So it's treason, then
April 19, 2021 1:09 AM   Subscribe

Twelve European football clubs have announced the formation of a new European Super League. Founding members include Milan, Arsenal, Atlético Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona, Inter, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Tottenham, with three more members expected to be announced and a further five teams qualifying annually. Commentators are not happy; supporters are even unhappier. FIFA, UEFA, the English Premier League, and other organisations have all promised to do what they can to stop the new league.
posted by adrianhon (117 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
As an Arsenal fan, this is the stupidest idea the club has ever had. Ever. It's utterly ridiculous.
posted by prismatic7 at 1:15 AM on April 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


Gross. Naked greed
posted by dmt at 1:17 AM on April 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


FIFA and UEFA are corrupt organisations. Instead of working to fix this, they decided to found an even more morally bankrupt organisation with its own set of rules.

What an astonishingly short sighted decision.
posted by benoliver999 at 1:28 AM on April 19, 2021 [10 favorites]


The fact that the richest clubs are all guaranteed a spot, and only five of twenty are up for any club to be promoted into is disgusting. If they're all as elite as they claim, there should be no risk for them of relegation anyway. Except we all know that isn't how it actually works.

It's bad enough that the Big Four countries auto qualify for Eurovision, and that's completely empty puffery with no real claim of integrity. I realise sport isn't exactly life and death either, but nevertheless: naked corruption and privileging the wealthy, beyond the privilege the wealth itself already provides. Awful.
posted by Dysk at 1:50 AM on April 19, 2021 [9 favorites]


Righteous anger from Gary Neville.

Tame statement from FIFA, with no mention of previous threats to ban players from the World Cup, and careful wording condemning only a "closed league."

Interesting to see US reactions — given promotion and relegation don't seem to exist in major US sports, will their (partial) removal really resonate with fans?
posted by Klipspringer at 2:30 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


WORLD SERIES OF SOCCER
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:06 AM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


WORLD HYPER LEAGUE
posted by adrianhon at 3:07 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


WORLD SERIES OF WORLD CUPS
posted by awfurby at 3:13 AM on April 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


Private ownership of public goods strikes again.

The only way out of this would be for governments to nationalise their football leagues, set up fan-based ownership structures (like Australia Rules Football clubs), impose salary caps to rein in the ludicrous spending, establish a govt-appointed commission to administer the league.

This would never happen though.
posted by awfurby at 3:17 AM on April 19, 2021 [10 favorites]


This has been coming for some time and it's a culmination of the interminable powerplay between UEFA, FIFA and the clubs. Will be interesting to see who blinks first. FIFA has the World Cup, UEFA has the leagues, the clubs have the money.

FIFA will go with whoever gives them the biggest bribe so will probably not sanction the players in regard to the World Cup. That doesn't mean the national associations couldn't stipulate selection is predicated on belonging to a UEFA league. So the players may well find themselves out of the national teams irrespective of what FIFA says.

The national associations could ban the clubs from their domestic leagues which while hilarious would take some serious backbone although wouldn't be as unpopular as you may think. The fans seem very determined. There's been a surprising number of them demanding relegation for their own clubs as punishment for this before it's even been started.

A bit of solidarity could kill this dead before the end of the season because while JP Morgan may have oodles of money to offer; only playing 22 games a season and being banned from international selection could seriously lose a significant number of players from this league. If the players and managers come out against it then it's not gonna happen. Relegating the big 6 English teams would be enormous. I assume the Spanish clubs in La Liga would jump at the chance of kicking out Barca and Real and nobody really cares about the Italians.

Personally, I think it's the American owners spectacularly misunderstanding how important competition is to non-American sporting leagues and thinking the NFL model will work in Europe. Trying to emulate the success of NFL Europe does not seem to be a winning play.
posted by fullerine at 3:31 AM on April 19, 2021 [16 favorites]


Richard Murphy: The break away football league is all about the corruption of markets that the Tories have done so much to assist. Are they really going to oppose it now?
Six of these clubs are from England. The result is that in effect, competition in the UK's Football League is rendered meaningless almost overnight: however good another club is in our domestic competition... they will know that they will have almost no chance of progressing to this supposed elite of competition.

Think about this in terms of economics, and what becomes apparent is that this represents a straightforward intention to lock in monopoly profits for the benefit of these clubs, at cost to the rest of the Football League, football fans, society at large and the whole idea of competition which should underpin sport.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 3:35 AM on April 19, 2021 [8 favorites]


A fitting end to the worst football season there has ever been - no fans, everyone injured, VAR, fake crowd noise, Pay Per View interlude, endless all day football for 200 days all in a row, Southend not scoring for months at a time, three quarters of English football being null and voided, European Super League, THE END.
posted by dng at 4:35 AM on April 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


Liverpool fans should use this and Everton's proposed move to a new stadium as an opportunity to buy Goodison Park and set up a new team in Everton's empty home for a second time.
posted by dng at 4:38 AM on April 19, 2021 [8 favorites]


And as a cherry on top of this pile of shit: Mourinho has been sacked.
posted by Kosmob0t at 4:38 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


As a fan drawn to the EPL to escape the monotony of professional sport in the US, I saw this coming but held out hope the clubs were smarter than this. I discounted the level of greed.
posted by MorgansAmoebas at 4:50 AM on April 19, 2021


One of the other organisations which has promised to 'do what they can' to stop this is the British government. Ironically, Brexit might have made this easier for them, as they now have to navigate only UK law in order to prevent English clubs joining this circus.

