest fan of inciting German and French teams to join. It's discussed elsewhere why this was a transparent money grab. Perhaps more insulting is how badly it was executed!
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/accYU https://archive.is/accYU

41 points by jkuria 6y ago

metahost 6y ago

Non pay-walled link: https://archive.is/accYU https://archive.is/accYU

oh_sigh 6y ago
You can also just disable javascript for the site and it lets you read the full article. This trick works on a ton of other news sites as well. It's fairly easy to disable just for one domain...e.g. on chrome, click URL bar lock icon -> site settings -> javascript: disabled.

erikstarck 6y ago

The dynamics of this is quite fascinating. As a startup, figuring out what your product actually is - what is it your customers _actually_ pay for - can be challenging. Clearly, it's the same for football clubs that's been around for decades. They seem to have forgotten what their fans like about them. What they pay for. That's an expensive mistake for any company.

Clewza313 6y ago
I don't think the local fans really made a difference here. All the Super League teams are global franchises, and it was the threats from broadcasters (who they depend on for revenue) and governments that torpedoed the projects.
- erikstarck 6y ago
  Yeah, well, that's where the fascinating dynamics kick in. The "customers" for the clubs are of many different kinds. The sponsors are one, the broadcasters another. The list is long and they are connected with each other in a complex web. But at the end of they day, if the fans are gone nothing else remains.
  - hkt 6y ago
    Football in the UK can be quite political at times, especially around issues of ownership and regulation. There is a set of elections coming up in May and this was probably why the UK's prime minister threatened to use a "legislative bomb". Football fans are also voters, after all, and even people who don't watch the sport don't want bad things to happen to it.
    - thom 6y ago
      I am not sure we have all the information yet, it seems entirely possible that Boris Johnson and Ed Woodward’s meeting in the run up to the announcement was to ensure the government were on side.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  I wonder if there's a different "customer development" process you get with multiple leagues. Being American, I'd tend to think about minor league baseball as comparison. You put a team in every whistle-stop town, with $5-10 tickets and "free bat night". Families could attend several games a year and the kids grow up with baseball as part of their life. Maybe once or twice they go to a big league game at $200 per seat. Similarly, you've got people whose families who have supported the same third-division football team through generations of direct attendance. A sport with major leagues only has a very different model for building relationships with a new generations of fans. It's something they're really only experiencing through TV, and I wonder if that will have the same degree of customer connection. It works for the NFL and NBA but they're much more telegenic games than baseball is.
  - maweki 6y ago
    In Europe there are minor (regional) leagues all the way down to the city level. Most cost maybe 2 to 5 euro to attend. But they are all within the same football governing body and you can climb these leagues up to the Bundesliga or premier league or whatever.
    - tshanmu 6y ago
      That's the aspiration. But reality is very different. The interesting aspect was when the that reality was being called out, everyone rebelled!!
      - riffraff 6y ago
        the thing people seem to have forgotten is that reality _was_ different until 20 years ago, when the powerful clubs pushed for the creation of the Champions League, then for unbalanced dividends that rewarded the already powerful, then killed the Cup Winner's Cup. In the '80/90s the Champion's Cup was won by Red Star Belgrade, Porto, Hamburg, Steaua Bucarest, Aston Villa, Olympique Marseille, Ajax, PSV etc in addendum do the "big ones". Then the big clubs bullied the UEFA and the local leagues into giving them more and more money in proportion, and changing the rules so they'd basically never be excluded. This latest attempt is just another step towards a future where the reality of the small team getting to the top needs to be completely erased in the interest of the big teams.
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  But certainly the government wouldn’t get involved unless they thought there might be a vote or two in it for them.
  - edjw 6y ago
    This is campaigning. You show decision-makers why they should make the decision you want them to and sometimes that includes playing into the decision-maker’s self-interest.
- Closi 6y ago
  Eh, I think it will have had something to do with it - instant boycotts were happening for all involved teams in the U.K. by many of their fans.
- thom 6y ago
  Profit margins in football (where profits exist at all) are nowhere near large enough to suffer interruptions to either broadcast _or_ match day revenue, so I don’t think this is an either/or thing.
- username90 6y ago
  Governments represents local fans.
estomagordo 6y ago
They haven't really "forgotten" in the traditional sense. It is more a case of the present leadership of billionaire investors breaking the hundred-year lineage and representing a new, tone-deaf and usurped versions of the clubs.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

alessioalex 6y ago

Sooner or later the ESL will happen. Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL. They want to watch the top teams competing together. The disparity between the Premier League teams and the other leagues is huge already. ESL was meant to shorten that gap.

