Money and Greed were at the forefront but there's another reason owners wanted to create The Super League
The Super League plans were made by greedy rich owners who just wanted to get richer but they were also looking for protection - from themselves.
Tales will one day be told of the saga of the European Super League. It’s going to be one for the ages. If you were on Twitter on April 20th 2021 you’ll never forget the craziness that entailed as things started to unravel.
Fans got what they wanted. The Super League plan died merely two days after it was announced. For Manchester United fans it was even sweeter as it came with the resignation of Ed Woodward, a man who kept falling upward within the hierarchy of Manchester United.
The fans aren’t done though. The Super League may have fell but now they want these owners out too. There’s good reason behind that, they showed their true colors. They don’t care about the fans. They’re just greedy assholes that already make a ton of money and wanted just wanted to make more money for themselves.
Money was obviously at the forefront of all this. For four of the six English clubs - and specifically the Glazers of Manchester United and Fenway Sports Group of Liverpool - it was a simple case of greed. We want more money.
Outside of England, it’s a bit of a different story. For Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Juventus, Inter Milan, and AC Milan there was an urgency to getting this league set up as soon as possible. Some of these clubs are in serious debt. Barcelona have over €1 billion in debt and are close to bankruptcy. Real Madrid couldn’t spend a dime last summer in the transfer market. Last summer Juventus had eyes for Mauricio Pochettino, but that never got off the ground floor because they couldn’t afford his wages.
These clubs need money. That money that would have been dispersed from JP Morgan’s €3.5 billion investment would have been borrowed against future television revenues and needed to be paid back, but who cares! These guys get their money now to cover up the cracks. Does it matter that they themselves are the ones who racked up these debts? No. That was the second reason behind creating the Super League. It would give them a means to protect themselves from… themselves.
It wasn’t long after the plans for the Super League were announced that you could see the long term direction they wanted the Super League to go in. The hope was that top players would want to play against the best players and would naturally push to come to the league. Within the league, the lack of relegation would eliminate the arms race to sign the best players aka the very thing that drives prices so high. They were likely to go even further and put in some sort of salary cap to keep wages down.
In other words, they wanted to create a European football version of the NBA. Their comments about younger fans not necessarily supporting clubs but rather players echoes that as many NBA fans support whatever team their favorite players are currently playing for.
The thing is NBA executives are notoriously terrible at their job. So much so that over the years the league has put in place several rules that have no other purpose than to save owners from themselves. For example, in the NBA you can’t trade your first round draft pick in consecutive years. That came about because teams had a history of digging themselves into large holes as they traded away their draft picks, and then had no means to rebuild when the trades didn’t work out.
Despite the safe guards, NBA owners and GMs continue to do stupid things. Every summer teams give out ridiculous contracts to mediocre free agents that ultimately end up tying up a teams cap situation for years to come. Doesn’t matter, they’re just trying to sell a flashy new free agent to their fans so they’ll buy tickets.
That is exactly what caused the need for the Super League. The executives blamed the current pandemic but that’s a load of shit. Barcelona aren’t a billion Euros in debt because of the pandemic, they’re a billion euros in debt because they made some terrible decisions. It’s the same story for every club.
With the fall of the Super League fans are pushing for reforms. They’re angry and rightfully so. It’s not enough that the Super League fell, they want to ensure that it never happens again. They want some modicum of club control given back to the fans to prevent singular businessmen from ever doing it again.
This is a great time to call ownership structure into question and evaluate the different systems. Fans want more of a say and that’s not bad, but it’s important to note that fans having too much of a say is in fact, pretty bad! Fans were by no means the reason for the creation of the super league, but they’re not entirely innocent in leading us to where we are right now either.
In Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona are entirely owned by the members of the club. They’re controlled by presidents who are elected by said members of the club.
You should be able to already see how this might become an issue. You’re not necessarily picking the best most competent person for the job, but rather the person who gets the biggest following which is usually by promising the fans what they want.
In the early 2000s Joan Laporta ran for president of Barcelona behind the promise of signing David Beckham if he were elected. He was, but he didn’t sign Beckham (he would sign Ronaldinho, so… worked out). Seems like a pretty dangerous precedent to set.
Laporta actually did a pretty decent job - despite his fair share of controversies - considering he inherited a ton of debt but when he left Pep Guardiola was making Barcelona the biggest team in the world.