Note that German clubs are one by one announcing that they aren't getting involved. Quite some time ago the Bundesliga set up ownership rules which effectively prevent this sort of thing happening.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 4:51 AM on April 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


Fooxit.
posted by anshuman at 5:16 AM on April 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


Apparently the French and German teams have said no en masse. It will be interesting to see where they are looking for their 3 additional founder teams and the 5 cannon fodder teams. I think we can assume they are gagging for PSG and Bayern but might not get them. Otherwise Ajax, maybe Anderlecht and perhaps some teams from the eastern side, Russia, Turkey etc?
posted by biffa at 5:21 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


As a US-based FC Barcelona fan, I am just disgusted by this. I haven't seen a single Barca fan support this. We just won our first trophy in 2 years on Saturday and we were all on a high and then this. To top it all off, the ESL Chairman will be the president of Real Madrid, and unsurprisingly, we all hate him. Our only hopes are that our new president Laporta spoke out against the League (our old president signed on) and Barca is a fan-owned club and socios should get a chance to vote on it.
posted by ceejaytee at 5:21 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Everton fan, also disgusted by this. Also we know that the threats to ban participating teams/players from other competitions including the World Cup are bullshit, it would make those competitions way less popular.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:36 AM on April 19, 2021


Jonathan Liew in the Guardian:
why on earth have Tottenham signed up when they must know this is their best chance of actually winning something?
posted by 7segment at 5:47 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


The real question is, how many teams said no before they asked Tottenham?
posted by biffa at 6:03 AM on April 19, 2021 [4 favorites]



FIFA and UEFA are corrupt organisations. Instead of working to fix this, they decided to found an even more morally bankrupt organisation with its own set of rules.

What an astonishingly short sighted decision.


It never was about fixing FIFA or UEFA. It was about providing more money for hedge funds, oligarchs, petrostates and converting the remaining meritocratic aspects of football into more fungible bullshit for the capitalist machine.

You have to understand that despite its degradation, soccer is one of the few places in elite team sports where in theory - and in practice - anyone can compete and win.

In competitions like the FA cup, teams with entire annual organizational and salary budgets that would be paid by 1 weeks wages for a medium level premier league superstar can compete against titans! These teams can be staffed by part-time footy players and support staff and managers: bricklayers, accountants, managers of car dealerships, fast food workers, and random joe-shmos - and they can play against "the walking gods" that make up so much of european popular athletic imagination; and sometimes (rarely), they win! They are the closest, flawed embodiment of the sporting ideal that actually works in this greed-soaked world.

These teams often participate in leagues - the football pyramid - that can be promoted into professional football..... and lowly-ranked professional teams by virtue of merit and grit, rise the ranks. It's as if your local baseball team team in 20 years could be a minor league team, and in another 20 play in the majors!

Consequently these events (FA cup and lower-division sports) have been devalued by the elite clubs because of monetary issues - i.e. they can't print money based on this; it also devalues eliteness. Also: no-one likes competition if the competition makes a joke of your hideous mammon-built culture.

If the super league forms then the FA cup will be ignored, there will be less money for the FA to nurture lower-league teams, and it's another big poke in the eye to people who watch sports as an example of fairness.

I'm a Liverpool fan. I'm 2 degrees of separation from people who watched fans crushed to death at Hillsborough disaster .My friends have had season tickets for decades and traveled the world following the club. My family met Bill Shankly and hung out with him.

Fuck my club. If they don't walk it back, I hope they and the rest of these fucking traitors burn because of this.
posted by lalochezia at 6:12 AM on April 19, 2021 [30 favorites]


Perhaps I am thick but: how does this new league relate to existing leagues -- are the teams going to pull out of their existing national football leagues? Or is it like Champions League, and runs sort of "superimposed" on the various national leagues, during their existing season?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:17 AM on April 19, 2021


Supposedly the English teams want to continue in their national leagues as well, with the ESL games in midweek, around weekend EPL games. At a time when club managers are complaining about too many fixtures though its difficult to see how a minimum 18 additional games will easily fit. Its easy to see that the clubs might pull out of the League and FA cups to make it work. Will they be outside the Champion's League and Europa League structure also?

UEFA are saying the clubs will be banned from all national, European and World competitions so if they follow through on that then it will be moot.