hewrin10 6y ago
The reason top team clashes are so anticipated is because it happens rarely, if it happened every season it loses its attraction.
- MisterBastahrd 6y ago
  Not hardly. Some American sports teams clash every year and the buildup each year is still huge. We're talking powers in their respective sports that have played each other for almost 100 consecutive seasons, even at the collegiate level. Texas vs. Oklahoma, Auburn vs. Alabama, Ohio State vs. Michigan... even when the teams are doing less than stellar, there's still a gigantic buildup and anticipation for these games because of the rivalries involved. Being on the same level and having that familiarity makes the games more fun to watch and it makes the teams more competitive with each other.
  - matsemann 6y ago
    There are still important matches between pairs of top teams every year as it is now. ManU plays Liverpool 2+ times. Madrid vs Barca probably 4 times or so. But with ESL, every match would be between the dirty dozen. Then it loses its charm.
    - MisterBastahrd 6y ago
      Yes, every matchup would be with teams that have accumulated a ton of elite talent and know each other well enough that they will have to compete harder if they want to win. I will never understand European purists and their desire to watch a lesser product for tradition's sake. When Louisiana State University plays The University of Alabama in a game of American Football on the first weekend in November every single year, the worst that they've ever done in TV ratings is the same as Liverpool vs. Man City's record viewership. This is a game of two elite amateur teams, mind you, that happen to be in the same division in the same conference (I guess you could call it a regional league).

amarant 6y ago

What were fans, media and governments upset about? What was wrong with ESL? i don't get it...

pjmlp 6y ago
Money. This was 100% about money and 0% about sport. They forgot they exist, because of the fans not the other way around.
gehsty 6y ago
European football is seen as the most prestigious tournament, and also has significant financial rewards for just getting into it. European football is not guaranteed for any team at the moment, you need to finish in the top places of your domestic league to qualify. The ESL guaranteed European football for a some teams, making the domestic leagues less important as it doesn’t get you access to European football, and also stops growth of smaller teams (how do they get into the ESL etc). For me it was a grab by the top teams to de-risk their financials by having guaranteed European football, nothing to do with seeing the best teams play each other etc (if they are the best they’d meet in champions league..). I guess it would be like if 10 teams said we are making our own playoffs or something, and no other teams can join our playoffs unless we let them, the regular season is suddenly worthless (sorry if this is a terrible analogy - I don’t really know American sports).
- amarant 5y ago
  Ah gotcha, didn't know about those guaranteed spots! I couldn't judge your analogy, as a Swede I too know very little of American sports. I know they say football but don't mean it, and that's about all I know.
estomagordo 6y ago
Where to even begin? Concretely, the ESL wouldn't be a sporting competition, it would be an entertainment spectacle. When there is nothing to lose in terms of relegation or missed qualification for performing poorly across one or several seasons, we are no longer dealing with a competitive sport. And football fans, i.e. the grassroots, don't typically take kindly to attempts at crafting new artificial rivalries and watering out those rare, big occasion games by playing them with absurd frequency. Add to that the frankly quite disgusting narrative of "doing this to save football" and it's just a perfect shitstorm, really.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

A closed you can't loose American round robin competition does not appeal to soccer fans - we want to see clubs doing poorly get relegated and those that play well have a chance to compete in the champions league.

toyg 6y ago

What this attempt really revealed, IMHO, is how desperate for fresh cash a lot of these top clubs are. In particular, Juventus and Real Madrid (and Manchester United while the Glazer looters stay at the helm) have monstrous debts that risk destroying them as soon as they don’t dominate any competition for a few years. This is what they are saying when they talk about “saving football”: Florentino Perez and Andrea Agnelli are genuinely trying to save their clubs from self-destruction. Their sense of entitlement is such that they cannot fathom renouncing their position (i.e. selling big players and being weaker for some time), but they know sooner or later the debts will be due. I hate the ESL/NBA concept for football, but something still has to be done to reduce these excesses. Financial Fair Play has not worked well enough for top clubs, the market for players remains fundamentally inflated by a handful of oligarchs. I hope that UEFA takes the legitimacy capital earned this week to make some real changes in this area.

pjmlp 6y ago
Sadly it shows how far the sport has moved from the founding principles when playing for money was considered dirty and caused even arguments between football clubs across UK, about 100 years ago.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  A lot has changed with the advent of TV. Suddenly you could have millions and millions of fans instead of thousands. And a corresponding advertising opportunity. Few people would let such an opportunity lie on a pavement without picking it up, especially given the fact that the recollections of the Great Depression were still within living memory.
riffraff 6y ago
Perez, Agnelli and others have often mentioned "football can't go without this", but what they mean is "I can't go on like this". Some of the big clubs have basically been financially mismanaged for years, but it's not about "football" it's about Juventus, Real Madrid etc. I wish we'd use salary caps (but those are trivial to hack around) and max transfer caps (ditto) and reduced shortlists with a mandatory % of youths. And surely the UEFA can be managed better. But the truth is these clubs are the "badly managed too big too fail bank" of football.

riffraff 6y ago

one of the interesting outcomes of this kerfuffle is how JPMorgan got a downgrade in ESG ratings[0] because they financed this. Oddly enough, the teams themselves which are traded didn't, maybe they just had not had a grading before. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/21/jp-morgan-chase-gets-sustainability-downgrade-standard-ethics-after-funding-failed-super-league https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/21/jp-morgan-c...

