So with Chelsea announcing their withdrawal prior to their match today, is Liverpool the only "super team" to have played while ostensibly a member of this catastrophe? Asking for my future pub trivia match
Pellaeon on
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TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
Man United fanzone Twitter, repost from Spanish radio show El Larguero.
Meanwhile, Italian teams released an statement saying that they would give a group statement:
Man United fanzone Twitter, repost from Spanish radio show El Larguero.
Meanwhile, Italian teams released an statement saying that they would give a group statement:
How desperate are Barca and The Madrids that they didn’t immediately bail on this nonsense when it fell apart in England? Are Spanish fans actually supporting this?
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TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
Barca are over one billion euro in debt and their whole business model is based on Messi not getting any older.
As a club they’re absolutely fucked and I’m not surprised at them digging their claws in.
Barca are over one billion euro in debt and their whole business model is based on Messi not getting any older.
As a club they’re absolutely fucked and I’m not surprised at them digging their claws in.
But....without the English clubs this goes nowhere. Like they gain nothing, they're better off enjoying their all-but-assured berths in the CL. A Euro Super League without the English clubs isn't going to draw the overseas eyeballs they're hoping for, it's all going to be glorified friendlies. Especially since this guarantees that the French and German clubs stay a hard pass.
Like, I see this losing them money, at best.
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TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
For context, over the last three seasons they’ve spent a quarter of a billion on Pjanic, Trincao, Firpo, Neto and Coutinho and not one of them has played more than 25% of the available minutes since their arrival
and that’s not mentioning the further 300 million on Griezzman, Dembele and De Jong or the two million a week they pay Messi
Being an American on the outside and doing a quick peek in, I see where the leadership of the Super League are coming from.
Let me play devil's advocate.
In the U.S. the Major League Baseball (MLB) has the Minor Leagues below them where they can collect talent. If the talent goes into the MLB and it turns out they aren't very good, but want to continue to play, they can go back to the minor leagues, which is, for intents a purposes, a black hole. Even though I'm aware that the minor leagues exist, I have never heard of a single Minor League team or if there are any in my area. They are not advertised, and never ever broadcast on TV. I believe the Minor League sponsors are like "Bob's Tire Shop and 24 Hour Salad Bar" and are *extremely* local where games are played in High School/college baseball fields.
It seem that this "regulation" rule in football says that if your team does poorly, then the whole franchise is demoted to the equivalent of the "Minor League" .. I mean, if the Chicago Cubs had a bad year and the next year the whole team was put into the Minor Leagues, they might as well kill the franchise. They would lose all of their brand name sponsorships, would no longer be on television, and why would the owner even bother owning the team if the best sponsor you can get is "Charlie's Towing and Outback Steakhouse"
I mean why would anyone want to own a team on the off chance they have a bad year and now you have a team that basically worthless?
Like I said I'm kind of playing devils advocate, and I heard this whole Super League thing was cooked up by American owners.
If that's the case and this falls through there are going to be lawsuits all over the place. For example it seems that governments are involved now. If that happened in the US the league will try sue the government for interfering with their business, like when cities were sued by internet companies when the cities wanted to have municipal broadband. (The city was illegally interfering with their business)
I think you are vastly underestimating the scope and budget of some of the minor league baseball teams, but that’s not really on topic here.
It’s a somewhat similar structure to the soccer pyramid though, in that there are over a hundred minor league baseball teams spread across the US and Canada operating in a system that is stratified by levels. However, teams at each level are owned or affiliated with the major league teams.
From a North American perspective, what these clubs have tried to do is create a league structured just like MLS, which does not have pro/rel.
In the U.S. the Major League Baseball (MLB) has the Minor Leagues below them where they can collect talent. If the talent goes into the MLB and it turns out they aren't very good, but want to continue to play, they can go back to the minor leagues, which is, for intents a purposes, a black hole. Even though I'm aware that the minor leagues exist, I have never heard of a single Minor League team or if there are any in my area. They are not advertised, and never ever broadcast on TV. I believe the Minor League sponsors are like "Bob's Tire Shop and 24 Hour Salad Bar" and are *extremely* local where games are played in High School/college baseball fields.