Makes me wonder whether the whole thing is some sort of power flex to negotiate a better deal with UEFA.
posted by biffa at 6:29 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


It's essentially (ostensibly) a replacement for the champions league, except with 12-15 permanent participants, and another few places to be allocated to others, in a new format suspiciously like the new Champions League format that these same clubs have spent all year convincing UEFA to adopt - a bigger group stage, with more games, to guarantee more revenue for a semi permanent selection of clubs.

So as far as I can tell, these clubs have spent all year lobbying for this new format, then the day before its agreed, announce this rival/replacement that they've lied about the existence of to everyone, including UEFA, all the way up until Saturday.

Presumably the end game is they then either force UEFA to adopt this format themselves, or are hoping UEFA take the nuclear option, kick these clubs out of everything, and then so the Super League clubs can then say, "Well, we'll just have to form an actual super league then, you've left us no choice", and leave behind their national leagues, cups, national teams, FIFA, etc forever.

All this would have to be based on having such a contemptuous view of fans that they'll. think they'll all follow them off into their dystopian fields of constant endless closed loop football, but I don't doubt that bits true (the contempt, I mean).
posted by dng at 6:30 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Richard Murphy: … the UK's Football League

NB: there is no UK football league. Scotland does its own thing. The league they're talking about is in England.

It amuses me that pre-collapse Rangers FC were talking about joining a then-hypothetical super league. It's taken them 9 years to claw their way back to winning the Scottish Cup. Where's that talk gone now? Nationally, we're not bad at the fitba, but world class? Ask Ally's Tartan Army …
posted by scruss at 6:35 AM on April 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


I also expect this is their hope of emulating American sports, with a closed shop, no/limited player transfers, permanent profits, no chance of failure, and so on. The Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli was talking about initiating proposals for banning Champions League clubs from buying players from each other, while allowing them to buy players from clubs not in the Champions League, which made no sense at the time, but makes perfect sense in a this model. Use scouting and money to buy the best outside talent, then have some sort of draft/free transfer system at the end o their contracts to other Super League clubs.
posted by dng at 6:35 AM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


Aw, man...just when I had started getting into EPL football. Cash Ruins Everything Around Me
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:40 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


Guardian livestream with recent quotes from the president of UEFA press conference.
posted by Kosmob0t at 6:46 AM on April 19, 2021


The big clubs want more money. FIFA wants to protect the World Cup cash cow. UEFA want to maintain their cash-making cup tournaments. And, everyone wants to lock in their curreent position.

Piss on US sports if you want but at least the players’ unions have a seat at the table and can push for less games, better retirement/medical/etc. Not that they are any less venal than the owners.
posted by sudogeek at 6:48 AM on April 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


Is this the part where the president of FIFA falls down clutching a body part that was clearly not hit by anything at all and screaming? Cuz I'd totally pay to see an old dude in a suit throwing a classic football fake injury tantrum.
posted by sotonohito at 6:58 AM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


Guys I’ve figured it out! The timing is perfect!

Make Jose Mourinho the President of the new Super Duper League.

You’ll all get one season of awesome glory, then he’ll burn it down the next season and you can all go back to normal.

It’s a flawless plan!
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:05 AM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


Is this viral marketing for Ted Lasso S2? Asking for a non-football friend.
posted by jquinby at 7:30 AM on April 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


As an Arsenal fan, this is the stupidest idea the club has ever had. Ever. It's utterly ridiculous.

This Spurs fan 100% agrees with the Arsenal fan. Let that sink in. Also firing Mourinho less than a week before the EFL cup final makes me think he was probably against this bullshit as well.
posted by cmfletcher at 8:54 AM on April 19, 2021 [7 favorites]


Seems exciting to me. I'd jump at the chance to get the big money franchises into their own league in American sports. I root for the Cleveland teams and the owners can't make the same profits as the big city coastal teams and they don't pay the same salaries and the players very obviously don't want to play in Cleveland if they have a choice. Francisco Lindor signs with the Mets for hundreds of millions of dollars and the Cleveland Baseball Team has never in its history signed a player to a contract like that. The economics in European football seem quite similar, and its laughable that any of these big clubs would ever be relegated. I root for Ohio State football on the other side of this and it's obvious that they should be in a league with Alabama and Clemson instead of Illinois and Rutgers. That would be much more exciting and fun to me, to have a real, competitive league schedule, whether i'm rooting for a small fry or a big player. They're already not playing the same game, might as well get them in different leagues.
posted by Kwine at 9:12 AM on April 19, 2021


Fortunately the BCS has shown that establishing a sub-cartel isn’t controversial at all.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 9:17 AM on April 19, 2021


The economics in European football seem quite similar, and its laughable that any of these big clubs would ever be relegated.

Perhaps not relegated, but each of these teams, at various times in living memory, has been shit. Nor are these teams a complete lock to win their leagues (other than the Italian teams I suppose but Serie A is a bit of a clownfest generally). Tottenham hasn't won the top English league since 1960! Not quite as futile but Arsenal haven't won since 2004 and Man. United since 2012.