nindalf 6y ago

A previous discussion of this topic was flagged. I think this link is better because it compares the economic models of American and European sports teams. That’s interesting for a general audience, not merely sports fans.

erfgh 6y ago

They tried to do the same thing that happened in basketball 20 years ago. Back then no fan objected to it. I wonder what changed.

pjmlp 6y ago
I am not aware of similar stunt with European basketball.
- erfgh 6y ago
  In 2000 some basketball clubs split off, made another league and FIBA was furious. FIBA managed to keep only 3-4 top clubs so basketball was split between the Euroleague (which had most top clubs) and FIBA's Suproleague which was the poor relative. After 1 year FIBA scrapped the Suproleague altogether and only the Euroleague remained. The Euroleague has been running as a closed league since then.
- toyg 6y ago
  International basketball leagues in Europe are a mess, they went through several schisms and, if i remember correctly, some of them now work on an invite basis. You can reach the top rings of a national league and still don’t get into the European competition you’d deserve simply because you’re judged “not big enough”. The contrast between our system and the NBA has always been stark, but at least in the past century this could be justified by a love of competition; now it just shows that the European game is run by amateurs and bureaucrats.

fergie 6y ago

The wider issue here is whether football clubs should even be run as for-profit corporations. It seems wrong that the owners of a club would regard a "successful season" as one in which they made the most money, rather than the one where they actually won stuff.

riffraff 6y ago
part of the problem is the opposite: the clubs have dug themselves in a hole financially attempting to actually win something (think of Juventus in the last couple years wasting a ton of money while failing to achieve any international success).
qeternity 6y ago
Entertainment is fundamentally one of the simplest forms of enterprise. One party has disposable income and gives it to another party for completely non essential services. The incentives align perfectly. If there was ever a market that should run as a for profit entity, it’s football. People see Super League as some sort of failure. This is a free market success. The fans reign supreme through the power of their wallets.
- username90 6y ago
  No, more profits doesn't mean more entertainment. People who are addicted to football pay a lot for it, increasing prices wont make them happier, increasing ads wont make them happier etc. You are basically increasing profits to make worse entertainment, having it not be profit seeking is so much better for the viewers.
  - qeternity 6y ago
    You're missing the point: the fact that people are willing to pay a lot means that there is a large incentive to provide the best level of entertainment. If you take the profit away, you risk misaligned incentives.
    - 6y ago

erfgh 6y ago

The Champions League cannot compete with ubiquitous Netflix/Youtube. It will have to be replaced or radically change. The ESL's demise points to the latter. Americans here cannot grasp the huge difference between the European top 10 clubs and the rest. In american sports teams are much closer to each other.

raverbashing 6y ago
I'd argue even deeper than that. Football (Soccer) is boring. It is even more boring nowadays. (Sill less boring than Baseball but that's a discussion for another time ;) ) 90 min of very little action. Most of the discussion happens around the games (Sports journalists in Football will lose their job to GPT-3 mark my words). Most of the talk was generated by needless controversy/drama (not exclusive to that sport, sure, but see the discussions on how VAR would "end" football) Sports need to adapt to the new times or lose audience.
- killtimeatwork 6y ago
  > 90 min of very little action It's like a boxing match. The formations are constantly jockeying for tactical advantage, taking calculated risks, outplaying and outsmarting each other on a micro scale etc. [1] Perhaps it's boring for someone who doesn't care about that and only wants to see goals scored. [1] Of course, this is most true in a match of two top teams, the less skill involved the more the match starts to remind a pinball game - i.e. with much less tactics and control, and much more of just reacting and randomness.

zwaps 6y ago

I think another reason this did not happen is that the clubs who participated were not distributed well throughout Europe. This also goes in terms of audience. The ESL claims to be a league of the best, but the ranking it actually conforms to is a league of the "valuable, but in debt" teams (seriously, check the ranking on wikipedia). If you'd want to have a closed league of the best teams, why are there (internationally speaking) third rate teams like Tottenham, whereas there were zero German or French teams? What was the CL final last year? Bayern and PSG? Well, you say, they tried to invite them. However, Bayern and PSG are interested in making money. Nobody in France or Germany would be happy with a league comprised mostly of British teams, calling itself "best in Europe". How do you sell that to the largest countries in the EU? One thing the premier league teams do better is international marketing. British teams are more likely to be known in China, India and the US. This is, in the end, where the money would come from. Again, fewer incentives for French and German teams. Nevertheless, if it would have gone past the pesky "legacy fans", it would have been profitable as a show competition for international audiences. But it did not get past the local fans, because it did not even have the slightest plan of appeasing British fans, nor the slightest fan of inciting German and French teams to join. It's discussed elsewhere why this was a transparent money grab. Perhaps more insulting is how badly it was executed!

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/accYU https://archive.is/accYU