NationStates

Outer Sparta wrote:

Bombadil wrote:
The fans have a lot more say in German clubs, so it's not a case of some executive owner who doesn't much care for the team over lining their pockets to just make a call.

Red Bull is a lot different from typical Bundesliga teams and Red Bull GmBH will gladly accept that ticket to the ESL.

Diarcesia wrote:

Outer Sparta wrote:Red Bull is a lot different from typical Bundesliga teams and Red Bull GmBH will gladly accept that ticket to the ESL.

Red Bull joining the ESL might give it wings to stay afloat.

Inb4 Mercedes sponsors/forms a team there.

Fartsniffage wrote:I am no longer a Manchester United fan over this decision.

I will pick a new team after an appropriate period of mourning.

CoraSpia wrote:I don't support it. I like the idea that clubs who are not large now could hope to become large, and that there's a very good chance they could manage it. It also seems wrong for Leicester, who are consistently a top-5 finisher in England to miss out on an invitation at the expense of Arsenal, who have floundered in recent years.

Much as I don't support the ESL however the way that the federations are putting pressure on the players strikes a bad tone with me. I don't think that it's at all appropriate to ban the players who are at one of these clubs if it goes ahead from representing their country.

Bombadil wrote:

CoraSpia wrote:I don't support it. I like the idea that clubs who are not large now could hope to become large, and that there's a very good chance they could manage it. It also seems wrong for Leicester, who are consistently a top-5 finisher in England to miss out on an invitation at the expense of Arsenal, who have floundered in recent years.

Much as I don't support the ESL however the way that the federations are putting pressure on the players strikes a bad tone with me. I don't think that it's at all appropriate to ban the players who are at one of these clubs if it goes ahead from representing their country.

Well perhaps..

@FabrizioRomano
UEFA Executive Committee meeting scheduled for today in Montreux.

UEFA, FIFA, PL, Liga, Serie A on the same position: #SuperLeague has been disapproved. No UCL, no domestic leagues for the 12 clubs.

#SuperLeague clubs insist they want to play in the domestic leagues too.

Looks like they'll certainly be banned from domestic and CL..

CoraSpia wrote:

Bombadil wrote:
Well perhaps..

@FabrizioRomano
UEFA Executive Committee meeting scheduled for today in Montreux.

UEFA, FIFA, PL, Liga, Serie A on the same position: #SuperLeague has been disapproved. No UCL, no domestic leagues for the 12 clubs.

#SuperLeague clubs insist they want to play in the domestic leagues too.

Looks like they'll certainly be banned from domestic and CL..

I get that. It's the national teams thing I don't like, it reminds me too much of rugby where various national teams ban players who play abroad. No like, national teams should have the best players who can and want to play in them.

Bombadil wrote:

CoraSpia wrote:I get that. It's the national teams thing I don't like, it reminds me too much of rugby where various national teams ban players who play abroad. No like, national teams should have the best players who can and want to play in them.

I don't mind at all, players can choose to play for these clubs in their exclusive little competition or be part of the wider game of football overall. It's ridiculous these teams think they can have their cake - for which they're guaranteed an upfront $3.5B - and eat it in the PL, CL and even the World Cup.

“Founding clubs will receive an amount of €3.5bn solely to support their infrastructure investment plans and to offset the impact of the Covid pandemic… and [solidarity payments] are expected to be in excess of €10bn during the course of the initial commitment period of the clubs.”

So they get, and players earn, all this additional money over and above what they might receive from the leagues and other tournaments.

No.

Either it's an exclusive little club of teams doing whatever they want to do or nothing. It's unfair on every other team. And so players get to choose which system they want to take part in.

CoraSpia wrote:

Bombadil wrote:
I don't mind at all, players can choose to play for these clubs in their exclusive little competition or be part of the wider game of football overall. It's ridiculous these teams think they can have their cake - for which they're guaranteed an upfront $3.5B - and eat it in the PL, CL and even the World Cup.

“Founding clubs will receive an amount of €3.5bn solely to support their infrastructure investment plans and to offset the impact of the Covid pandemic… and [solidarity payments] are expected to be in excess of €10bn during the course of the initial commitment period of the clubs.”

So they get, and players earn, all this additional money over and above what they might receive from the leagues and other tournaments.

No.

Either it's an exclusive little club of teams doing whatever they want to do or nothing. It's unfair on every other team. And so players get to choose which system they want to take part in.

How would the super league negatively impact national teams, and what benefit would these policies have to the world cup and other national team competitions aside from making them a lower quality product?

Bombadil wrote:

CoraSpia wrote:How would the super league negatively impact national teams, and what benefit would these policies have to the world cup and other national team competitions aside from making them a lower quality product?

None at all, but given Harry Kane has already said he'd leave if he couldn't play in the World Cup, it's an effective bargaining tool in stopping these teams making up their own little competition for themselves.

CoraSpia wrote:

Bombadil wrote:
None at all, but given Harry Kane has already said he'd leave if he couldn't play in the World Cup, it's an effective bargaining tool in stopping these teams making up their own little competition for themselves.

Putting all the pressure on the players sounds like a very unfair strategy.

Bombadil wrote:

CoraSpia wrote:Putting all the pressure on the players sounds like a very unfair strategy.

Blame the owners who devised this little scheme.

CoraSpia wrote:

Bombadil wrote:
Blame the owners who devised this little scheme.

