Southpaw 31: Revenge of the Lads
The European Super League collapsed. Now what?
Dear Readers,
The big news in the sports-and-politics world this week was, of course, the creation and subsequent collapse of the European Super League. A lot of ink has been spilled parsing the details of the bizarre saga, so in addition to our thoughts, we’ve included a bunch of good pieces at the bottom of the newsletter this week for your reading pleasure.
In some personal news, the two of us are now fully hopped up on two doses of that sweet, sweet vaccine, so we’re celebrating by going to see our two favorite baseball teams play each other today at Citi Field. Loser copy edits next week’s newsletter. Thanks as always for reading!
-Ian and Calder
In their Super League failure, European plutocrats have made the case for collective ownership of clubs
The rise and fall of the European Super League—all within 48 hours—has predictably given rise to lots of hot takes, some better than others, from lots of American writers. We’re going to put a unique Southpaw spin on the situation, thinking not only about the issues that the Super League exposed in European soccer, but also about how the aftermath of the failed league could lead to some positive outcomes for sports more broadly. Even if it won’t come to fruition, the Super League should force sports fans everywhere to question the relationship between fans and their teams, and to start searching for alternatives to the ownership models that we take for granted. We’ll explore one of those possibilities below.
But first, we’d imagine that some of you might need some background on what the European Super League is/was and how it fits in the broader landscape of European soccer. We’ll provide that context before diving into our quick take on the matter.
----
In European soccer (or football), the major leagues are organized by nation. The English have the Premier League, the Spanish have La Liga, the French have Ligue 1, Italian clubs compete in Serie A, and the top German division is the Bundesliga. There are plenty of other leagues in other countries across Europe, but these five are home to the best—and richest—clubs in Europe.
In addition to these national leagues, European football’s main governing body, UEFA, runs the Champions League, an annual tournament which brings together the top finishers from each of the national leagues to compete for the title of Europe’s top club. Aside from prestige, a spot in the Champions League title carries a pretty hefty cash payout. In the 2019-20 tournament alone, UEFA awarded around €2 billion to the clubs, with the winning team eligible to take home as much as €82,400,000 in total prize money.
The owners of Europe’s big-money clubs hate the Champions League for two primary reasons. First, since teams have to earn a spot in the tournament by finishing in the top tier of their domestic leagues, the pay-out from the Champions League is never a guarantee—especially for the clubs in the English Premier League, which historically has had the most parity of all the major leagues. In other words, in order to make money from the Champions League, clubs actually have to compete—a concept which is anathema to the plutocrats who own Europe’s richest organizations.
Second, despite the Champions League’s cushy cash prizes, Europe’s top clubs—many of whom are in significant debt—have long bemoaned the fact that they don’t have more control over the Champion’s League revenue. Like all self-respecting magnates, the owners hate the idea that the revenue that their employees generate could end up in the pockets of anyone besides themselves.
Granted, for a club that’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars (or pounds) to attract top-flight talent, missing out on the Champions League—or making a premature exit—can be a pretty significant financial blow. But in reality, the owners of Europe's biggest clubs aren’t so concerned about losing money in the Champions League. They’re just mad that they can’t earn more.
And so on Monday, 12 of the richest clubs in Europe announced their intention to break away from the Champions League entirely to form their own “Super League.” The Super League would have 15 permanent slots for some of Europe’s best (or wealthiest) teams, leaving five additional slots open every year for other teams to qualify. The 12 founding members included six English sides—Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, and Tottenham—three clubs from Spain—Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid, and Barcelona—and three clubs from Italy—Inter Milan, AC Milan, and Juventus. The owners of these clubs would have controlled every aspect of the league’s finances, including revenue from broadcasting deals, thereby freeing them from the necessity to compete for their money.
The experiment, however, proved short-lived. As soon as the teams announced the plan, bedlam broke out: fans revolted, Manchester United’s Executive Vice Chairman resigned, all six English clubs pulled out of the Super League within a day, and the ill-fated experiment was over before it had even begun.
----
It’s tempting to draw simple comparisons between the Super League and the major American leagues, which operate on the same franchise model. At the end of the day, the owners of the would-be Super League clubs want the same privilege that every American franchise owner already enjoys: a guaranteed pay out, no matter how bad their team might be and no matter how angry, disillusioned, and indignant their fanbase might become.