I mean let's be fair, MLB barely airs on broadcast TV too. Part of that is that there are too many games, which mean none of them really matter, which means none are worth real airtime until you hit playoffs. They're stuffed onto regional sports networks, that have time to cover 800 games per year.
By comparison, in my city at least, both minor league soccer and minor league hockey get actual legitimate OTA broadcast coverage (one on the local CW affiliate, one on the local FOX). For the soccer team, games not shown OTA are on ESPN+. AHL has its own streaming service apparently for the hockey games not broadcast. Both also advertise pretty substantially in the local market. It's not like higher tiers of minor leagues necessarily have to be anonymous sideshows in the sports world. We choose to treat them that way. I'm not saying this will ever change in the US, I suspect closed leagues are here to stay. But minor league teams can be legitimate, can build their own (smaller) stadiums, can get real sponsors, can get actual broadcast deals.
And that's ignoring that we treat amateur sports as legitimate and even worth "big money" broadcast and sponsorship deals...if they're attached to a college.
None of the super league teams are at any real risk for relegation to the lower tiers. Arsenal had one of the worst starts in forever and they're still 9th and 19 points clear of the drop. Their financial and personnel edge over the rest of their league is such that it would take a series of catastrophic seasons to get to a point that they would ever likely be at risk.
This is about the champions league, where the big money is. You have to earn your way into it every season by either placing in the top spots in your domestic league the previous season or winning one of the previous season's two european competitions, Europa or Champions league.
The big teams wanted guaranteed spots in those leagues, unearned, just because of who they are. Liverpool will likely miss out this year, and rightfully so because they have been shit, and they're looking at missing out on those big dollars and thinking "what of we had a competition where we never missed out, and also the paydays were even bigger, and guaranteed, but also we still want to play in the premier league on Saturdays only now our payroll will be even bigger than everyone else's and guys, guys why are you unhappy where are you going?"
It would be the equivalent of say, the red sox, yankees, cubs, and dodgers saying "we're the only teams people want to watch so we're going to create our own separate world series and playoffs with our own broadcast money and maybe we let the Cardinals in every now and then"
None of the super league teams are at any real risk for relegation to the lower tiers. Arsenal had one of the worst starts in forever and they're still 9th and 19 points clear of the drop. Their financial and personnel edge over the rest of their league is such that it would take a series of catastrophic seasons to get to a point that they would ever likely be at risk.
This is about the champions league, where the big money is. You have to earn your way into it every season by either placing in the top spots in your domestic league the previous season or winning one of the previous season's two european competitions, Europa or Champions league.
The big teams wanted guaranteed spots in those leagues, unearned, just because of who they are. Liverpool will likely miss out this year, and rightfully so because they have been shit, and they're looking at missing out on those big dollars and thinking "what of we had a competition where we never missed out, and also the paydays were even bigger, and guaranteed, but also we still want to play in the premier league on Saturdays only now our payroll will be even bigger than everyone else's and guys, guys why are you unhappy where are you going?"
It would be the equivalent of say, the red sox, yankees, cubs, and dodgers saying "we're the only teams people want to watch so we're going to create our own separate world series and playoffs with our own broadcast money and maybe we let the Cardinals in every now and then"
The five "additional" spots in this nonsense league are what really got me. Like, you want to have 15 permanent competitors, the invite 5 second-class citizens in to beat up on every year, to pretend it has "sporting merit?" The fuck? I mean if you just created a 20-league closed league I could almost get it, but this idea that we'll buy our way in permanently but you have to earn your way in is fucking nonsense.
I think the more comparable thing to try and understand it from a US sports perspective, is if The Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Astros, Cubs and Braves, all got together and decided they wouldn't play in the MLB post season, they would have their own world series, and invite 2 other teams each year.
Doesnt matter if they suck, they still get the invite and they get to keep all the money Also the MLB isn't allowed to kick them out, cause somehow that's unfair to them.
