European Super League Officially Announced - All Comments In This Thread - Arsenal, Liverpool, Man City, Man United, Spurs & Chelsea all out of it

J7u9xF0.jpg

tWtbKX8.jpg
 
I don't believe for a minute uefa will punish any of these teams, the new format of the UCL is a complete joke aswell, corrupt to the core.
 

Fans’ trust has been betrayed by owners – that’s a heavy toll​


Owners of rebel clubs have already paid a big price, regardless of further potential punishment​

Graeme Souness

Sunday April 25 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

The punishment for the six English sides who plotted a European Super League behind the backs of their fans, players, managers and fellow Premier League clubs should not be something that ends up penalising those same supporters.

If you fine them, who, ultimately, picks up the tab? If you deduct points and they don’t qualify for Europe, who feels the pain? The fans. The club has to recoup that money from somewhere, so prices will go up in a subtle way and the people who should get punished, won’t be.

It will just be the supporters who suffer if you impose fines or points deductions. The real punishment will be a permanent change in the attitude of the supporters towards the key decision-makers in this.Some people are going to be booed and hounded out of those clubs or certainly not welcomed with the same enthusiasm as before.

When The Sun published a picture of me recovering from my triple bypass heart operation on the anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster, I accepted that things would never be the same between me and some of Liverpool’s supporters. As much as you apologise, and I was profoundly sorry, there’s a significant amount of people who cannot forgive and forget. It was a serious error of judgment on my part, compounded by the timing being out of my control while I was in hospital.

Trust can’t be won back easily and is never recovered in some cases. For months, these people have sat in on Premier League meetings, planning for this year and beyond, secretly thinking they weren’t going to be part of it for much longer. Whatever public relations executives they listened to have been so misguided in their advice. There will be a few sacrificial lambs and it’s a long road back for all these guys. Who’s going to believe them any more?

The betrayal of their fans was the worst part, though. They failed to grasp that the guy who buys a season ticket probably sits in the same seat his dad did and, beyond that, possibly his grandfather did, too. They didn’t understand that our clubs are institutions to supporters and not just another sporting franchise. For most fans who buy shares in their club, it’s so they can have the certificate framed above the mantelpiece rather than selling them at some stage for a profit.

The motive for the Super League was money and new markets. Europe has less than 10 per cent of the world’s population; Asia has 60 per cent. They may not have been founding members, but in time there would have been clubs, or franchises, based in Beijing and Shanghai; Seoul and Tokyo.

Breaking into North America has been difficult since I’ve been involved in football because you are competing against the major sports there, so the immediate target is Asia, which is becoming more affluent at a rapid pace. They would have factored in some resentment and losing up to 25 per cent of their existing supporters in Europe, but still reckoned they could multiply that number in Asia several times over in their misconceived model.

Changes have to happen, you can’t stand still and must keep moving forwards, but this was a seismic change, taking clubs out of an exceptionally successful domestic league. It reminds me of a comment a few years ago from a journalist that successful businessmen often leave their brains at the door when they try to run big football clubs. They get caught up in it and go against all their business acumen by overspending then have to come up with plans like this to deal with the debts. It’s like they get caught in a hamster wheel, trying to satisfy the supporters and their own egos and end up spending money they know they shouldn’t be spending attempting to be successful.
That’s what ultimately happened to my old chairman David Murray at Rangers, for example, who spent tens of millions of his money chasing the dream there. Mike Ashley runs Newcastle United as he would any of his other businesses and look at how unpopular he is there.
 
I don't get the Souness article because he doesn't actually say what punishment they should get?

do you think Kroenke and Glazers who don't exactly interact with the fans are going to care if they get booed? they'll just stay away, just like FSG normally do unless they have a chance of winning something. Punishment isn't easy to call if they end up getting any because it will have a knock-on effect on people who don't deserve it
 
Let's be honest, UEFA will do absolutely fucking nothing to the likes of Real and Barca. The elite sides run the show and they know it. Small fine and job done.
 

Super League is entirely logical (if you’re American)​

Stateside fans generally struggle to grasp how central the principle of promotion and relegation is to their European counterparts​


Opportunities to see Neymar taking on Europe’s best players are rare

It was a banner week for lovers of pantomime. On Sunday, a cast of greedy football club owners announced their dastardly plan to steal our football, only to be greeted with so much booing and hissing from the audience that they hastily abandoned their scheme, promised to mend their ways and fled the stage, as if pursued by a crocodile that had swallowed a ticking clock. But what exactly was this evil ploy? Many observers sagely intoned that “it was all about the money”. Yes, true, but all about the money how, exactly?