In any event, I'm nominally a Liverpool fan but I'd really rather not see any of these other squads more than absolutely necessary, and Liverpool can rot for all I care for going through with this nonsense. Footballers are generally bad people playing for teams owned by worse people; it's pretty easy for me to get off this ride.
posted by sinfony at 9:33 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


It's also pretty telling that all of these squads got embarrassed in the Champion's League last year and decided they would literally take their ball and go home.
posted by sinfony at 9:37 AM on April 19, 2021 [8 favorites]


Kwine, European football already has a champions league. They want to ditch that and form a competition they own more of and automatically gain a seat each year.

We have top-tier meetings every year in US sports, it's the playoffs. This is more like the Patriots, Cowboys, and NY giants decided they wanted to restructure January football. They will always be invited to play regardless of their season record, they select who and where they get to play, and they have decided that that winner is the champion of the sport.
posted by cmfletcher at 9:38 AM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]




I'd jump at the chance to get the big money franchises into their own league in American sports.

Why? Smaller budget teams depend on a revenue stream that comes from media exposure and ticket sales when they play bigger teams, and this is true across all leagues. When smaller teams are well enough managed and coached to put up fights against teams with bigger budgets, that's when sports actually get most interesting. This is why the NCAA basketball tournament is arguably the most exciting playoff in any sport, because there are always teams playing above their level.

On the competitive side a sub-NFL rich teams' league with eight to twelve teams would be dreadful. A ⅓-size MLB with a 162-game season would feel like a slog, and a shorter season wouldn't feel like baseball. At least with MLB you can get occasional surprise teams (e.g. Moneyball). Teams in a "no poors" league would largely be managed to conserve revenue, not to win, and you'd still end up with a second tier within each league where they're only just good enough to fill the seats, playing for guaranteed revenue and not much else (cf. the Washington Football Team under Snyder). The teams stuck in a "lesser" league would forever be fighting to keep players from jumping to bigger contracts, and the TV revenue would collapse.
posted by fedward at 10:31 AM on April 19, 2021 [11 favorites]


The economics in European football seem quite similar, and its laughable that any of these big clubs would ever be relegated.

If it's not a worry why take the unpopular move of guaranteing themselves a spot?
posted by Mitheral at 10:42 AM on April 19, 2021


I think the worry is less about being relegated from their various national leagues as it is not playing in the Champions League. Perhaps not a worry for Bayern or PSG but a bad year could see any of the mentioned Spanish or Italian teams not qualifying for it and missing out on the associated revenue as a result. As far as the English teams are concerned, that there are 6 of them when the Premier League only gets 4 spots for the Champions League highlights the problem there, even in a good year any given team might not be good enough to actually qualify for it.

These teams count on the additional revenue from the Champions League to make their finances work and if they don't qualify for any extended period of time it'll be trouble for them. I saw a post showing that the 12 teams are all in various amounts of debt right now, exacerbated by the loss of revenue thanks to Covid, and I'm sure the initial payments of $300 million being offered weigh heavily in their thoughts. Getting the initial cash injection and then not having to worry about missing out on Champions League revenue are I guess good enough reasons for these teams to go for it.

I don't have a cable package or any other subscription to see these matches anyway so I guess I don't count as far as revenues are concerned one way or the other but if this does go through I could see myself stop following football altogether and reclaiming that time for other things.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 10:59 AM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


The only real argument for this is that the Champions League is an unwieldy, badly organized beast that doesn't really do what fans want it to do, which is have an actual multinational Top League where all the other leagues feed into in standard football-pyramid style - the top three teams from the Premier League, the top three from La Liga, from Bundesliga, Series A et cetera all promote into this new Super Awesome League. Figuring out exactly how promotion and relegation work for the new league would be complex - the top leagues would basically have to standardize their playing seasons to the same number of games (Premier, La Liga and Serie A all currently play 38, Bundesliga 34, Ligue 1 28, and so on and so forth), and presumably the larger national leagues would want more guaranteed slots than smaller national leagues, both so the quality of play is at its highest and also because it doesn't make sense for, say, the Eredivisie to get as many teams into this new thing as the Premier League. But it is absolutely doable, and would probably represent an improvement over Champions League as it stands.

