THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT THE BEAUTIFUL GAME
Rise and fall of Super League shows money rules soccer world — but that can change
It may well go down as the greatest — and certainly the fastest — collapse of a professional league in modern sports history.
On Sunday evening, a dozen big soccer clubs announced that they would form a new multibillion-dollar organization, the European Super League. Replacing the current UEFA Champions League format, this new competition, bankrolled for up to US$4.8 billion by JP Morgan, would include 12 “founding clubs” from just three countries (England, Spain and Italy). Three other unnamed clubs would soon join, along with another five teams allowed to qualify on an annual basis for the 20-team competition. With a tokenistic nod to gender equality, it was suggested that after the men's game was up and running, a women's league would also launch, at some unspecified date in the future.
According to Joel Glazer, co-chair of Manchester United and vice-chair of the Super League, the project represented a “new chapter for European football.” With the prospect of European giants like Liverpool, Manchester United, Barcelona and Real Madrid playing each other on a regular basis, and with more guaranteed income divided between fewer clubs — each team would likely receive up to 350 million euros simply for signing up — the Super League certainly represented a new financial chapter for the founding clubs.
But this new chapter ended within days, as European soccer fans rejected the Glazer family's Americanized model of sports. The dramatic events highlighted the striking difference between the legal and formal power of owners and the cultural and symbolic power of fans. Yet, as much as supporters in England and across much of Europe celebrated what looked like a populist victory, the real reason for the Super League's sudden collapse was the same reason for its inception in the first place: money.
Almost immediately after news of the league circulated across the sports world, the reaction from everyone who wasn't involved — and from players and managers on some of the teams that were — was vehement. No one except the organizers, it turned out, wanted this. The president of European soccer's governing body, Aleksander Ceferin, called it a “spit in the face of all football lovers.”
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to stop the league; French President Emmanuel Macron praised French clubs for the “solidarity” they had shown by refusing to participate, never mind that only one team in France — Paris Saint-germain — would ever likely to have been invited.
International and national soccer associations threatened to prevent players who played in the league from playing in the World Cup, and Europe's fan groups quickly mobilized against the Super League, as well.
By Tuesday, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola and Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp had come out against the league their clubs were to be founding members of; less than 24 hours later, all six English clubs were out, and the project was suspended indefinitely.
How was it that the 12 founding clubs could have so misjudged the moment? Was this really an example of “fan power,” as many have suggested? And what does this episode tell us about power, money and greed in today's hyper-commercialized sports cultures?
From an American perspective, the entire spectacle must have undoubtedly looked somewhat bizarre. American sports competitions, and especially the major leagues of the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL, as well as the women's equivalents such as the WNBA, are all effective money-producing cartels.
The monopoly-like structures of professional sports leagues in America ensure that the riches are evenly spread among a self-selected group, and teams stay in the league no matter how well — or poorly — they play. This means that “brand value” isn't necessarily related to on-field success (think of the Dallas Cowboys), with the “worst teams” in one season getting the best players, through draft picks, the following year.
Most European sports leagues and nearly all of the major soccer competitions, in contrast, have historically been based upon a “pyramid” system, with promotion and relegation from and into the top leagues every season (Major League Soccer in the United States has been a notable exception from this system, much to the chagrin of some American fans). While the top teams tend to stay at the top, in principle, a meritocratic system allows for the dream that one day, your local team could find its way there, too. And conversely, of course, even the Big Teams, if poorly managed and with a run of bad luck, could, in theory, slip down the pyramid.
The UEFA Champions League has offered Europe's biggest clubs a kind of “top up” source of revenue, worth tens of millions of dollars each year, that they have become increasingly dependent upon. Even if these teams fail to win their domestic national leagues, the real financial glory has been in ensuring qualification for the next season's Champions League.
The appeal of the Super League for these teams was not only the guarantee of “European money” each season without having to go through the annoying process of qualifying, but that such money would be there, regardless as to how they performed year after year. The opening payoff for founding clubs would have been more than four times what FC Bayern Munich earned in 2020 for actually winning the Champions League — and Bayern wasn't even among the founding 12.
