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Fans 1, European Super League 0 (extra time being played)
2021-05-13
By John Williams
The announcement of a proposed new European Super League for football earlier this month was but the most recent example of attempts to refashion the structures and finances of the European game. But it soon became clear that the American owners of two English clubs, Manchester United and Liverpool, were at the very heart of this new version of the ESL, and that 15 clubs had been discussing it for at least two years, according to Real Madrid’s president Florentino Pérez. The Spaniard, an old-stager himself, had been predicting a European Super League since the 1960s. But this latest venture was rooted in hard cash, based around a reported £3.5b funding package from JP Morgan. Merchant banks were to be the new financiers of global football.
The aim here was to run two mini-leagues each of 10 clubs, made up of 15 founders and five annual qualifiers, followed by knockout stages. The ESL press release noted the inherent financial ‘instability’ in the European game accentuated by Covid-19, with co-conspirators FC Barcelona and Real Madrid each reportedly close to a, largely self-inflicted, £1bn in debt. An initial £350m payment per club and a structural fund would smooth their support. Pérez claimed that the world game was currently in ‘freefall’, that TV viewing figures and the value of rights were declining for elite clubs, which were, ‘on the edge of ruin.’ He added: ‘We don’t want the rich to be richer and the poor poorer. We have to save football. Everything I do is for the good of football, which is in a critical moment.’
Frankly, this kind of top-down altruism was unfamiliar to most keen students of elite European club football, but Pérez’s plea may even have had some unlikely impact: if it were not for the fact that, so lacking in detail and communications elan was this new proposal, it was regarded by some as a hasty poker play, a saucy gambit designed eventually to transform, via stealth, the values, governance and finances of Uefa. But actually, it was much more serious than that. Clubs were named and had apparently committed by contract to launch the new league right away. At the very least, these initial 12 clubs, incongruously minus the required German and French recruits, aimed to shake Uefa up on matters of TV rights and income redistribution. As well as the cash injection from the banks, the ESL promised to increase TV income for its core founder clubs by an eye-watering 400%. Negotiations would not necessarily follow.
The EFL would be an existential threat to the Champions League, some national leagues, and many smaller clubs, and it was set to undermine a central premise of the European game much derided by US sports entrepreneurs: sporting merit and jeopardy expressed via domestic league performance and the annual processes of promotion and relegation. All this should be sacrificed, according to Pérez, because football had four billion fans around the world, but polls (research?) suggested that 40% of people between 16 and 24 were no longer interested in the product on offer. They could barely watch a match all the way through. Pérez was talking here about global TV’s youthful ‘future fans’ not the so-called ‘legacy fans’ who can be bothered to attend games in Europe. How to deal with this armchair ennui? Remove risk and routinize the fixtures between the top European clubs, that’s how. Guarantee quality content. Apart from its five annual qualifiers, the new league would be sealed off from other competitions and other clubs. It was met with almost universal disapproval and resistance by fans in England.
And the positive outcome of this story was that the fan protests in Liverpool, Leeds and London seem to have some impact, because this brave new future for the European game lasted for precisely 48 hours. The ESL was, in many ways, the logical outcome of the commodification of Premier League clubs in 1992. This shift signalled the growing funding power of television and sponsors, the explosion in players’ wages, and especially the arrival of overseas owners. Some had global reputations to sportswash, others came with financial incentives to pursue. Most had little or no knowledge, or love, of the game – or its fans.
What happens next? Is the ‘cultural shift’ now urgently demanded by fans, commentators and even the British Government, any more likely to occur at this dangerous juncture than it has been at any point in the last 40 years? Conservative politicians tend to laud investor billionaires, not excoriate them. A fan-led government commission has predictably creaked into delayed action and there is talk of a fans ‘golden share’, the 50+1 model of German ownership, and even the possibility of an external regulator. We would have to wait to see the outcome of all of this well-meaning good work. But, frankly, no knowledgeable fan of England’s elite football clubs was holding their breath right now, dreaming of a better sporting world somehow beyond the machinations of global finance.