But context matters. Unlike European football fans, American fans have more or less come to accept their powerlessness as the way things are. While we Americans are just as loyal as our European counterparts, most of us tacitly acknowledge that the owners of our favorite team completely control its fate. American owners will literally uproot teams overnight—think of the Dodgers, or the Sonics-turned-Thunder, or the Baltimore Colts—in search of more money, and, as history has demonstrated time and time again, fans are more or less powerless to stop them.
But if there’s a big lesson from the Super League saga, it’s that it doesn’t have to be this way. The traditions that connect European football clubs with the communities that support them run deep—deeper, in many cases, than the transactional ties that connect most American teams to their current homes. But at its core, these traditions are anchored in the fans’ abiding sense of ownership over their clubs. Take a look at this photo, for example, from a protest outside Chelsea FC’s Stamford Bridge.
Even as their club likely stood to benefit financially from the Super League arrangement, the fans’ message was that football is theirs, not the owners’, and that they would decide what to do with it. Hours after Chelsea fans briefly blocked their club's bus from entering the arena, Chelsea announced that it would not participate in the Super League, being the first domino to fall in a series that led to the Super League’s ultimate demise.
Even if it’s not organic, it is possible to replicate this feeling of ownership in the United States and Europe by giving fans a literal ownership stake in their teams. With the exception of the Green Bay Packers, few teams anywhere have taken fan ownership seriously as an alternative to their current business models—but the Super League fiasco shows why we should. At the end of the day, the interest of the ownership classes on both sides of the pond are the same—to extract maximum profit from their teams. In some cases, the owners are even the same people. (Fenway Sports Group, the ownership group that owns Liverpool, also owns the Boston Red Sox, for example.)
The Super League saga has made it abundantly clear that communities of fans are better stewards of sports teams than the billionaires who own them. In the case of the Super League, the fans may even have saved their owners from their own short-term greed, given that it’s an open question whether the league would have generated the sort of eye-popping revenue that its founding owners wanted. But business savviness aside, Europe’s fan base showed that they are more in touch with the spirit and traditions of their clubs than are their plutocratic owners. That in itself is a priceless asset.
So, if fans are better at the owners’ jobs than the owners, why can’t they have a piece of the pie? All evidence suggests that if fans had a real stake in their clubs, these franchises would be equally if not more successful than they are now. Compared to a monopolistic take-over by cabal of Europe’s richest owners, fan ownership sounds like a positively reasonable reform. Why not give it a try?
Go Deeper
“The European Super League is the perfect metaphor for global capitalism,” by Larry Elliott in The Guardian (April 22, 2021).
“Capitalist Green Created the European Super League,” by Ben Joyce in Jacobin (April 14, 2021).
“The greed of the European Super League has been decades in the making,” by David Goldblatt in The Guardian (April 20, 2021).
“The Super League debacle is a lesson in stakeholder capitalism,” by Ryan Heath in POLITICO (April 21, 2021).
“Soccer Is Broken. The European Super League Proves It,” by Alex Shephard in The New Republic (April 20, 2021).
“How America Ruined Soccer,” by Tom McTague in The Atlantic (April 19, 2021).
“Europe’s Super League is Gone. Now What?” by Rory Smith in The New York Times (April 23, 2021).
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . athletes’ reactions to the verdict in Minneapolis? “Sports World Reacts to Chauvin Verdict,” by Sopan Deb in The New York Times (April 20, 2021).
. . . the latest in Republicans’ campaign to ban transgender athletes from high school sports? “Alabama Gov. Signs Law Banning Transgender Athletes as Other Governors Veto Bills,” by Daniel Villarreal in Newsweek (April 24, 2021).
. . . a big step forward in the Professional Collegiate League’s effort to challenge the NCAA? “A start-up basketball league, hoping to compete with the NCAA, announces TV deal,” by Ben Strauss in The Washington Post (April 22, 2021).
. . . the English Premier League’s next stand? “English Soccer Will Boycott Social Media to Protest Online Abuse,” by Jesus Jiménez and Andrew Das in The New York Times (April 24, 2021).