Why is it mystifying? regulating business and looking after the cultural welfare of the country seems like a reasonable part of a government’s remit.
Governments have a place in regulating business where externalities must be controlled. Pollution, labor law, shared resources, and things of that matter. If Team A wants to play games against Team B instead of against Team C, that has nothing to do with any reasonable area of regulation.
“Cultural welfare” my ass. Nobody is talking about getting rid of soccer or changing it into lacrosse or something. The league structure of European football has changed before and will change again. We’re talking abut a mid-sized commercial enterprise here, not a war.
If the Premier League decides to expand the length of the season, should the UK government stop them? What if the Bundesliga decides to go to 20 teams, should that be against the law too? I don’t see why government should be wasting its time on the structural arrangement of a sports league. How do you make it illegal for Man United and Juventus to play a game against each other on a given Thursday? It’s absurd.
This. It’s worth noting that for all their huge incomes and multi-billion valuations, very few of these clubs make a profit - Barcelona, as I understand it, is virtually bust. The Glasers at Manchester United are a partial exception - and you don’t have to Google much to find Man U fans screaming at them for treating the club as a revenue-generating business rather than a chance to spend billions on silverware.
It’s been called the “prune-juice effect” - the faster the money comes in, the fast they piss it out on player salaries and transfer fees.
The two things the profit-seeking owners most want are a ring-fence so they don’t have to keep spending to stay in the game and some sort of salary cap to end the treadmill - why pay your star striker £20 million when you can pay £10 million, keep the rest, and know he won’t just leave? But a lot of the owners are the billions-for-silverware type, who don’t care how much they spend as long as they get the best team - which is why proposals for a salary cap have always gone nowhere.
I think some of the terms used in European soccer are confusing to an American audience. Champions League, as being described, sounds like a type of competition that in North America would be referred to as the playoffs. But I have trouble wrapping my head around it because we don’t have different leagues for each sport. Back in the old days, when baseball and football were young, there were two different leagues that competed against each other in a championship game / World Series. But eventually the two leagues for both sports merged, on a somewhat equal basis in both cases IIRC. It wasn’t a matter of taking the top teams from say the American League and National League in baseball or the AFL and NFL in football and kicking out the bottom dwellers. They just came together to form the new MLB and NFL.
That sounds like the story of the Mannings. The father , Archie Manning, played for the Saints back in the day, before my time, so I’m not all that familiar with his career. The son who “reneged on a contract” is Eli Manning. He was drafted by the San Diego Chargers but refused to sign to play for them on the assumption that his career would go nowhere with that team. San Diego was forced to trade him to the New York Giants, and in return they ended up with a different quarterback, Philip Rivers. Archie reportedly used his connections to assist in the process, though that’s never bene proven. The Giants got the better of the deal in the end, getting two Super Bowl victories out of the deal (although I’m sure many would argue about that, I think it’s a safe assumption).
The other son, Peyton Manning, was actually the more talented of the two, and probably the second best QB to play the game after Tom Brady.
Of note, that particular incident was probably the most recent time something like that has happened, meaning a player holding out of an initial contract from the draft because they didn’t want to play for a particular team. The incident took place back in 2004, so it’s not terribly common. The only other incident of something like that happening that I can recall off the top of my head is with John Elway and the Denver Broncos back in the 1980s.
Interesting. Michael Cox, the author of the Mixer and Zonal Marking says the Super League may indeed be necessary evil due to the massive inequalities in the European domestic leagues (which no one seems interesting in addressing):
Any interest from PSG, Bayern and Dortmund?
Monopolies? anti-competitiveness? closed shops? “things of that matter” is a broad term but this suggestion seems like nothing more one huge externality.
That’s not what this entails. Such “friendlies” can be arranged at will and no-one stops them.
Says you, The vast, vast, vast majority of the fans say different.
This is not tinkering around the edges. This is designed to create a closed shop with protected participation to the highest tier for a select few. That is a fundamental change to the tiered structure and it matters.
Sport is what we have instead of wars and it is of huge cultural significance.
[quote=“RickJay, post:42, topic:940270”]
If the Premier League decides to expand the length of the season, should the UK government stop them? What if the Bundesliga decides to go to 20 teams, should that be against the law too?
[/quote] no in either case as all that is is tinkering with the existing structure. No ring-fencing has taken place, no anti-competitive competition has been put in place.
Because it is of huge cultural significance and it matters to a large proportion of the people who elect said governments.
Local councils have to give their permission for games to takes place and policing arrangements need to be made and agreed for any major event. Such permissions can be declined, such agreements can be rescinded.
There are ample ways in which perfectly legal obstacles can be placed in the way of this. One I really like is removing the right of Liverpool to use the name “Liverpool” .That’s a nuclear option but such things shouldn’t be seen as an idle threat.
Also, you may be interested in how such matters are handled in Germany, they certainly think that the fan’s voice is important and discontinued Monday evening games because of it. I’d be very happy indeed to see similar decentralisation of power in place in the UK.
Nothing about the proposal is any of those things, and it’s not in any way incurring some sort of externality the government should need to control.
If that is the case, the Super League will fail on its own merits (which, to be honest, looks really likely anyway.)
Of course it is, but that’s a dreadful reason for government to interfere in how sports teams arrange their schedules. Star Wars is of enormous cultural significance, too; it would be absurd for the U.S. government to interfere in how Season 2 of “The Mandalorian” is written.
No
Yes
No
Cite:
“I can only say my personal opinion, I don’t like it. Hopefully, it doesn’t happen,” Liverpool captain James Milner told Sky Sports.