The pyramid system makes good sporting sense — but it's bad financial sense, especially for the billionaire owners, who have invested millions into teams and who seek a secure profit from the world's most popular sport. So the Super League was a logical outcome of the ever-increasing commercialization of football and the monopolistic control of the game's resources by a powerful few. It represented a shift from the nostalgic idea of the “people's game,” being organized for the pleasure of fans, toward a profit-maximization approach in which clubs are viewed more like franchises and fans seen as customers. Strong local identities and attachments to place are reduced to mere marketing “narratives” to position competing brands in a global marketplace of team logos and colours.
Whereas owners of American sports franchises are often the faces of the enterprise, in European soccer, the manager is usually the public-facing embodiment of the club. Europeans find it notable, for example, that when U.S. teams win a trophy, it is the owner, with the manager and players behind them, who gets to lift it. In European sports, the team captain, surrounded by their teammates and the manager, get to enjoy that moment. The owner and the board of directors just watch (and count the profits).
As the legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly once noted, at a football club there is a Holy Trinity: the players, the manager and the fans. The owners are only there to sign the cheques. Owners are at best tolerated, rarely revered, often despised. In legal terms, the billionaire owners may have financial and strategic control over the clubs, but fans still exercise and retain the moral and symbolic ownership rights.
This means that, for many fans, the very idea of a Super League was an example of the Americanization of European sports, the fingers pointed especially at the American owners of Manchester United (the Glazers), Arsenal (Stan Kroenke, also the owner of the Los Angeles Rams, Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and Colorado Rapids), and Liverpool (John Henry and Fenway Sports Group). The villains of the moment were the Americans, and they were defeated by the organic uprising of the English fans.
But was this really the case? Certainly U.S. sports franchises have attempted to expand their global audiences by showcasing both pre-season and in-season games in other countries, the NFL leading the way with London games now a feature of the regular season.
It's an interesting fact of globalization that, while American cultural goods and symbols, including the jerseys and hats of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Dallas Cowboys, are ubiquitous items consumed around the world, the actual playing of America's favourite sports has a much more limited appeal. As Michael Baumann put it, “We can sell just about anything to the Europeans. Why not our hyper-capitalistic, cartel-based pro sports system?”
So the fear among many soccer fans was that, if America can't export its sporting cultures to Europe, American owners might instead simply transform European sports cultures into the American cartel model by stealth.
The obvious problem with this analysis, of course, is that most of the owners of the 12 founding clubs are not American — with Italian, Spanish, English, Russian and United Arab Emirates-based ownership.
The problem wasn't American ownership, per se, but rather a billionaire class, regardless of nationality, that seeks profits before tradition, financial opportunities before culture, and self-interest before communal identity.
In other words, soccer team owners are capitalists.
Which means we should be wary of simply casting this as a win for the little fan, as so many are suggesting.
It was clearly the case that the rapid and effective mobilization against the Super League was accelerated and given legitimacy because of the fan protests. But in reality, this was an intra-class struggle, too, a clash between the various power brokers of world soccer, a battle among the ownership class and between UEFA and the top European clubs.
The events of the past week have revealed the competing interests among soccer's power elites, with those left out by the Super League invoking nostalgic ideas about the importance of fan cultures, even though they themselves have, for years, been as committed to revenue maximization at the expense of others as the founders they criticized.
Rather than seeing a win for soccer's largely working-class fan base, we might more accurately see this week's developments as another fissure between the populist, patrician and neo-liberal wings of sports capitalism, in which tradition, culture and the rhetoric of “the people's game” is cynically invoked to maintain control over how the sport is organized and played.
The question remains, will
“the people's game” become just another marketing slogan that covers up as much as it reveals — or could this be a pivot point in which, out of the global pandemic and political and economic crisis, a different model of professional sports emerges based upon sports as a civic institution and a public good for all, rather than a privatized and personal benefit for the few?
If the various social movements and street protests of the past year have taught us anything, it's that we must resist the urge to concede too readily that social change is impossible. In place of that intellectual pessimism, we should engage our optimistic will to remake society, and sports, so they're more humane and seen as a public good for all, not a private source of profit for the few — and to put soccer under the control of the people, the fans and the players, who make it the beautiful game.