I think the more comparable thing to try and understand it from a US sports perspective, is if The Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Astros, Cubs and Braves, all got together and decided they wouldn't play in the MLB post season, they would have their own world series, and invite 2 other teams each year.
Doesnt matter if they suck, they still get the invite and they get to keep all the money Also the MLB isn't allowed to kick them out, cause somehow that's unfair to them.
I'd say the more comparable situation is the whole "P5" and "G5" thing in college football, which is still horseshit.
This is a silly question, as I'm kind of not keen on how relegation works, but I assumed if the team did badly, there was a percentage at the bottom that was kicked down. (Lets say bottom 5%) so if a top tier team loses a huge amount of matches (because, I mean, someone has to be at the bottom, no matter how good you play), how can they not get kicked out?
I ask because I follow Vlogbrother John Green, and he is a big fan of AFC Wimbledon and though he loves the sport and supports the team, he constantly makes himself ill near the end of the season(?) because AFC Wimbledon seems to be *always* a match away from relegation
The bottom x number of teams are relegated (in the English league it's the bottom 3, smaller leagues with fewer teams in each division would have fewer teams relegated). It doesn't matter who the teams are, if they're in the bottom 3 at the end of the season they go down.
And conversely the top two teams and the winner of the playoffs between the third to sixth placed teams in divisions under the top one are promoted. So success is rewarded and failure sees you go down, the idea being that the best performing teams play each other and those that don't make the grade are knocked down to a lower level.
Relegation is incredibly painful for fans, promotion (or winning the league) is glorious and joyful. Being a fan carries with it the possibility of both.
I can't wait for the first season of the ESL featuring four clubs, three of whom play each other in the Spanish league anyway.
Going from secondhand reports the domestic backlash against the Spanish clubs doesn't seem to have been anyway near as bad as it was over here. Possibly because they're terminally screwed financially without the ESL and everyone knows it, I dunno.
At the close of the 1990–1991 season, a proposal was tabled for the establishment of a new league that would bring more money into the game overall. The Founder Members Agreement, signed on 17 July 1991 by the game's top-flight clubs, established the basic principles for setting up the FA Premier League. The newly formed top division was to have commercial independence from The Football Association and the Football League, giving the FA Premier League licence to negotiate its own broadcast and sponsorship agreements. The argument given at the time was that the extra income would allow English clubs to compete with teams across Europe.
This is a silly question, as I'm kind of not keen on how relegation works, but I assumed if the team did badly, there was a percentage at the bottom that was kicked down. (Lets say bottom 5%) so if a top tier team loses a huge amount of matches (because, I mean, someone has to be at the bottom, no matter how good you play), how can they not get kicked out?
I ask because I follow Vlogbrother John Green, and he is a big fan of AFC Wimbledon and though he loves the sport and supports the team, he constantly makes himself ill near the end of the season(?) because AFC Wimbledon seems to be *always* a match away from relegation
The point where the whole comparison to how US leagues operate (and I agree on paper that Super League is the same as NBA, NFL or MLB in the US) falls apart is the history. The US leagues have always operated that way, your fans don't know any other system.
European football has 100+ years of history of working one way and now they want to upend that in favor of more money. As has been mentioned before, none of those super teams are ever in danger of being relegated. On the other hand, in Germany there are a some long term successful clubs who were relegated to a lower league recently. Hamburger SV out of (you guessed it) Hamburg was the only club left that was never relegated in the history of the Bundesliga - up until a few years ago, when years and years of being bad finally caught up with them and the went down to league 2 (and haven't gotten back up). Second team is Schalke 04 - who yesterday secured their relegation down to league 2 for the first time in 30 years.
Relegation or threat of relegation is a constant worry for ALOT of fans in Europe, that is how they learned the system. So, this is not a problem for any of us and that is why the prospect of a US style league with no relegation doesn't hold any appeal over here.
Second - only very very few clubs are set up as big and complicated as any US franchise, so this whole "oh they would be finished as a franchise because they'd lose corporate sponsors" wouldn't really come into effect over here. Again, except maybe the biggest clubs - but as we noted elsewhere, non of those big clubs are anywhere near relegation and never will be (unless the domestic league punishes them).
