Soccer’s Super League: Greed Suffers a Rare Defeat
The strangest thing happened this week. For one brief shining moment, the rich didn’t get richer.
It’s a complicated story and it happened in the European soccer world, so it didn’t get a lot of attention on the American side of the pond.
Nonetheless, it’s worth noting, because in this golden age of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and extreme capitalism, it’s what we newspaper old-timers used to call a man-bites-dog story.
To oversimplify, the best and richest soccer teams in Europe and Britain got together to form what they modestly called a Super League.
The idea was that these rich teams would anchor a 20-team European championship tournament every year, with the 15 founding members and five one-shot rotating invitees.
This would have effectively replaced the current European soccer playoffs, the Champions League long run by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA).
The UEFA Champions League includes 32 teams, which qualify by finishing at the top of each participating country’s national league. These teams go through elimination rounds leading to the championship game itself.
The winner becomes that year’s top team in Europe and if you believe Europeans, the top team in the world — though teams in, say, South America aren’t always ready to concede that title.
The rich teams that were going to form the Super League all participate regularly in the UEFA Champions League. One of them almost always wins it. No surprise there. They have the most money, they buy the best players. Welcome to how the world works.
But these rich teams didn’t think this was enough. They wanted more. Like we were saying, welcome to how the world works.
Because the Super League would have had most of the marquee teams, 15 of which would have been guaranteed a spot in the Super League playoffs every year, the Super League was confident it would have instantly supplanted the Champions League as the place where the top team in Europe would be coronated.
Therefore, the Super League would have gotten the most attention and the most lucrative TV deals, which means most of the money.
So each of its 15 core members would have been guaranteed a large annual payout, and they would have had to share less of it with teams that weren’t in their elite club.
The Super League concept had been incubating for a while before it was formally unveiled this week with a gilded promise. Look what we’re giving you, the founders told soccer fans: all the best teams together in one place, all the time. It’s like a buffet with all desserts!
What’s not to like?
Well, funny you should ask.
First, the best three teams in Germany and France, who had been expected to join, decided not to. That left only teams from Britain, Italy and Spain, which meant the Super League didn’t have every top team after all.
Second, almost no one was queuing up at the buffet.
The Super League founders no doubt expected to take flak from UEFA, from teams that were excluded, from national football associations that saw their own leagues downgraded and from politicians aware of how many soccer fans vote. The Super League founders clearly figured this would all become background static once the games began.
They clearly figured wrong.
Turns out fans like the way European soccer has always been run, where anyone can form a team and if it’s good enough, work its way up into sequentially more prestigious national leagues. Your local small-market team is unlikely to win a UEFA title, but it can play against teams that do. They’re part of the same entity.
There’s an odd sort of sports democracy in play here, and Europeans like the fact their soccer world is not set up like, say, the closed world of the National Football League, where a finite number of teams are granted franchises.
Fans of teams that were going to be part of the Super League, like Manchester United or Liverpool, rebelled in the streets. Players on those teams called the Super League a bad idea.
They didn’t like the concept and you have to think they also didn’t like something else — the greed, and the arrogance that fueled it.
For all the justified heat that social media takes these days, it gets a cheer here. Where in the old days fans would have raged in their separate living rooms, social media enabled them to rage together, creating a much more imposing opposition force.
Within two days, the Super League plan crumbled. All six British teams announced they were pulling out, most with a sheepish apology.
Those apologies didn’t negate the original arrogance. Many of the statements were worded to sound like this was one of those crazy ideas hatched at the end of a boozy frat party, and that the perps realized their mistake as soon as they woke up the next morning.
Truth is, the Super League was a whole lot more calculated than that. More tone-deaf. And greedier. Any bets on whether the founders are already spitballing ideas for a Plan B?
For the moment, however, it’s a victory for those who aren’t rich, and a rare humiliation for those who are and think it’s a free pass to always get richer.
