Would a Super League destroy football?
Take a look at the Premier League table, said Riath Al-samarrai in The Mail on Sunday. You’ll see that Bournemouth, a team who were facing relegation from League Two ten years ago, sit above Manchester United, the three-time champions of Europe. It’s the kind of “gloriously remote possibility” that can only be realised in a domestic competition like the Premier League. And it’s the kind of thing that will never be allowed to happen if the architects of a European Super League (ESL) get their way. According to leaked documents released by Der Spiegel magazine, 11 giants of European football – including Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and the two Manchester clubs – have been holding secret talks about creating a breakaway league. If that were to go ahead, those 11 clubs – along with five “guests” – would leave their domestic leagues in 2021. As ever in football, it comes down to money: the founding clubs would each stand to net as much as £440m a season.
It’s not as if English clubs really need an ESL, said Sam Wallace in The Sunday Telegraph. The next deal for Premier League TV rights, which comes into effect next year, will pay out an astonishing £8.3bn over three years. No, it’s the clubs elsewhere that are desperate for change. Barcelona and Real Madrid are “approaching a financial crisis”. Bayern Munich play in the Bundesliga, which yields less than £1bn in TV rights a year; and it’s Karl-heinz Rummenigge, their chairman, who has reportedly been a key force in ESL talks. These clubs know the ESL wouldn’t serve their most dedicated fans; it is for an audience “in different time zones”. The big teams have been threatening to form a breakaway league for years, said Matthew Syed in The Times. But no matter how the domestic leagues and Uefa accommodate them, by giving them a bigger slice of TV money, they always want more. If we’re not careful, a super league could soon be a reality. “After more than two decades of appeasement, football has to stand up.”