The European Super League is UEFA’s Bluff Called. What will they do?
Twelve top European football clubs have announced that they will form a European Super League (ESL) to compete annually from as soon as possible. The seismic element of this proposal is that these twelve clubs (plus three more yet to be announced) will always be in the competition. There won’t be relegation from it, or failure to qualify.
Such a closed league has precedent — most North American sports leagues are closed in this way, and indeed the English Football League originally was back in the 1880s and 1890s, and to a large extent through to the mid-1980s when relegation from the Football League was established. However, the Football League had 92 clubs, and a hierarchical promotion and relegation structure within it throughout its existence. Teams like Burnley, Preston North End, Huddersfield and Wolverhampton Wanderers have all played in all four divisions over the years.
In football, promotion and relegation are part of the fabric, and certainly in Europe. Academics have published on this, most notably US economist Roger Noll who provided a theoretical take on promotion and relegation, arguing that they ensure that the quality of play is higher.
That a system of promotion and relegation is necessary for fan interest isn’t obvious, since North American leagues generate great fan interest. Such a system also doesn’t guarantee that the successful clubs aren’t always the same few. After all, in most European countries the biggest teams have been the biggest teams for a very long time (Bayern Munich, Juventus, Manchester United… all the twelve essentially).
But it’s always been possible these clubs can suffer from bad, or indeed corrupt management. Manchester United were relegated in the 1970s, and Juventus demoted in the 2000s.
The ESL guards against such catastrophic outcomes. It protects 15 of the 20 places in the elite competition for the chosen select few — regardless of how good or bad they are.
But it might just work — surely we all love good football? And surely, if these clubs, the successful few, are proposing it, surely they’ve thought about it and decided it’s their best option.
They must have anticipated the reaction that is currently on-going, and indeed they have since they’ve released a statement informing UEFA and FIFA that they’ve taken pre-emptive legal action against the threats from these bodies that they will be excluded.
They clearly bank on the idea that they are too big for their domestic competitions to carry on without them. The remaining 14 Premier League clubs won’t expel them because they know that without the six, their own revenues will be much lower. The top clubs have called the bluff of their domestic Football Associations, and UEFA.
Fundamentally, sports teams rely on on-field competition to generate revenues and exist commercially. This involves off-field collusion — cartel agreements to set up sports leagues and sports competitions. Sports leagues are agreements between sports clubs, made in the knowledge that sporting competition involves teams of a reasonably similar level of quality as to be interesting. That involves something un-economic in nature — redistributing revenues away from the successful sides to the less successful ones. Televising the top teams, but giving the worst teams the revenues from that. Restricting the hoarding of players at teams. So that they can hope to compete and make an interesting spectacle.
The ESL is precisely off-field collusion, but will it generate enough on-field competition to sustain itself? Five teams each year will qualify somehow (assuming they want to be part of it — the big clubs must again be assuming that they will), but is that going to provide enough on-field competition? Will they become Norwiches and West Broms, always fighting to stick around at the top table?
Sports leagues need to be commercially viable. Hence as a motivation, commercial viability is always the fundamental aim. As with the Premier League in 1992, so with the ESL now, the calculation is that this is what is needed to maintain competition — another move away from redistribution of revenues in the game.
The removal though of promotion and relegation, of the consequences of failure, is the controversial aspect here. That is what has driven quality up in European leagues over the decades. What will be the consequences of limiting top competition to the precious few — will they become bloated and inefficient?
It’s worth also noting that the removal of promotion and relegation is a natural consequence of the changes in football going back all the way to the end of the Second World War. At that point significant restrictions were placed on labour mobility — clubs owned the registration documents of players, and revenues were redistributed. In England there were gradual reductions in the restrictions on labour mobility through to the Bosman ruling, and in the 1980s revenue sharing was abandoned.
The Premier League took the distorting of revenues towards the big teams a big step further. The main consequence of the huge inequalities in the game has been notable financial instability as teams in the lower divisions chase the dream of Premier League football.
So one argument might be that by stopping promotion, the incentive to invest heavily to gain promotion is removed. Maybe it will be good for financial stability? However, the financial instability is arguably a result of the inequality that exists in the game now to an extent it never previously did.