If these teams had proposed something along those lines, with a reasonable degree of revenue sharing into the national league systems but still creating more profit for them than they make right now (which would absolutely be the case), there probably would have been insane enthusiasm for the idea. But that wouldn't have made them enough money.
posted by mightygodking at 11:15 AM on April 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


The only real argument for this is that the Champions League is an unwieldy, badly organized beast that doesn't really do what fans want it to do, which is have an actual multinational Top League where all the other leagues feed into in standard football-pyramid style

I'm not convinced this is what football fans in general want. I don't follow club football closely anymore, but I know I wouldn't want that at all.
posted by Dysk at 11:37 AM on April 19, 2021 [4 favorites]


But fans don't want that. In a lot of ways a local derby is more meaningful against playing against a team like AC Milan or Real Madrid, especially for fans of the 11 of the 12 teams who have signed up as they play them every other year or two now as it is (not Tottenham as they aren't in the Champs League often enough). Maybe 20 years ago it would have been a glamour tie but if a team's been in the Champions League for the last 10-20 years then its all more of the same at this point and the points/moving to the next round matter more than the opposition.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:39 AM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I don’t know why we don’t nationalize sports. We already do the Capex for them (arenas). You wouldn’t even need to take it over. Just launching a municipal league run by city government could out-compete the current offerings. All of the PR / advertising is done by ESPN anyways.
posted by The Ted at 11:44 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


The economics in European football seem quite similar, and its laughable that any of these big clubs would ever be relegated.

Is it? Plenty of powerhouse teams for previous generations (Leeds United for example) have spent years outside of the top 20 more recently. Fulham, which was only promoted back into the Premier League this season, just went 1-1 with Arsenal.

These teams count on the additional revenue from the Champions League to make their finances work and if they don't qualify for any extended period of time it'll be trouble for them. I saw a post showing that the 12 teams are all in various amounts of debt right now, exacerbated by the loss of revenue thanks to Covid, and I'm sure the initial payments of $300 million being offered weigh heavily in their thoughts. Getting the initial cash injection and then not having to worry about missing out on Champions League revenue are I guess good enough reasons for these teams to go for it.

I understand the two Spanish teams are particularly levered up and are really hurting financially, partially because of Covid, partially because of ongoing stadium projects.
posted by atrazine at 11:59 AM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


I don’t know why we don’t nationalize sports. We already do the Capex for them (arenas).

Broadly, that is not true for European football, which is the topic of this thread.
posted by Dysk at 12:05 PM on April 19, 2021 [14 favorites]


Aresenal and Tottenham, two of the 12 to sign onto this, are very much at risk of not being in European competition at all next year. Yes the Europa League is less money and prestige than the Champions League but its still extra money and a way to be attractive to players. If teams like Leicester and West Ham are able to grab "their" spot next year as well then it'll be even tougher for them to recruit the new players they need to move back into contention for a European spot. Even still I don't think they'd be relegated anytime soon but a loss of form and confidence could happen and they could get relegated. Leeds was mentioned upthread. Newcastle is another big team that's been relegated recently and still could be this year. Aston Villa just came back last year after being relegated. So it isn't without precedent.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:43 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Mr. Machine may have grimly and pointedly sent the kid off to (in-person) school wearing a jersey for our local MLS franchise and worn his matching one today.

Also heard this afternoon from Mr. Machine, bitterly: "Hey, let's talk about Arsenal's 1-1 draw with Fulham!"
posted by joyceanmachine at 1:06 PM on April 19, 2021


comment from the grauniad that I agree with completely:


Hi Rob,” says Colin. “It is interesting that everyone from the prime minister down is getting upset about a breakaway league, yet they said nothing about thousands of migrant workers dying while building facilities for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

“thousands of deaths so that a few rich blokes could kick a ball around while other rich blokes make even more money from it, and Qatar get to indulge in a bit of sports washing. Just think how many kids will never see their dads again, how many will grow up in poverty because the breadwinner is dead.

“I think we’ve lost our perspective and I doubt we will ever get it back again. Football really is more important than life itself. How tragic is that?”

posted by lalochezia at 1:21 PM on April 19, 2021 [12 favorites]


There's been a lot of outcry about the conditions in Qatar since pretty much the day they won the bid. Recently players in Norway, Germany, and the Netherlands have worn shirts before matches highlighting the working conditions there. Some countries still might decide to boycott the World Cup, probably not any with a legit chance of winning the thing, but maybe a country like Norway or England.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:41 PM on April 19, 2021 [5 favorites]


but maybe a country like Norway or England.


hello police id like to report a murder
posted by lalochezia at 1:42 PM on April 19, 2021 [28 favorites]


Gooner 'til I die, and I'd absolutely love it if UEFA and the FA banned any player who participated in this NFL-lite horseshit from their competitions.
I miss watching us in the Champions League, but a closed shop is the opposite of an answer to that. Let the clubs do what they like, but make it clear that anyone playing in a league outside a national pyramid can't play in one (and preferably their national teams) the next year.
posted by Kreiger at 2:07 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Footballers are generally bad people 

I'm assuming you've seen Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Patrick Bamford and James Milner giving their views on TV in the last few minutes, and would therefore exclude them all from that generalisation.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:25 PM on April 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


As a Liverpool fan, this is gross, not least of which because Klopp has made his views on the matter clear, and if it goes through and he walks, I'm just @#^% ugh. Guys, he got us our first league title in 30 years, maybe don't do your level best to make him quit.
posted by juv3nal at 2:46 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm assuming you've seen Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Patrick Bamford and James Milner giving their views on TV in the last few minutes, and would therefore exclude them all from that generalisation.