I really get where that comparison comes from and I made it myself as well, but you can't really compare these two wildly different systems with a wildly different history.
None of the super league teams are at any real risk for relegation to the lower tiers. Arsenal had one of the worst starts in forever and they're still 9th and 19 points clear of the drop. Their financial and personnel edge over the rest of their league is such that it would take a series of catastrophic seasons to get to a point that they would ever likely be at risk.
This is about the champions league, where the big money is. You have to earn your way into it every season by either placing in the top spots in your domestic league the previous season or winning one of the previous season's two european competitions, Europa or Champions league.
The big teams wanted guaranteed spots in those leagues, unearned, just because of who they are. Liverpool will likely miss out this year, and rightfully so because they have been shit, and they're looking at missing out on those big dollars and thinking "what of we had a competition where we never missed out, and also the paydays were even bigger, and guaranteed, but also we still want to play in the premier league on Saturdays only now our payroll will be even bigger than everyone else's and guys, guys why are you unhappy where are you going?"
It would be the equivalent of say, the red sox, yankees, cubs, and dodgers saying "we're the only teams people want to watch so we're going to create our own separate world series and playoffs with our own broadcast money and maybe we let the Cardinals in every now and then"
I don't really know much about it but from what I can gather a lot of rugby leagues work kinda similarly to the proposed ESL, right? But maybe not. Who plays in what rugby competition for what reason is a bit of mystery to me, except that there's a split between Union and League.
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David_TA fashion yes-man is no good to me.Copenhagen, DenmarkRegistered Userregular
TavIrish Minister for DefenceRegistered Userregular
I think some Americans also fail to conceptualise the sheer amount of fully professional football in Europe. There’s 92 fully professional clubs throughout the top four divisions in England and that’s before we get into the Vanarama league, which is also mostly fully professional.
I mean why would anyone want to own a team on the off chance they have a bad year and now you have a team that basically worthless?
Because football isn’t just about the absolute richest of the rich. A bunch of those clubs are owned by fan collectives or local businessmen with ties to the area. Not to romanticise it but a bunch of these clubs are pillars of the community in a way that I think just doesn’t exist in American sport. They’re content to only get few million a year from the clubs.
Also I think you’re vastly underestimating the amount of money involved here. Pre-rona, the Championship had annual revenue of a billion pounds and league one had revenue or 200 million. There’s no paupers here, the only clubs that are at risk of folding from relegation are ones that didn’t plan their wage system accordingly (see Sunderland)
Agnelli has now apparently admitted that the ESL can no longer go ahead, which is a shame because it would have been really funny to see them try.
“I remain convinced of the beauty of that project,” Agnelli said, stating it would have created the best competition in the world. “But admittedly ... I mean, I don’t think that that project is now still up and running,” he said.
I think most of the withdrawals don't actually include an apology, just oh well I guess we won't do this we remain committed to sporting excellence and the fans are sooooooooooooooo important to us lol.
I think most of the withdrawals don't actually include an apology, just oh well I guess we won't do this we remain committed to sporting excellence and the fans are sooooooooooooooo important to us lol.
I cannot wait for the fans to get back to the stadiums after this. The concentrated rage and hatred towards some of the owners will make the ground levitate.
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we lost but this goal was a cracker
what a 47 hours its been
Good. I like the apology, but Kroenke needs to go.
Man United fanzone Twitter, repost from Spanish radio show El Larguero.
Meanwhile, Italian teams released an statement saying that they would give a group statement:
Repost from news channel Cadena Ser
So, of course, a team already left:
Super Sport Blitz is a sport news site.
I’m looking forward to seeing who’s left when I wake up in 8 hours.
Maybe if they make it into a five a side tournament, the remaining clubs can field multiple teams ?
How desperate are Barca and The Madrids that they didn’t immediately bail on this nonsense when it fell apart in England? Are Spanish fans actually supporting this?
As a club they’re absolutely fucked and I’m not surprised at them digging their claws in.
