The Beautiful Disaster of the Super League
American fans of European soccer are unique. We have to wake up at absurdly early times to watch matches overseas, deal with other sports cultures looking down on us, and cope with the fact that most of us will probably never step foot in our favorite club’s stadium.
However, American fans of the sport are just as passionate about their teams as fans across the pond. When news of the formation of the Super League broke, we joined the rest of the world in absolute indignation on April 18 when 29 words started to circulate through our social media feeds:
“Twelve of Europe’s leading football clubs have today come together to announce they have agreed to establish a new mid-week competition, the Super League, governed by its founding clubs.”
The elite of European soccer were attempting a coup and the UEFA Champions League was the one to be usurped.
Real Madrid, F.C. Barcelona, Juventus, Arsenal F.C., Chelsea F.C., Inter, AC Milan, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool F.C. and Atletico Madrid all demanded a new mantle.
The reaction to the proposed league was filled with animosity toward the thought of such a competition in Europe, whose leagues all run off of the sporting merit system of promotion and relegation, giving any club the opportunity to fight for the most prestigious trophies on the continent.
“It’s been damned and rightly so…[Manchester United and Liverpool] are breaking away into a league without competition that they can’t be relegated from… it’s pure greed and they’re imposters,” the Manchester United great Gary Neville said during an interview with Sky Sports.
Comments from former players like Neville were fierce and scathing, but UEFA President Alexsandr Ceferin’s response during a press conference on the issue was one that put everyone watching the debacle unfold on alert.
“Our game has become the greatest sport in the world based on open competition, integrity and sporting merit and we cannot allow and will not allow that to ever change. As previously announced by FIFA and the six confederations, players that might play in the closed league will not be able to represent their national team in any matches,” Ceferin said.
As a relatively new American convert to soccer myself, with no club I had ties to, I found my club in a peculiar way. I did a quiz on Facebook in 2015 about what European side I would probably support.
At the end of that quiz, the computer christened me a Blue and I started my obsession with Chelsea F.C. knowing nothing about the club and very little about the sport.
Since then, I’ve learned quite a bit about the beautiful game and luckily for me, I’ve been able to feel what success is like as a fan as Chelsea have lifted two Premier League trophies, one FA Cup, and one Europa League title since 2015.
In that time as well, I also watched Chelsea languish with poor performance during a few awful seasons and creep toward the knife’s edge of relegation. The battles with both glory and damnation were an absolute thrill to watch throughout those seasons.
That thrill is something that I cherish about the sport, and something I was incensed was at stake.
Chelsea’s inclusion as one of the 12 founding teams in the Super League hit a nerve in me, but one that I had to examine further.
For Americans like me, anger at this idea is a little bit hypocritical as all of our sports leagues here are built on closed competitions, only opening up if someone has the wealth to purchase or establish a franchise.
The MLS, our top tier professional soccer league, doesn’t use the promotion-relegation system despite the existence of lower tier leagues in the U.S. Instead, new prospective franchises pay an entrance fee that has soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.
But the system that Europe employs in its leagues is exactly the reason why I have as much passion for the sport. It offers a wholly different perspective for me on what a professional sports league should be.
Opportunity for glory is equal for all European clubs and based solely on performance. Because of that system, European soccer can have some of the greatest “Cinderella stories” in all of sports, like Leicester City F.C.’s improbable 2016 Premier League win.
The concept of promotion and relegation is a foreign concept to those from the U.S. but is the crux of what is called the pyramid in European soccer, the tiers of professional leagues that feed into one another through promotion and relegation.
It’s a system that rewards good performance and sanctions poor performance. When paired with the pyramid, it allows for mobility through the tiers for all clubs.
The Super League completely threw away this central practice to the game in order to keep the 12 clubs solidified in the competition, and as a result those clubs would be guaranteed the lucrative broadcasting revenue from the matches they play.
The rest of the soccer world immediately called out the clubs for their obvious attempt at a cash grab.
However, soccer is an incredibly expensive sport.
In UEFA’s list of the top 20 clubs with the highest yearly player salary bills in Europe, the lowest ranked club Crystal Palace F.C. had a player salary of $160 million on their books
This is well above the average salary bill of $130 million for all five major U.S. sports leagues combined, according to data from Sportrac.
The wage bill for soccer clubs also doesn’t take into account the transfer market, which itself is a confusing process for many lay in the U.S.
In soccer, clubs are essentially able to purchase the contract rights for a player from another club to add them to their squad. For elite players however, transfer fees can run into the hundreds of millions.
The transfer of Neymar Jr. from F.C. Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain holds the world record with an astronomical fee of $269 million, according to Statista.
With all these crushing financial factors, it can be understandable how clubs can go into hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars into debt, and why the Super League then becomes an extremely palatable idea if you’re a club executive trying to claw back from the pandemic.
And billionaire sympathy is something that is rightly absent in the minds of soccer fans.
In the most animated part of this saga, Manchester United fans have viciously protested against their American billionaire owners, the Glazer family. Their anger has caused United executive chairman Ed Woodward to resign and culminated in the May 2 pitch invasion of Old Trafford.
In response, the Glazers have now named an asking price of $5.6 billion to sell the most decorated club in England and end their maligned chapter as caretakers.
The angry response against American ownership was also echoed at fellow Super League team Arsenal F.C. Club owner Stan Kroenke faced massive backlash from Arsenal fans and has since capitulated to the prospect of selling, with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek the frontrunner for the purchase of the club.
As the backlash grew, nine teams began to pull out of the Super League to preserve the interests of their fans, and to also avoid any serious punishment from UEFA. The only three teams left as official members of the Super League are Real Madrid, F.C. Barcelona and Juventus.
A month on from the beginning of this cacophony, UEFA has already handed down punishments to the nine clubs who withdrew. The punishments amounted to a $15 million donation to children’s soccer charities by the nine clubs and small revenue cuts from UEFA competitions.
Although it seems light, it seems like these are mostly symbolic moves by UEFA to criticize the greed of the clubs for even joining the Super League.
The other three clubs’ punishments are expected to be far more serious for their continued defiance, with major fines and bans from the UEFA Champions league for multiple seasons.
Watching the downfall of the Super League from afar was a beautiful fiasco. The ferocity and love for the game that fans showed in Europe was deeply inspiring for me as an American fan, and showed why they call soccer the beautiful game.
No matter the forces behind the scenes and no matter how much money any entity might have, our game cannot and will never be bought.
And that’s exactly why I call myself a fan.