I don't necessarily agree with the assertion you're responding to, but I've seen lots of condemnation from former footballers, and nothing from anyone still playing (except Bruno Fernandes's cryptic crossword clue of a tweet which some are interpreting as being about this). Would love to be shown that it's just my choice of news outlets driving that, though.
posted by Dysk at 3:09 PM on April 19, 2021


nothing from anyone still playing (except Bruno Fernandes's cryptic crossword clue of a tweet which some are interpreting as being about this).

While it wouldn't surprise me if none of the players on teams which have agreed to it have spoken out, I think you'll probably be able to find players on other teams willing to be more vocal.
posted by juv3nal at 3:12 PM on April 19, 2021


Bamford interview. Milner interview. Klopp interview.
posted by biffa at 3:46 PM on April 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Patrick Bamford (if you're outside the UK, at at least in the US): "It's amazing the amount of opera that comes in to the game when somebody's pockets are getting hurt, it's a shame it's not like that with racism."
posted by General Malaise at 3:53 PM on April 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


Footballers are generally bad people

I'm not sure where you got this idea from but I'd wager that footballers are generally better people than the owners of football clubs.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:15 PM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'd wager that footballers are generally better people than the owners of football clubs.

Some of the faintest praise I've ever heard.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 4:55 PM on April 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


I'm a Southampton supporter, so I don't this actually matters to me.
posted by COD at 4:58 PM on April 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'm not sure where you got this idea from but I'd wager that footballers are generally better people than the owners of football clubs.

…where did I get the idea that super-rich, coddled men who have spent their entire lives training to be good at sport and protected by powerful interests at every turn might not be great dudes? Is this a serious question?
posted by sinfony at 5:06 PM on April 19, 2021


laughable that any of these big clubs would ever be relegated

eh, that's what most people said about Rangers FC before they filed for insolvency and the 'new' Rangers had to start playing in the third division. There were some dodgy tax dealings going on at Rangers, but I'm sure there are other big teams on similarly thin ice.
posted by scruss at 7:14 PM on April 19, 2021






Found an English article on the European response.

I think another reason this hurts so much is that we are just getting back to normality for football after such a weird year, with the testing of having fans at the FA Cup semi final over the weekend, and now they choose to break football?!

Also, footballers are not by nature terrible people, Marcus Rashford would like a word!

All links here are from the Guardian.

European Super League could end up halting growth of women’s game

Premier League’s furious ‘Other 14’ look to derail Super League plan
posted by ellieBOA at 11:31 PM on April 19, 2021


Mod note: One deleted. Let's not re-direct this to talk about US sports, please.
posted by taz (staff) at 1:24 AM on April 20, 2021 [4 favorites]


So these 12 football clubs, which as I understand it are private businesses, have announced that they're going to enter into a new business arrangement to play some football together.

People who have strong feelings about football are angry and I respect that. I am not a person who knows about football.

But the UK government, champions of the free market that they are, have a problem with this because...what? Is there any legitimate governmental concern here whatsoever?
posted by automatronic at 2:03 AM on April 20, 2021


Competition, impact on wider community, loss of revenue and a hundred other things. Whilst businesses love to claim they are rational actors just "giving the public what they want" they consistently elide how integral society and yes, government support, is to their "success".
posted by fullerine at 2:42 AM on April 20, 2021 [2 favorites]




Why The European Super League Is Evil
The fact that all the powers that be seem to agree that what soccer most needs is more money, more power for the biggest and most famous clubs, more conglomeration of capital and power amongst the few, more decisions made with an eye toward the casual fan who watches on TV instead of the diehard local, is why it’s hard to really believe something like the Super League won’t happen sooner or later. The forces that led the sport here aren’t new, and they aren’t even limited to soccer or sports in general. Every industry in the world is presently tending toward monopoly, capital conglomeration, deregulation. In that sense, the European Super League is a lot like Amazon, or Netflix, or Disney, or Uber, or Facebook, or the superhero-centric movie industry, or Spotify, and so on. All are forces that make the world a little bit worse for the sake of being a little bit more convenient, until you wake up and the world is much worse and less varied and interesting, and the new status quo has become so normalized that you’ve forgotten the words that could articulate what it is the world has lost.
posted by medusa at 4:08 AM on April 20, 2021 [11 favorites]


On the plus side, Gavin Williamson has come out against the super league, so thanks to the ESL for distracting him from Education.
posted by biffa at 5:57 AM on April 20, 2021


"Footballers are generally bad people"

Some are less bad than others.
posted by Kiwi at 7:18 AM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


Marcus Rashford is a bloody good egg, but his off pitch activities are also notable because they are certainly not typical.
posted by Dysk at 7:21 AM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure where you got this idea from but I'd wager that footballers are generally better people than the owners of football clubs.