That's little help to the players who would now be excluded from major competitions and the chance to represent their country. I'm pretty sure they'd be blaming the associations.

Shofercia wrote:...as long as the clubs continue to be dedicated to the domestic leagues, I don't see an issue. In the Champions League, a club only gets six guaranteed games, and seven games as the teams advance, which they may or may not play. With the new league, the teams get 18 games guaranteed.

CoraSpia wrote:

Bombadil wrote:
None at all, but given Harry Kane has already said he'd leave if he couldn't play in the World Cup, it's an effective bargaining tool in stopping these teams making up their own little competition for themselves.

Putting all the pressure on the players sounds like a very unfair strategy.

Forsher wrote:

CoraSpia wrote:Putting all the pressure on the players sounds like a very unfair strategy.

Players matter. But, more to the point, world cups matter. Lionel Messi, for example, you've got to think that he feels the sentiment is that he needs to win something senior with Argentina to not be thought of as... well, perhaps not as a "what could've been" but certainly something between that and a "disappointment". I imagine the pressure of the world cup weighs just as heavily on anyone who plays for England but that's less because they are (or have been) part of a national team with a decent crack at doing so and more because the English press are rabid.

If FIFA thought this proposal would be bad for the world cup, they'd do everything they can to crush it. The way people talk about them, you could imagine Russia getting another world cup in exchange for some poisonous umbrellas. Obviously they wouldn't actually have Perez and co. assassinated but they'd pull out all the stops. I imagine helping players get out from contracts would be a first step.

Someone mentioned the example of rugby... the players tend to go overseas only if (a) they're old and have retired or been retired by other players having become preferred in the national team, or (b) if they've managed to get an exception or confirmation that so long as they're back before such and such, they'll be eligible for the world cup.

Also, rugby players go overseas (usually this means France or Japan) so that they can make enough money to live off. They're basically no better remunerated than many white collar professionals. At least, in the Southern Hemisphere. Soccer players don't have this problem.

Bombadil wrote:I don't have a source yet but..

Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich will not be part of the ESL

EDIT: Also unsourced, Mourinho sacked.

Sannyamathland wrote:

Bombadil wrote:I don't have a source yet but..

Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich will not be part of the ESL

EDIT: Also unsourced, Mourinho sacked.

The Super League thing definitely has something to do with Mourinho's sacking.

Forsher wrote:You can't have sporting competitions that are run commercially. Rugby understands this and so it forces players to play by their rules. Of course, they're helped enormously by the difference in importance of international matches and domestic seasons in rugby vs soccer.

If you want it to be about sport, it has to be bigger than anyone alive at the present moment. If you let the best All Blacks run willy nilly off to whatever foreign clubs, there won't be an All Blacks team to do this in twenty years. Oh, sure, there'd probably still be a team called the All Blacks but they'd be rubbish since the grassroots foundation would've been gutted and ripped out... and the thing that keeps rugby alive in this country (i.e. the fact the All Blacks win) would've gone.

In the US, they've got things that look like sports but they're not. To a European, they lack to the community feel given they're not clubs but franchises and they can (and do) up sticks. To people round here, they lack the international competition which is what it's all really about (well, aside from League... but that has State of Origin, which is much the same thing though I'm not a fan of either code nor Australian so sort of outside looking in). And it's for those reasons that you get no impetus to change things like the draft system that exist to ensure a quality product, i.e. a competitive one, and handwringing about super teams. If you can't provide a quality product, people aren't going to buy the product.

Soccer was built up on sporting terms. Now, I'll be honest, I'm not sure I agree that club mobility is the best system... from the POV of a player, you're going to get moved out the door if the team wins promotion on the logic you're not X division quality (e.g. Chris Wood with Leicester)... but it seemed to work well for about a hundred years (late 1800s to the late 1900s) before colliding with the commercialism of the 1990s to now. That collision works terribly. There's no stability to the product but there's also absolutely no culture of working to ensure competivity and, indeed, a culture of Big Clubs that Win and Everyone Else (see: this thread). And fans are complacent about it because they think that's what relegation and promotion do (they don't do anything to create competition... they just give incentives for teams to always struggle... at least until things are mathematical, which ironically makes the ends of seasons the least interesting time barring flukes). In reality, though, promotion and relegation just reward the clubs that stay up.

The solution at this point is probably to pit the Leagues against each other, with each League holding player contracts and the clubs within the Leagues being given the players. And similarly to involve salary caps. It'd still get funky with promotion and relegation, but you'd get promoted teams getting the top players the League's newly acquired... so if an established team wanted those players, they'd need to swap them with the promoted clubs.

Academies would also be screwball since the Rich Clubs have, generally, more attractive academies. However, youth football needs closer regulation anyway.

And from the POV of the Broadcasters, they'd just need to invest money in making players more popular than clubs. This is probably something they want to do anyway, since a lot of people can't be arsed watching a match, but they'd love however many minutes of Player X's highlights (e.g. 33 times X made it look like the defender wasn't there).

Owners can be happy by taking ownership stakes in the Leagues (giving them secure and, hopefully increasing, revenues)... which leaves the clubs able to be owned by the fans. So, fans would probably be happy.

There'd be tension but in principle the owners are incentivised to make sure the clubs in their League are the best since that makes their League the better product which means their League gets more money from broadcasters...

The game would, of course, be unrecognisable.