But....without the English clubs this goes nowhere. Like they gain nothing, they're better off enjoying their all-but-assured berths in the CL. A Euro Super League without the English clubs isn't going to draw the overseas eyeballs they're hoping for, it's all going to be glorified friendlies. Especially since this guarantees that the French and German clubs stay a hard pass.
Like, I see this losing them money, at best.
and that’s not mentioning the further 300 million on Griezzman, Dembele and De Jong or the two million a week they pay Messi
that club is just straight up fucking stupid
Let me play devil's advocate.
In the U.S. the Major League Baseball (MLB) has the Minor Leagues below them where they can collect talent. If the talent goes into the MLB and it turns out they aren't very good, but want to continue to play, they can go back to the minor leagues, which is, for intents a purposes, a black hole. Even though I'm aware that the minor leagues exist, I have never heard of a single Minor League team or if there are any in my area. They are not advertised, and never ever broadcast on TV. I believe the Minor League sponsors are like "Bob's Tire Shop and 24 Hour Salad Bar" and are *extremely* local where games are played in High School/college baseball fields.
It seem that this "regulation" rule in football says that if your team does poorly, then the whole franchise is demoted to the equivalent of the "Minor League" .. I mean, if the Chicago Cubs had a bad year and the next year the whole team was put into the Minor Leagues, they might as well kill the franchise. They would lose all of their brand name sponsorships, would no longer be on television, and why would the owner even bother owning the team if the best sponsor you can get is "Charlie's Towing and Outback Steakhouse"
I mean why would anyone want to own a team on the off chance they have a bad year and now you have a team that basically worthless?
Like I said I'm kind of playing devils advocate, and I heard this whole Super League thing was cooked up by American owners.
If that's the case and this falls through there are going to be lawsuits all over the place. For example it seems that governments are involved now. If that happened in the US the league will try sue the government for interfering with their business, like when cities were sued by internet companies when the cities wanted to have municipal broadband. (The city was illegally interfering with their business)
It’s a somewhat similar structure to the soccer pyramid though, in that there are over a hundred minor league baseball teams spread across the US and Canada operating in a system that is stratified by levels. However, teams at each level are owned or affiliated with the major league teams.
From a North American perspective, what these clubs have tried to do is create a league structured just like MLS, which does not have pro/rel.
I mean let's be fair, MLB barely airs on broadcast TV too. Part of that is that there are too many games, which mean none of them really matter, which means none are worth real airtime until you hit playoffs. They're stuffed onto regional sports networks, that have time to cover 800 games per year.
By comparison, in my city at least, both minor league soccer and minor league hockey get actual legitimate OTA broadcast coverage (one on the local CW affiliate, one on the local FOX). For the soccer team, games not shown OTA are on ESPN+. AHL has its own streaming service apparently for the hockey games not broadcast. Both also advertise pretty substantially in the local market. It's not like higher tiers of minor leagues necessarily have to be anonymous sideshows in the sports world. We choose to treat them that way. I'm not saying this will ever change in the US, I suspect closed leagues are here to stay. But minor league teams can be legitimate, can build their own (smaller) stadiums, can get real sponsors, can get actual broadcast deals.
And that's ignoring that we treat amateur sports as legitimate and even worth "big money" broadcast and sponsorship deals...if they're attached to a college.
This is about the champions league, where the big money is. You have to earn your way into it every season by either placing in the top spots in your domestic league the previous season or winning one of the previous season's two european competitions, Europa or Champions league.
The big teams wanted guaranteed spots in those leagues, unearned, just because of who they are. Liverpool will likely miss out this year, and rightfully so because they have been shit, and they're looking at missing out on those big dollars and thinking "what of we had a competition where we never missed out, and also the paydays were even bigger, and guaranteed, but also we still want to play in the premier league on Saturdays only now our payroll will be even bigger than everyone else's and guys, guys why are you unhappy where are you going?"
