Super league is risky
WHAT is it that the Premier League is selling? What is it that’s made it the most successful and popular football league world wide? Is it the quality of the football? The size of the clubs? Is it the quality of footballer? The transfer fees spent? The managers who’ve been enticed to England’s green and pleasant land?
Or is it something a little more intangible? Is it the culture that attracts fans?
The history of the thing, the rivalries, the style of football, the helter-skelter frenetic pace of it all?
We’d lean towards the latter rather than the former. The money that’s allowed English football to splash the cash on overseas players and managers is a factor of its popularity, not the other way around.
It might have had the effect of reinforcing those things which made the Premier League such an attractive product in the first place – what soap opera wouldn’t be spruced up by the arrival of characters like José Mourinho and Jürgen Klopp? – but the culture is the USP (unique selling point) in the corporatist lingo.
The strange thing about the monied interests pushing the latest drive for a European Super league is that they seem to have missed this point entirely. According to blockbuster reports in Der Spiegel, the breakaway clubs have discussed “an option for leaving the national leagues and their football associations behind entirely”. Apart from anything else – the unfettered greed and arrogance of the proposed project and of those clubs backing it – the concept is a potentially flawed one for that very reason. There’s no guarantee that fans will be as interested in this Super League as they have been in the Premier League or Bundesliga.
The Premier League and the Champions League as they exist may very well be – and, indeed, are – run on the basis of rapacious capitalism sucking every last Euro and cent out of the great sporting public, but they nevertheless have something money can’t buy: soul, history, tradition. What these clubs propose is essentially a soulless enterprise. It’s fraught with a certain amount of risk.
Is football unmoored from what has made football, football over the best part of a century and-a-half still football? Perhaps we’re being overly dramatic about the risks here, after all a massive market has been found for the UFC in a relatively short space of time and that had even less of a tradition to draw upon than a European Super League will be able to. Still it just feels wrong, a grubby little enterprise for people who don’t know how good they’ve got it is unworthy of the beautiful game.