“The players obviously had no say, so the welcome we got to the ground tonight felt a bit unjust. We’re here to play football and have no control of it.”
It is all three of those things. A self-selected group colluding to set-up a closed competition from which they cannot be relegated and seeks to replace the current top level club competition.
This is nothing to do with schedules.
That is a very poor analogy. This is more akin to the major movie companies deciding that only the films they release can be considered for top awards. No other independent film can now ever be considered for an Oscar.
That’s another aspect that those of us in the US aren’t used to. The NHL, NFL, and NBA have salary caps, and MLB has a luxury tax. Even teams that most fans think of as perennial bottom dwellers do have good seasons now and than, and sometimes even win the championship.
In the NFL every team has made the playoffs at least once since 2010, which was the most recent time the NY Jets made it.
In MLB the Philadelphia Phillies most recent playoff appearance was in 2011, and every other team has been more recently.
I’m not sure about the NBA and NHL, but my guess is that the vast majority of the teams in those leagues have also been to the playoffs at least once in the last 10 years.
Not yet. They have all strongly condemned the move so far.
The German clubs in particular have an issue in that I believe the fans have a pretty large say in any such move (50%+1, right?).
If the big money clubs want to ring themselves off and make their own league, fine I guess. I won’t watch it (as a current Arsenal fan that can’t imagine how dull propping up the table every year would get). But if they do it they should be removed from La Liga, Premier League, etc.
How is that different from existing leagues? That’s how a sports league works. You can’t just get a team of your friends together and demand to play Real Madrid. (They’re not replacing existing club play, either, or at least they don’t propose to. Since I doubt this’ll ever fly, it’ll never come up anyway.)
The Academy does, in fact, restrict eligibility for major awards to films released in a certain manner in the United States; “independent” films can be eligible but only by meeting certain requirements for being released on that manner. Most of the movies ever made are not eligible. It would be preposterous for a government to get in the way of their little trophy ceremony.
“demand” doesn’t come into it. As it stands anyone can put a professional team together and work their way up through the ranks until you play at the very highest level. i.e. the Premier league and Champions League.
Just like anyone can enter and win the Open golf. If you are good enough you’ll be given the reward of playing with the very best.
Well as I said, it was a terrible analogy to make in the first place.
Yes, but it’s a restricted access matter and you have to meet the requirements set by the Premier League (or La Liga, Ligue 1, etc. etc, you get my point.) They determine who gets to play, full stop. It’s different from a league like the NFL or Japanese League baseball or something, but it’s still restricted according to the criteria set by the guys who run the league.
In mean, we are only 29 years past ta similar thing happening in 1992 when the Premier League broke away from EFL. They’re still working together but that was a matter of considerable controversy at the time and it was based entirely on making money.
The main fan objection to such a Super League would probably be that it would vastly diminish their team’s chances of winning a championship in any given year.
Right now, Real Madrid and Barcelona have essentially shared the La Liga trophy between the two of them for many years running. So their chances of winning the title are, in any given year, roughly 50 percent, so to speak. But now that they’re in a Super League alongside ten other strong, rich and elite teams, their chances of winning the Super title are far lower than their odds were of winning La Liga. Maybe something like 10-15%.
Ditto for Man City or Man U, who had fine chances of winning the Premier League each year but now good luck to them trying to win a Super title.
Again, though, the plan as stated is not for them to leave their national leagues. They’re still competing to win La Liga.
Suppose they were to leave national leagues though… I mean, wouldn’t you as a fan kind of like the idea of winning a more prestigious championship? I am sure it’s cool for Barcelona fans to win La Liga again and again but a championship basically just between them and Real Madrid is surely LESS thrilling than winning a league where winning is a more remarkable achievement.
My objection actually doesn’t have anything to do with that, since Arsenal have basically no chance of winning a title in the near future anyway.
My issue is that part of the conceit of the soccer leagues is that they are meritocratic. Teams can join, they can move up and down, Leeds can be a powerhouse and then relegated and now pretty good again. Man City similarly. Walling off the Super League so some teams can never exit basically says that what matters is the brand, not the quality of the team. It encourages crappy management, because there is no real risk to mediocrity or worse.
Now, I fully acknowledge that the conceit is largely false. If I were a Bundesliga fan or a La Liga fan I would probably think differently, since it’s ridiculous that one team can win for almost a solid decade (or two/three in the case of La Liga). I just wish the solution was to fix the leagues rather than build a new walled-off garden for the mega rich clubs.
The only way I would support this is if the clubs truly did leave their domestic leagues for this new league. But dominating their leagues and then also keeping the vast majority of the international club competition money to themselves will only make the domestic league situation worse. It’s clear that is what these clubs want.
Sure, that’s how I’d feel - as a Cowboys fan, for instance, I’d analogously find Dallas winning a Super Bowl a lot more interesting than them winning the NFC East division title. But I think the main objection of many fans would be that they’re no longer a regular title-winning team (if they get kicked out of La Liga.)
It also might be more humiliating if a team like Tottenham, for instance, always occupies the basement of this Super League year in and year out. Tottenham was never a title-winning team in Premier, but to be on the bottom of something is still different than being in the middle of it.
Maybe if one team was consistently bad in the Super League and kept dropping in value and quality, and some none-Super team became greater and greater (say West Ham, Internazionale, Roma or Everton), they might get an invitation to Super, and then the bottom-dwelling Super team would be ejected? …I don’t know, maybe that would be an idea for them…