The idea of creating a European Super League has been with us for decades, long before the present generation of baddies entered the scene. The idea is attractive because most of the world’s best players work in Europe, but spread across a number of countries — many in England, Spain and Germany, some in France and Italy.

In any spectator sport, fans want to see the best play against the best. That means international competition, which makes the World Cup or the Olympics so compelling. Football teams, however, play mostly against domestic competitors in national leagues, and only rarely do the top players go up against their peers in other countries.

Take, for example, the 12 clubs that signed up for the Super League. In ten years of Champions League matches, the teams in this group have played those from different countries only 90 times. If, by contrast, each team in the would-be Super League had played every other team home and away, the foreign teams would have met up 81 times in just one season. No wonder JP Morgan was willing to underwrite the venture to the tune of £2.8 billion: they were rightly confident that they could recover the money from broadcast fees alone.

These games would have attracted a vast global audience eager to watch not so much the clubs but the star players. Lionel Messi against Harry Kane, Neymar against Mohamed Salah, Luka Modric against Kevin De Bruyne, Raheem Sterling against Serge Gnabry — the permutations are not endless, but certainly they are much more numerous than any domestic league can offer.

The same logic drove the expansion of the European Cup, which went from a knockout competition reserved for 16 national champions to a 32-team Champions League, soon to be expanded to 36. In that regard, the Super Leaguers simply sought to take a process already well under way to its logical conclusion.

They miscalculated — and the pantomime villain always miscalculates — when they imagined that we would not cotton on to the truly sinister aspect of the plan right away. They did not just want a Super League, they wanted a Super League that was closed to anyone but themselves. There is no promotion and relegation in closed leagues, no plucky underdog can work their way up on merit.
News of the Super League was met with widespread protests

News of the Super League was met with widespread protests
CHARLOTTE WILSON/OFFSIDE/OFFSIDE VIA GETTY IMAGES

If you come from a small town playing in a small town league, in other words, you are doomed to remain there for ever. That is how American professional sports are organised, with unsurprising results: fans lose interest in anything but the elite teams of the closed league at the top, which in each Major League American sport contains about 30 teams for the entire country of 330 million people.

American baseball once had dozens of independent minor leagues across the nation, but they are long gone. The few minor clubs that remain are simply farm teams for the Major League clubs, playing meaningless games in meaningless leagues.

The villain the audience booed off the stage, then, is the US, or rather an American sports system where the super-rich join forces to slam the door shut on the underdog. I have taught at the University of Michigan for ten years and I can vouch that Americans generally struggle to grasp how central the principle of promotion and relegation is to European fans, how many hopes and dreams ride on the possibility, however distant, that your local third-tier club will one day rise and triumph.
Interestingly enough, even the fans of the top clubs, who would have benefited from the European Super League, shared this commitment and rose in solidarity.

That is a reflection on modern Britain as well, perhaps: we may have left the EU, but at least when it comes to football, our hearts beat to the European rhythm. There are even calls to adopt rules modelled on the German system, which requires that fan membership organisations have a controlling voice in clubs. Possibly we remain more European than we think.

At the least, we know how to raise an unholy ruckus when the villains try to steal our sports.

● Stefan Szymanski is a Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan and the co-author of Soccernomics



Fans’ backlash proved that game isn’t dead . . . far from it
 
Is this a punishment?

5% of their euro income will only amount to a couple of percent of their overall turnover. If that.

I get the feeling the genie is out of the lamp on all this.

:(
 
ESL will happen at some stage. Far too many money people involved with the clubs at the top of football. Far too many non EPL sides struggling to keep up with the top EPL club revenues and thus in huge debt.

The knock on effect to other clubs out with the ESL is the interesting factor and what it means for us.
 
This would tend to suggest that they have insight that the European Court of Justice will rule that the Super League is protected by EU law in its forthcoming ruling.

IOW, effectively the ECJ labelling UEFA's control of European football as a monopoly, in breach of competition law.
 
_DON_ said:
I think the clubs involved probably realised this but the money from the Super League probably makes up for it. And all they care about is money.
Click to expand...
A lot of players may not buy into this it will be interesting to see what they say on not playing for their countries in European and World cups
 
Gameboy said:
Reporters in Spain are saying that it will now be an open competition. Which was the big stumbling block the last time.
Click to expand...
How would that even work? A team from Spain gets relegated and a team from America gets promoted?

All seems pie in the sky,
 
kingwilliam said:
Anything those clubs can do to screw up the corruption of FIFA/EUFA is fine by me.
Click to expand...
So you think FIFA and UEFA have more to answer for than Abramovich, the Qatari Royal family at PSG, the Saudis at Newcastle and the Man City mob.

UEFA and FIFA are corrupt and far from perfect but let’s stop talking nonsense.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Latest posts

Back
Top