Football club ownership is a labor of love. You cant just phone it in like in major sports in the US. The Dallas Cowboys would be a third tier football team at this point with the same model. The best clubs have a sugar daddy that doesn't expect return on the investment outside of promotions and trophies.
Premier League
- Thread starter Deanster
- Start date
For a bunch of billionaires who are supposedly good at this business stuff, the whole roll-out of this Super League by the owners has been clown car quality.
* Announce a competition with 15 founding members, but only have 12 of those confirmed
* Have zero details on how the other 5 competitors will be determined
* Have zero idea of the push back you are going to get from your fan base
* Have zero plans for a PR campaign to sell the benefits of your new competition for all parties involved
* Announce a competition with 15 founding members, but only have 12 of those confirmed
* Have zero details on how the other 5 competitors will be determined
* Have zero idea of the push back you are going to get from your fan base
* Have zero plans for a PR campaign to sell the benefits of your new competition for all parties involved
Haha. Well if anyone can follow the money and sense the momentum of competing back-room deals first, and double back on prior statements with no shame and impunity to grab some free goodwill, it would be a Russian corruption crony!
(I don't mean that in recent years US politics + Russia, but in general as it's "last man standing" over there - one day you're the steward for half the country's aluminum or oil, the next your in jail for "corruption" since you didn't toe the right line and be corrupt in the right way and keep your place, or you're being assassinated in your mansion in London. I don't know how a guy like Abramovich that does it...You have total power and luxury with total precarity.)
Yeah I was just thinking about this too. I imagine for these owners who don't care about opinion, they just think of it as a gamble. They'll never know for sure, so 50/50. Announce, and if momentum goes right carry on, if not do a U-turn and say it was negotiating tactic for better Champions League guarantees. (And maybe lull fans into a sense of relief they've stopped it, bring it back in 3 years) If you screw over Ed Woodward in the process then oh well. The English clubs will be fine - make a lot of money or make even more money. The Spanish clubs needed it to work.
Gosh I just enjoy reading the debate on this - the principle of having some guaranteed spots - because it is all such a settled thing in US pro sports. College sports still has a bit of this competitive possibility. (Even as we are told violating some sacred rule that ISU is pre-season #4 instead of mandated SEC-Big10 teams). Also if the US must have "closed" leagues at least the draft and pick-ordering keep some parity possible, vs the Euro soccer Buy/Sell.
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I try to catch two games a month of theirs. Lots of shoddy streams lol.
I wouldn’t accept any of those team apologies. Those owners tried to undermine the true sport of competition and hard work to get you places and they just wanna act like nothing happened.
It's astounding and absolutely hilarious. You have to think a lot of hubris is in place here.
I think this is a good example of what would happen if 16 teams broke away from the NCAA to form their own super conference and the NCAA tourney got screwed up. People hate the NCAA, but man they would get really sympathetic real quick if it happened.
To be fair, these clubs have a ton of debt and COVID has smacked them hard. Yeah, they were "greedy" clubs but again it's kind of like NCAA teams. They spend all the money they take in and when their revenue gets slammed it's a real problem. That said they went about this completely wrong and it's just hilarious how badly it's come off.
Two years ago, Joel Glazer was quoted as saying “It took me 2 years to learn the offside rule in soccer and I still struggle with it.”
On top of that, I hear they rarely are in Manchester for games - mainly for “bigger“ games like against Liverpool or City.
Anyways, moving ahead, this presents a lot of opportunities for reform for the major European leagues. It sounds like the 12 clubs involved gave up their voting rights for league business if I heard correctly on Ringer FC. Again, I'm a very casual fan so tell me if any of this is crazy.
1. UEFA Champions league needs to flatten it's revenue distribution. One of the reasons these clubs are in trouble is one like Liverpool is looking at not making it this year which could cost them like 50-60 million. Dumb planning on their part. But, and this is where I could get a little galaxy brained, but hear me out - instead of taking the top two from each league, you just take the top team, and then the rest of the selections are picked by a committee like the NCAA tournament. NCAA tourney selection is a wild and fun time here and when you're talking about the top European soccer clubs it would drive conversation all season kind of like brackets do here.
2. The revenue distribution should be given to the leagues based on how many teams they have in the tournament. Premier league gets 20% of the participants, they get 20% of the revenue. However, that 20% is evenly distributed to every team in the Premier league. Yeah, this might suck for German and Italian leagues but Bayern and Juventus basically own those leagues like Gonzaga owns the WCC.
I might be crazy but this sounds kind of fun to me.
1. UEFA Champions league needs to flatten it's revenue distribution. One of the reasons these clubs are in trouble is one like Liverpool is looking at not making it this year which could cost them like 50-60 million. Dumb planning on their part. But, and this is where I could get a little galaxy brained, but hear me out - instead of taking the top two from each league, you just take the top team, and then the rest of the selections are picked by a committee like the NCAA tournament. NCAA tourney selection is a wild and fun time here and when you're talking about the top European soccer clubs it would drive conversation all season kind of like brackets do here.