Barcelona quickly became the victims of their own success. Before Laporta, Barcelona were the clear number two team in Spain who had won the Champions League once. By the start of the last decade they were right up there with Real Madrid and were now a European power.
They did that on the backs of one of the greatest teams ever assembled, but as that team’s run came to a close, the fans weren’t going to accept falling back to second fiddle. They now needed to compete with Real Madrid year in year out.
Their biggest problem was their success wasn’t built upon expensive signings but from a ‘once in a generation’ line of talent that came from their academy. The thing about once in a generation is… it only happens once in a generation. You can develop plenty of good players every 10 years, but you’re not going to develop multiple world class players every 10 years (Manchester United have encountered the same problem).
Now the problem is if you’re the president when the team’s run comes to an end you’re under a lot of pressure to keep it going. If you allow the team to fall back down the pack you’ll quickly be voted out. Naturally you’re going to make short term decisions to keep the team at the top so you can stroke your ego and say you brought glory to your club. Who cares really? You’re the president, all you have to do is make sure you get out before things go south.
So Barcelona started spending money. Lots of it. Quite poorly too. Even when they generated a huge influx of cash with the Neymar deal they reinvested it terribly. They swung and missed on some big deals and then made the incredibly short sighted decision of just spending more money to try and fix those mistakes. As expected, that just made things worse. Hence where Barcelona are now.
Florentino Perez’s situation at Real Madrid is a bit different since he’s been so successful but ultimately he answers to the fans as well. If they suddenly decided they didn’t like him they could vote him out.
When Perez began his second term he quickly went back to throwing money around - signing Kaka, Karim Benzema, and Cristiano Ronaldo - because this was Real Madrid and they were “supposed” to have the best the players in the world playing for them. He would eventually shift his ‘galactico’ policy towards players who were aged 23 or younger to make it more sustainable signing Gareth Bale and James Rodriguez when they were 23.
Then, he stopped. Real cooled their spending in the middle of the decade which was something that Perez could get away with because despite the lack of signings the club was able to win four out of five Champions League titles.
But this was still Real Madrid, the fans demanded the glitz and glamor and new players. Perez engaged in long drawn out transfer sagas, always making sure the fans knew they were heavily involved with the best players but nothing ever came of it.
That might have been good, but the rest of his decision making was poor (€600k/week for Gareth Bale). When he sold Cristiano Ronaldo, Real had to re-invest that money quickly or face the ire of their fans. They splashed it around poorly, including spending £100 million on 28 year old Eden Hazard which has very much not worked out. You wonder why they are where they currently are.
Something happened to the Spanish clubs in the last decade. At the turn of the century, Real Madrid and Barcelona were able to negotiate their own TV contracts separate from the rest of La Liga. That kept the money flowing in at the top clubs and away from everyone else. In the last decade that rule changed and now all 20 teams are included in the deal collectively. That’s reduced the financial advantage those two clubs had over their countrymen to some extent, but they still operated as if they had it.
You would think someone at the club would realize that wasn’t sustainable? Or, they saw it but in order to maintain their power they had to ignore it. Do we really think it would be any different at an English club? People in power want to keep their power.
The German 50+1 model is currently being touted by a lot of English fans but I’m not sure that’s the way to go. German rules require the fans to own at least 50 percent of shares plus one to ensure fans always have control. The clubs are then controlled by presidents or CEOs who are voted on by the members.
Bayern are obviously the example everyone sites about the success of the model but Bayern are also very much the exception to the model.
The Bavarian’s ownership structure is insanely complicated. Part of the club is also a corporation and that corporation owns part of the team. While they are compliant with the 50+1 rule they also have some big time companies (Audi) and countries (Qatar!) with ownership stakes who have pumped heavy money into the team.
The obvious drawback to the 50+1 model is it becomes difficult to get a rich owner to inject money into the club. That’s literally what the rule is designed to prevent. Bayern are well off financially because they’re a commercial giant. In the last decade Borussia Dortmund have also become pretty big commercially firmly establishing themselves as the second biggest club in Germany.
But the second biggest club in Germany is still a very distant second. Borussia Dortmund have only kept the title race going to the final day of the season twice since last winning in 2012. They’re still a selling club. The third biggest club in Germany is probably RB Leipzig, a team that is an exception to the 50+1 rule isn’t exactly rolling in the dough. Last season they had to sell their biggest star in Timo Werner, this season they’ve had to sell centerback Dayot Upamecano (to Bayern nonetheless).