It would be the equivalent of say, the red sox, yankees, cubs, and dodgers saying "we're the only teams people want to watch so we're going to create our own separate world series and playoffs with our own broadcast money and maybe we let the Cardinals in every now and then"
The five "additional" spots in this nonsense league are what really got me. Like, you want to have 15 permanent competitors, the invite 5 second-class citizens in to beat up on every year, to pretend it has "sporting merit?" The fuck? I mean if you just created a 20-league closed league I could almost get it, but this idea that we'll buy our way in permanently but you have to earn your way in is fucking nonsense.
Doesnt matter if they suck, they still get the invite and they get to keep all the money Also the MLB isn't allowed to kick them out, cause somehow that's unfair to them.
I'd say the more comparable situation is the whole "P5" and "G5" thing in college football, which is still horseshit.
I ask because I follow Vlogbrother John Green, and he is a big fan of AFC Wimbledon and though he loves the sport and supports the team, he constantly makes himself ill near the end of the season(?) because AFC Wimbledon seems to be *always* a match away from relegation
And conversely the top two teams and the winner of the playoffs between the third to sixth placed teams in divisions under the top one are promoted. So success is rewarded and failure sees you go down, the idea being that the best performing teams play each other and those that don't make the grade are knocked down to a lower level.
Relegation is incredibly painful for fans, promotion (or winning the league) is glorious and joyful. Being a fan carries with it the possibility of both.
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Going from secondhand reports the domestic backlash against the Spanish clubs doesn't seem to have been anyway near as bad as it was over here. Possibly because they're terminally screwed financially without the ESL and everyone knows it, I dunno.
Anyway:
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Football London reporter. I'm becoming more and more certain that the reason this thing failed was everyone involved is very, very stupid.
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The point where the whole comparison to how US leagues operate (and I agree on paper that Super League is the same as NBA, NFL or MLB in the US) falls apart is the history. The US leagues have always operated that way, your fans don't know any other system.
European football has 100+ years of history of working one way and now they want to upend that in favor of more money. As has been mentioned before, none of those super teams are ever in danger of being relegated. On the other hand, in Germany there are a some long term successful clubs who were relegated to a lower league recently. Hamburger SV out of (you guessed it) Hamburg was the only club left that was never relegated in the history of the Bundesliga - up until a few years ago, when years and years of being bad finally caught up with them and the went down to league 2 (and haven't gotten back up). Second team is Schalke 04 - who yesterday secured their relegation down to league 2 for the first time in 30 years.
Relegation or threat of relegation is a constant worry for ALOT of fans in Europe, that is how they learned the system. So, this is not a problem for any of us and that is why the prospect of a US style league with no relegation doesn't hold any appeal over here.
Second - only very very few clubs are set up as big and complicated as any US franchise, so this whole "oh they would be finished as a franchise because they'd lose corporate sponsors" wouldn't really come into effect over here. Again, except maybe the biggest clubs - but as we noted elsewhere, non of those big clubs are anywhere near relegation and never will be (unless the domestic league punishes them).
I really get where that comparison comes from and I made it myself as well, but you can't really compare these two wildly different systems with a wildly different history.
I don't really know much about it but from what I can gather a lot of rugby leagues work kinda similarly to the proposed ESL, right? But maybe not. Who plays in what rugby competition for what reason is a bit of mystery to me, except that there's a split between Union and League.
Yeah, maybe.
Edit: Football writer for many, many sites.
Because football isn’t just about the absolute richest of the rich. A bunch of those clubs are owned by fan collectives or local businessmen with ties to the area. Not to romanticise it but a bunch of these clubs are pillars of the community in a way that I think just doesn’t exist in American sport. They’re content to only get few million a year from the clubs.
Also I think you’re vastly underestimating the amount of money involved here. Pre-rona, the Championship had annual revenue of a billion pounds and league one had revenue or 200 million. There’s no paupers here, the only clubs that are at risk of folding from relegation are ones that didn’t plan their wage system accordingly (see Sunderland)
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arsenal's been the only apology so far i think
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:rotate:
I saw reports Milan noped out right after the English clubs, so it's just Juve from Serie A.
Nothing official from AC Milan yet, I don't think. Inter Milan have dropped, though.
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Isn’t this what they really wanted all along?