New European Super League

[Zoran]

Why did the SUPER LEAGUE Crumble? | FOOTBALL news

[Mascot]

@Kopstar

@Retro_Helix

Here you go:

The thing is, they can reform solidarity payments now. They don’t need to break away to do that so the question must be, why don’t they?

The easiest way to do that is to say all players pay a % of their wages (deducted at source) earned after they turn 23 to clubs that trained them between the ages of 11 and 18 and a % of all transfer fees (both international and domestic transfers) is also distributed in the same way. Training compensation gets paid largely in accordance with the existing European model (our own PFCC needs scrapping).

So that’s one thing taken care of from that attempt to conceal greed under a veneer of virtue signalling. Next?

For Real, Barca and Juve this is nakedly about fixing their catastrophic mismanagement of their clubs. They are the real bad guys here.

I get why people focus on John Henry, but I see FSG as in this because they see it as a way to keep LFC competitive and exert greater influence on the sport, through cost control mechanisms like a salary cap or similar.

[Zoran]

https://youtu.be/HAKieZUwx4E

[aldredsp]

Life is never fair, but sometimes you can make it fairer, or at least stop it from becoming manifestly unfair.

[mattyhurst]

All great but these people are businessmen if they are that dumb at Business then I’d worry for their clubs.

In fact from that I’d probably take at least our owners had a vision of what they wanted and how this will work, which is better than the three others.

Alternatively it’s called saving face and they’ve believed it like the idiots they are, it seems pretty obvious that even our top brass this side of the Atlantic hadn’t a clue.

[aldredsp]

The football bubble has gotten out of hand and needs to be reined in to survive, in my view. Players on 1/2 million a week regardless of form, transfers > 100 million; it simply can’t go on. Creating a super league will not necessarily address these problems. Some clubs have bet the house on continued success, not unlike Leeds a few years back. This is a risky strategy which the pandemic has clearly exacerbated. .

[GermanRed]

[Iftikhar]

Is it really over!

Guys like Agnelli and Perez aren’t any upstarts, they have been around for ages and know all the alleys and streets of sports politics. Guys like Abramovich and Mansour may have kept a low profile, but they would love nothing more than a glitzy thing like ESL. Guys like Rummenigge and Al-Khelaifi may have pretended the moral high, but they are all about monopolizing the gold-pot.

Add to that the seemingly endless ineptness and greed of UEFA, broadcasters, national associations etc.

[Aurelio]

It was fun whilst it lasted, can’t wait for the highlights reel

[PaulRoJo]

Magic cards and road cycling. Is there no end to your renaissance man talents SBYM?

[FGred]

He didn’t know either because Henry apologised to him as well

[WeeJoe]

@Rambler

Absolutely…but I have never heard a current player ever acknowledge that their wage demands are part of the reason for the mess. It is the elephant in the room.

Exactly, instead most actively invest it to avoid paying tax

[El_Dorado]

An article from the Wall Street Journal.

"The audacious plan by Europe’s top soccer clubs to form their own U.S.-style tournament lies in tatters just days after it was launched. But that might not stop some eventual Americanization of the world’s most popular sport.

The six English clubs that had supported the new European Super League pulled out Wednesday, all but sealing its fate. The proposal for a “closed” league inspired by U.S. franchises, featuring weekly face-offs between powerful teams that couldn’t be relegated, would have torpedoed the existing Champions League run by European soccer’s governing body UEFA. It sparked immediate outrage from national leagues, clubs, fans and governments.

What the near-universal criticism glossed over is the inadequacy of the status quo—and not just for the most popular clubs’ billionaire owners. The collapse of the Super League might not take much pressure off UEFA to fix problems it has failed to address for decades.

Although soccer has a bigger fan base than any other sport globally, the National Football League, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association all recorded more revenues than any European soccer competition in 2019. This is in part because the MLB and NBA have more matches per season. But the NFL still collected $60 million a game, compared with about $25 million for the Champions League.

More than half of that income comes from media companies like Sky—owned by U.S. giant Comcast —paying for soccer broadcast rights. The Super League expected a more popular format to double the value of these rights, helping soccer clubs plug the financial holes caused by the pandemic.

Investors in the few publicly listed clubs, such as Manchester United in the U.K. and Juventus in Italy, should be under no illusion that money alone can improve a flawed business model: Extra funds have a history of ending up in the pockets of stars rather than shareholders. Also, if broadcasters bid more for a Super League, they might pay less for domestic competitions—which is why the English Premier League in particular was up in arms.

Still, the Champions League is likely leaving a lot of money on the table by offering a subpar product. Its group and knockout format means that many of the most popular matchups don’t happen in a given tournament, or even for years. Changes recently announced by UEFA don’t fix any of the key issues, which only underlines the need for deeper reform.

Whatever comes of the Super League gamble, a tournament in which top European teams regularly face one another is likely to happen in the end, because it is in the interest of clubs, broadcasters and, yes, viewers. Media-industry analyst Ian Whittaker suggests that a more commercial arrangement could help bring U.S. streaming giants like Amazon.com and Disney into the mix—probably even if the contentious “closed” format were dropped.

Critics of soccer’s commercialization make little sense with their appeals to the grass-roots game, which has already been marginalized by high ticket and pay-TV prices, schedules that hurt game attendance in favor of overseas viewership and, above all, massive financial inequalities. A franchise like the Super League, with U.S.-style revenue sharing and spending caps, would at least address imbalances at the very top.

European soccer has long been a product, just a badly run one. It seems inevitable that an American sense of spectacle will eventually shake it up."

[richieh_10]

And all of our games with the other 14 PL clubs. We are fucked for a good few years

[Draexnael]

Stop wetting yourself.

It’s not as though the team has got shit over night…

Once Anfield re-opens you’ll see us fly again…

FSG are for things on the pitch irrelevant and those who stuck with the fans i.e. Klopp and the players will get our support… And that’s all they ever needed.

[Kopstar]

Politics For All (PoliticsForAlI)

Haha - what total nonsense.

[Iftikhar]

@El_Dorado

Critics of soccer’s commercialization make little sense with their appeals to the grass-roots game, which has already been marginalized by high ticket and pay-TV prices, schedules that hurt game attendance in favor of overseas viewership and, above all, massive financial inequalities.

The elephants no one wants to talk about. Over to you Sky Sports.

[mattyhurst]

Yeah I noticed that apologies to Billy Hogan

[LaurazRed]

That really should read RIP Micky Mouse League. Thank God it’s over.

[Mascot]

Just John Barnes, dropping truth bombs all over the place.

"FANS DID NOT WIN!" John Barnes insists football fans had NOTHING to do with Super League collapse