2. The revenue distribution should be given to the leagues based on how many teams they have in the tournament. Premier league gets 20% of the participants, they get 20% of the revenue. However, that 20% is evenly distributed to every team in the Premier league. Yeah, this might suck for German and Italian leagues but Bayern and Juventus basically own those leagues like Gonzaga owns the WCC.
I might be crazy but this sounds kind of fun to me.
Side note, everybody railing on about how this is anti-competitive... 17 of the last 20 UEFA champs have been from Spain, Italy, or England and that's before the explosion of the last decade of the super spending clubs. And I know fans love relegation but if you're somebody like me, who only really has emotional ties to one club, Sunderland, who is now in League One... well I honestly don't really care about what happens at the Premier level.
Personally, I’d argue massive clubs regularly winning the CL isn’t anti-competitive as long as they have to actually qualify for the competition in the first place. The railing against anti-competitiveness is due to the fact that these clubs were attempting to set up a closed shop. If the Premier League season were to end right now, Liverpool, Spurs, and Arsenal would all finish outside the top 4. They shouldn’t make it into what is essentially the playoffs for the European club championship. They just shouldn’t.
Just in the past couple years, Ajax and Lyon made it to the CL semis. They earned their spot in the competition and knocked bigger clubs out to get there. That’s competition. Saying that Arsenal deserves to compete for the European title when they are in 9th place in England is a joke and most football fans can recognize that.
I think these clubs could have gotten away with a Super League if they had set it up as a replacement for their domestic leagues. Instead they got greedy and wanted to milk the cash cow of their domestic leagues along with the SL.
Just in the past couple years, Ajax and Lyon made it to the CL semis. They earned their spot in the competition and knocked bigger clubs out to get there. That’s competition. Saying that Arsenal deserves to compete for the European title when they are in 9th place in England is a joke and most football fans can recognize that.
I think these clubs could have gotten away with a Super League if they had set it up as a replacement for their domestic leagues. Instead they got greedy and wanted to milk the cash cow of their domestic leagues along with the SL.
Agreed. They'd need to fully split with their leagues. They'd actually want more than 12 clubs then, and then they'd just be set up like an American league.
As far as the anti-competitive thing goes, yeah some teams jump up sometimes just like Leicester City did in the EPL. But it's like VCU making the final four. It really doesn't mean it's actually a level playing field at all. I wouldn't think a selection committee would pick Liverpool this year either. They'd still have the mandate of having the best teams. I just think it's ridiculous that a league like the EPL gets the same number of qualifiers as some of these other leagues.
This Superleague stuff would be great in the cf football forum.
It's like the college football realignment era on steroids. This was way bigger than if the Pac 12 had poached OU and the Texas schools. This is more like the top 10 to 20 college programs forming a new division.
It does remind me a bit about how Texas wanting to stay in the Big 12 kind of averted an even more drastic realignment.
It's like the college football realignment era on steroids. This was way bigger than if the Pac 12 had poached OU and the Texas schools. This is more like the top 10 to 20 college programs forming a new division.
It does remind me a bit about how Texas wanting to stay in the Big 12 kind of averted an even more drastic realignment.
If you want to put selection of CL teams in the hands of UEFA and think they WOULDN'T pick the biggest brand names, then you're sadly mistaken. The issues here run far far deeper than the 12 clubs that made this attempt.
Fact is that the creation of the Premier League and Champions League are the root of the money/greed that has been injected into the game. The organizing bodies of those two competitions were the loudest about standing up against the SL "for the fans". Reality is those leagues don't give two ***** about the fans, they care about protecting their money making assets.
I support a big club and I'm just as disillusioned with the game and our ownership today as I was Saturday before the Super League news broke. Unless there are massive fundamental changes to the organizing bodies and ownership structures within the sport, the "super league" concept will never be dead. Right now you're just going to watch the CL transform into it's own "super league".
The only way this all gets fixed is fans are empowered via club ownership stakes (see Germany) and if money is even distributed within the pyramid across all the major leagues in Europe. Good luck getting that to happen. You really think ANY current PL team not being relegated is going to sign up for giving away a massive amount of their revenues to the Championship, League 1 and League 2 sides? No shot. Every club that said "we'd never sign up for a Super League" would sing a very different tune if their was a push to disassemble the PL power structure that keeps them rich. It is VERY lucrative to be mid-table year in and year out.
It's funny that ISU football is now in the "you aren't supposed to be here" range, but for 90% of our football program's existence they would have been relegated to the Missouri Valley, MAC, CUSA or whatever league is below the Big 8/Big 12.
You have to love it as much as the fans. Chelsea found out quick when fans were blocking their bridge in protest of the Super league. Arsenal fans were also outside the last match protesting their own clubs decision. I think that was huge in popping this Super League bubble fast. Most managers came out against it as well.
There's a lot of truth here, and your right that promotion to the Premier league is hugely beneficial from a financial side. But I will give the Premier league credit for at least splitting their own viewership pie evenly amongst the league. La Liga doesn't even try to do that, Last year Barcelona received 4 times as much as the bottom club in La Liga from their TV deal. They made twice as much as the club in 4th place. And that league was the driving force for the Super League.
Fans took what power they had and helped stop this. And unfortunately they will need to do so again in the future