…where did I get the idea that super-rich, coddled men who have spent their entire lives training to be good at sport and protected by powerful interests at every turn might not be great dudes? Is this a serious question?


it's clearly not a serious answer, given that 'footballers' includes women, everyone outside the premier league and half a dozen mega-money equivalents, and (in the uk at least) a substantial proportion of the most visible and successful ethnic minority figures in the country, very few of whom got there by being coddled

unless you perhaps meant to imply that the above don't count as real footballers..?

also excited to hear more about how spending lots of time training to be good at sport contributes to being a bad person (as opposed to spending lots of time sat on your arse reading the internet, which i understand is the fast route to moral superiority)
posted by inire at 8:34 AM on April 20, 2021


"Footballers" in this context is probably best read as "professional footballers" and given the thread, "professional footballers playing in top flight leagues".
posted by Dysk at 9:37 AM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


quite possibly (although of course women and those outside the top flight men's leagues are still 'professional footballers'), but that doesn't really make the statement more sensical

unless the point it's attempting to make is that if you're a man and you make a lot of money you're generally a bad person, which i'm sure will be given due consideration by the next mane / di maria / rashford currently kicking a ball around without benefit of shoes or dinner
posted by inire at 10:52 AM on April 20, 2021


Chelsea are out
posted by DoveBrown at 11:08 AM on April 20, 2021


Well then, this may complicate matters.

BREAKING
I understand Chelsea are now preparing documentation to request withdrawing from the ESL

Dan Roan @danroan



edit: Man City too!

Manchester City pulling out of Super League. City have told organisers they no longer want to be part of the £4.6billion scheme

Martin Lipton @MartinLipton

posted by fullerine at 11:10 AM on April 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


city out too (edit: i've been gazumped!)
posted by inire at 11:14 AM on April 20, 2021


Interestingly, you need 16 Premier League clubs to achieve the 75% vote needed to eject the other 4 ;)
posted by fullerine at 11:22 AM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


according to talksport, all 12 clubs are meeting later today to discuss that ludicrous display last night disbanding the super league

as 24 hour periods of time go, this one's up there
posted by inire at 11:30 AM on April 20, 2021 [7 favorites]


The "super league" has been disbanded.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:51 AM on April 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


and now ed woodward's out! is this manifesting? am i manifesting right now? i think i might be
posted by inire at 12:05 PM on April 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


[insert Nelson GIF here]
posted by Kosmob0t at 12:08 PM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


wow, anyone know what the revamped Champions League is supposed to be like? They were supposed to release the details yesterday but with all the ESL stuff I don't know if they actually did.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:10 PM on April 20, 2021


Update: Super League to consist solely of one team from American Samoa. [non-real]
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:10 PM on April 20, 2021


Andrea Agnelli gone too?!
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:14 PM on April 20, 2021


Raphael Honigstein on twitter:
Earlier, I've put it to a German club official that the Super League 12 must have some really clever ideas to get around all the obstacles, relative to the huge reputational risk they're facing.

Answer: "Never underestimate the incompetence of people."
posted by hototogisu at 12:35 PM on April 20, 2021


tl;dr: a lot of football executives are just not very bright

meritocracy on the pitch, kakistocracy in the boardroom
posted by inire at 1:24 PM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


Liverpool's watch partner has dropped them over this.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:41 PM on April 20, 2021


Bizarrely, I feel like we've won the league. Is it OK to see a gliimer of hope that the Glazers will be gone?
posted by StephenB at 1:52 PM on April 20, 2021


Nope, they'll still be around to suck money out of Manchester United. £90 million over the last 5 years directly plus all of the hundreds of millions of pounds in interest on the debt needed to buy the club in the first place. That takeover should never have been allowed although it's probably good for the rest of football that it was.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:06 PM on April 20, 2021


Important to realise that if it gets thrown out entirely Spurs will have been bottom of the super league for its entirety.
posted by biffa at 2:25 PM on April 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


Spurs also the only ESL club to sack their manager
posted by fullerine at 2:30 PM on April 20, 2021 [3 favorites]


Football is ... by Brian Bilston

Football is a wiggle of the hips
Football is a whistle to the lips
Football is an unfollowed script
Football is

Football is kickabouts in the park
Football is floodlights in the dark
Football is fans not oligarchs
Football is

Football is the dream of finishing top
Football is the fear of facing the drop
Football is an open book not a closed shop
Football is

Football is not a share price but a shared obsession
Football is more than just keeping possession
Football is freedom of expression
Football is

Football is the real thing not a rehearsal
Football is a language that's universal
Football is drama not a corporate commercial
Football is

Football is a door to which we are the key
Football is nothing without you and me
Football is whatever we allow it to be
Football will be ...
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:32 PM on April 20, 2021


Aaaaand it's done.
All 6 English Premier League clubs to withdraw from the ESL.
posted by fullerine at 2:49 PM on April 20, 2021 [3 favorites]


Much as I've loved the football produced by some of these teams, they really need to be smacked good and hard for this shitshow. Banning them from European competition for a year at least, or something equivalently painful, should be the bare minimum. They'll all come back, but it has to hurt them.
posted by daveje at 2:53 PM on April 20, 2021


Sooo... what happened that made the teams start dropping out? Do we know yet? (Sorry if this is a too-stupid question, I'm trying to follow this thread coming from being clueless about football.)