The only way the 50+1 rule would work is if everyone did it. We’re not just talking about the clubs in England it would have to be all over Europe otherwise the clubs in England would fall behind in European competition. Germany has already fallen behind the rest of the big leagues, the only team that really has a fighting chance on the continent is Bayern, and a lot of that is tied to Robert Lewandowski.
Bayern don’t spend big money on transfer fees, rather they spend money on wages (which is the smart way to do things). That allows them to take chances on other teams big priced failed deals via low risk loan moves (James Rodriguez, Ivan Perisic, Coutinho etc). What holds them all together is Lewandowski, and as defenses focus primarily on stopping him, it allows those other players space to shine. But as we’re seeing now when you take Lewandowski out of the fold, it’s much harder for those players to really make their mark on a match against Europe’s elite.
Bayern are scoring some great PR right now because they rejected the super league, but read their rejection closely, they still stand for most of the “values” that the Super League was trying to push - especially regarding wage control. Hmm notice how Bayern are very in favor of wage control in Europe, but they’ve hardly made a peep about it in Germany? Hmmm.
Getting everyone on-board to the 50+1 rule would be damn near impossible especially as not even everyone in Germany has to abide by the rule!
Fan control of the club and electing someone to run it sounds very ideal but as always what is ideal and what ends up happening are often not the same. Elections just become about politics. It costs money to launch campaigns and run. Before you know it, a ‘club’ so-to-say among the elite supporters is formed and that’s who’s going to run things. When one steps down, it’s usually someone within their inner circle who takes over. Hell, Bayern is basically just a fraternity of ex players running the show. When one leaves he’s just replaced by another ex player.
Once it becomes about politics it just becomes the same rich people running the show that you’re dealing with now. Florentino Perez ran unopposed in 2009 because he was the only one that could get a bank guarantee of €57.4 million. Whether he had the best interests in the club in mind or not didn’t matter.
Powerful people really only want one thing, to keep their power. When the fans have the ability to strip them of that power they don’t necessarily act rationally - and it’s naive to think the fans would either. Manchester United have a higher net spend over the last five years than every club in Europe bar Manchester City, yet the fans still complain that the owners don’t spend enough money in the transfer market. Liverpool’s owners delivered a Champions League final and the fans shouted that they didn’t spend anything in the transfer market (they’d go on to win the Premier League).
Both teams didn’t spend for good reason, they were already in debt and didn’t have cash fully flowing. But if the person in charge of spending money on signing players felt he would be thrown out of office if he didn’t, do we think he’s going to make the right long-term decision for the club?
Fans might think that “our fans wouldn’t elect a Florentino Perez type” but what happens when the ideal candidates don’t have initial success? It may not happen right away, but these things always seem to head in the same direction.
Elected people aren’t going to necessarily look out for the best long term interests of the club. Nor will it prevent those people from trying to this super league. Perez was the ringleader of them all the president of the Super League. Single person or single entity ownership obviously won’t prevent this either, your owners might spend years making it seem like they’re looking out for the club, but turn out to be money grabbing pieces of shit just like everyone else. Let’s just not pretend that the 50+1 rule is what kept Bayern out of the Super League. It’s not like they put the decision up to a vote from their fans - then we would have heard about it. We were all fairly surprised to find out they weren’t part of the coup.
Football history is filled with rich fans becoming chairman of the club, spending recklessly to achieve success out of a ‘love of the club’ and nearly ruining either themselves or the club into financial ruin. That’s why regulations such as financial fair play have been put in place. To prevent clubs, chairmen, and owners from ruining themselves.
It’s not just UEFA who have FFP laws, the football league has them as well. La Liga now has a wage cap to prevent teams from over spending. These regulations are good - and bad. They save teams from themselves, but they also keep the status quo, which is something the big boys like. Since it’s now illegal to do a Manchester City or a PSG, the ‘historically big’ clubs don’t have to worry about someone else crashing the party.
And that is how you arrive at the Super League. It ticks all the boxes. The clubs get a desperately needed influx of cash immediately, the closed shop lets them maintain the status quo, and finally they’d be able to establish regulations to save themselves from themselves.
Because - as Simon Kuper says in Soccernomics - stupidity and football executives go hand in hand.