"Never underestimate the incompetence of people."

My nominee for theme quote of the 21st century.
posted by medusa at 6:56 PM on April 20, 2021 [1 favorite]




I don't know how keen all of the teams were to begin with. I think there was a lot of "so and so are going to join and we only have 12 guaranteed spots right now so if you don't sign now we'll ask someone else" going on to get those initial 12 signatures. Then when the backlash was so strong from fans, governing bodies like the English FA saying the teams would be banned from domestic competitions if they went ahead with the ESL* and UEFA's president calling the various chairmen liars, the UK government saying that they would fix the issue if the FA was unable to, probably made the more on-the-fence teams decide it wasn't a fight they wanted right now. And once one or two teams were out it became easier for others to leave than to remain in it and have to deal with increasing pressure. I think it's just the English teams that have officially left but without them and without Bayern and PSG who never joined to begin with the ESL isn't going to be viable.

But there's still the expanded Champions League that's apparently going ahead that was developed with a lot of input from the same 12 ESL teams. Now with 36 teams and a guaranteed 10 games for everyone so who's to say this wasn't all some big distraction so that people wouldn't be complaining too much about that.

So I'm happy that this ESL idea seems to be dead now but the status quo with UEFA in control is only a bit better. I think sports governance and organizations are kind of a shitshow everywhere. The huge organizations like the IOC and FIFA are amazingly corrupt, partly because they're in charge of doling out the money received from their huge events to their member organizations, which are all various degrees of corrupt themselves. FIFA members voted to run the 2022 World Cup in Qatar in the summer. Once everyone realized how stupid that idea was they couldn't change the vote for reasons so they instead moved the World Cup to the winter, when it is still hot but probably not hot enough to kill any of the players, but still disrupts the football calendar.

* Isn't this acronym already taken by English as a Second Language classes?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 7:47 PM on April 20, 2021


Isn't this acronym already taken by English as a Second Language classes?

Yes! Very hard to parse here!

I can’t believe this turned around so quickly! Fantastic news.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:53 PM on April 20, 2021


Isn't EAL (English as an additional language) preferred these days, what with being more accurate? It's the term all my mum's literature uses these days (she is a teacher).
posted by Dysk at 11:14 PM on April 20, 2021


but is it eal as in deal
or eal as in dealt
or eal as in cereal?
posted by lalochezia at 4:09 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


Always E. A. L. It's not an acronym you pronounce.
posted by Dysk at 5:41 AM on April 21, 2021


ahh the "silent EAL"
posted by lalochezia at 6:57 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


Umm, no? You pronounce each letter. You know, like USA or the UN, not like NATO. It's not silent.
posted by Dysk at 7:25 AM on April 21, 2021


As ever, David Squires is spot on.
posted by Kreiger at 7:47 AM on April 21, 2021


Sooo... what happened that made the teams start dropping out? Do we know yet? (Sorry if this is a too-stupid question, I'm trying to follow this thread coming from being clueless about football.)

Agnelli says it was Boris Johnson. I wonder what Johnson is giving him as a reward for that because it makes him look very good with key target voters.
posted by atrazine at 8:06 AM on April 21, 2021


Yeah it's EAL now (my spouse is a teacher and that's what they call it too) but in my mind it's still ESL.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:34 AM on April 21, 2021


The New York Times (the usual paywall) has an as-it-happened article from the day before the announcement to the fallout. Ceferin is godfather to Agnelli's youngest child. Agnelli lied to his face and went radio silent on him. Twice, really, since he did break his silence once after Ceferin texted his wife.
Ceferin, stern-faced, then excoriated the breakaway group in his first comments to reporters. He reserved specific vitriol for Manchester United’s Woodward, who he felt had misled him, and for Agnelli. Ceferin called the men “snakes” and “liars,” and described how they had led him to believe he had their full support for the Champions League revisions.

“Agnelli is the biggest disappointment of all,” Ceferin said. “I have never seen a person who would lie so many times and so persistently as he did.”
That friendship seems unlikely to recover.
posted by fedward at 10:25 AM on April 22, 2021


So Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus are still in somehow. I know that Barca's and Madrid's finances were terrible before Covid and now are much, much worse so someone dangling hundreds of millions of euro in front of them could get them to do practically anything, but is Juve in a similar position or is it something else?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 8:06 PM on April 22, 2021


@mweller:
if ever your carefully planned project doesn't go quite as you'd hoped, remember some of the richest men in Europe, with almost unlimited resources, couldn't keep the ESL going for 48 hours.
posted by Wordshore at 9:47 AM on April 23, 2021 [1 favorite]


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