'All About' The Super League Project
It all started with that announcement, made on April 18th 2021: “Twelve Europe’s leading football clubs have today come together to announce they have agreed to establish a new mid-week competition, the Super League, governed by its Founding Clubs.” The press release had a thunderous effect as the creation of this competition came shortly after the Champions League reform.
A closed league, composed of 20 clubs: 15 founding clubs and a qualifying mechanism for a further five teams to qualify annually based on achievements in the prior season.
Why the creation of a new competition?
As written in the official statement “the global pandemic has accelerated the instability in the existing European football economic model” and this new tournament was “a solution to provide significantly greater economic growth and support for European football via a long-term commitment to uncapped solidarity payments which will grow in line with league revenues.”
Capitalism and globalisation, as expressed in The Sydney Morning Herald: “there are millions of fans across the world - in markets like the United States, the Middle East and Asia - who spend their discretionary income on these clubs, not the teams who play in their own country (...) It’s the reality of modern football, and clearly the 12 clubs who have taken this step have done the sums and believe there will be more than enough people to support this for it to be viable, despite the outcry.”
Why The Super League is happening, and why it’s bad for football
How much revenue are we talking about?
Figures were astonishing! Supported by the U.S.-based investment bank JPMorgan Chase, clubs would have earned 350 million euros simply for signing up, with an expected long term revenue of 3.5 billion euros 23 seasons after. By comparison, German club Bayern Munich received only 130 million euros for winning last year’s Champions League, noted The Washington post. “The Super League’s financial projections were staggering and were at the heart of the breakaway league.”
What is the Super League, and how would it change European soccer?
One of the biggest incentives was the potential television distribution deal and "the large sums of money that comes with it," said Lee Igel, a professor at the NYU Tisch Institute for Global Sport at CNN. "It's really just about how much these clubs feel could be earned if this competition existed,”, and "that's based on what the revenue structures are, both in terms of current television deals and the set up of the competitions themselves." Indeed, the rise of broadcast rights and the recent deals have shown that the creation of a new competition could have led to very lucrative contracts with broadcasters.
Why now for European football's Super League? Mega TV deals
The Collapse
In less than a week, The Super League Project fell apart. Criticism after criticism, coupled with threats of sanctions from governing bodies, clubs withdrew one by one until only three were left. And this highway to hell, very well depicted by The New York Times, started with the highest authorities :
“If some elect to go their own way, then they must live with the consequences of their choice, they are responsible for their choice,” Infantino said “Concretely this means, either you are in, or you are out.”
“Some will say it is greed, others disdain, arrogance, flippancy or complete ignorance of England’s football culture. It does not matter. What does matter is that there is still time to change your mind. Everyone makes mistakes.” declared Ceferin
Within hours, the project’s demise started to snowball. The leagues, the players, politicians and fans, especially at Chelsea’s home stadium, to protest the plan before the team’s game with Brighton. The Super League lost its entire foothold in England first, before seeing other clubs announcing their departure too.
How the Super League Fell Apart
‘It was like shouting into a hurricane’ wrote The Guardian. The Super League was built on four pillars – great teams, incredible financing, a huge market for a new project, and a regulatory framework that would survive a challenge. But by Tuesday he believed two pillars were wobbling – the teams, with Chelsea and Manchester City looking for a way out, and the market, with Amazon, Sky, Comcast and BT all saying they were not interested in a TV deal.
‘It was like shouting into a hurricane’: how the Super League crashed
Last but not least, what wound up sinking the Super League was soccer’s roots. The Wall Street Journal wrote “The Super League had the potential to profoundly alter professional soccer, shutting off lesser clubs and stripping away the remote but essential quality of competitive chance. Soccer had long been overtaken by billionaires and oligarchs who’d choked the sport through unlimited spending, but part of what made an imperfect event like the Champions League work was that every team still had to earn its place, and every team could technically qualify.”
The Super League Is Dead. Here’s What Sport Learned.
It also demonstrated the power of fans. “They universally came out against the proposal. They put impossible pressure on the owners who were trying to sacrifice tradition in favor of the bottom line.”
“The collapse of the Super League was a collapse of the cynicism that has made fans feel helpless against poor management, owners who won’t televise games to hold out for better deals and refuse to invest in their products. After fans organized united, they proved that maybe fans are more powerful than hundreds of millions in guaranteed television deals. Maybe sports do belong to fans after all.” added Joe Levin in The Religion of Sport.
How The Super League Showed Us the Hidden Power of Fans
Going further more
Business Model Failure
“It was inevitable that professional sports, robbed of so much of their traditional match revenues by the Covid-19 virus, would look to new business models to retain their relevance and restore some semblance of viable cash-flows.” wrote Bill Fischer.
“Business models, and almost every other type of innovative activity, these days, succeed by being explicitly and determinedly, outside-in. Instead, almost everything about the Super League business model is explicitly inside-out.” Bill Fisher underlined the lack of leadership and the non-involvement of fans which were supposed to be the final ‘consumers’. This Project was inside-out from all the angles, should it be regarding the announcement or the delivery.
Moreover, the value proposition was not articulated in the customer’s voice and did not match any segments in mind, if not making the owners even richer. “Good business models create a life-long love affair with the experience provided” and the architect of the Super League never saw it.
Europe’s Super Football League: Business Model Failure, Leadership Debacle
A changing landscape: the attention economy
The Wired raised another topic, much more implemented in our daily lives and that makes the industry changing: the Attention Economy.
“The process is simple,'' they said. “Figure out what people are watching, give them more of it, sell advertising against it, repeat. It’s helped the likes of Facebook grow into behemoths, trampling entire industries in the process, and now it’s changing football. (...) For younger fans in particular, football has become something that’s consumed almost entirely through social media and the modern matchday experience goes like this: turn on goal alerts, type the scorer’s name into a Twitter video search, watch a grainy clip with Arabic commentary, carry on with the rest of your day.”
“With instant access to the biggest moments, they save their actual live football viewing only for the biggest games, which naturally garner the highest viewing figures. The ESL is going after these “fans of the future” to provide more of what they think they want: more games between the biggest clubs in football to capture more attention and sell more advertising.”
And we are coming back to the main point, already depicted in the beginning of this paper: “Outrageous television rights deals have modernised football”, new type of owners entered the football world with one goal: win trophies not for the innate satisfaction, but for the marketing boost you’ll enjoy” A beautiful formulation that illustrates the transformation of football into an entertainment commodity. This is sports as content, not competition.
The Super League is the grim end game of the attention economy
Today’s situation
On Friday, May 7th, 9 clubs accepted UEFA’s “reintegration measures” that notably comprises a donation totalling an aggregate of €15 million, to be used for the benefit of children, youth and grassroots football in local communities across Europe, including the UK, and a withholding of 5% of the revenues they would have received from UEFA club competitions for one season, which will be redistributed.
UEFA approves reintegration measures for nine clubs involved in the so-called 'Super League'
One day after, the 3 remaining clubs answered with a joint statement, expressing their willingness to pursue their quest of creating this new competition and “to discuss, with respect and without intolerable pressure and in accordance with the rule of law, the most appropriate solutions for the sustainability of the whole football family.”
https://www.juventus.com/en/news/articles/statement-from-barcelona-juve-and-real
What is next ?
After listing what leads the European Football in this situation (crystallisation of sporting results, media landscape evolution, Attention Economy, financial crises/difficulties, limited control of the governance etc.) KPMG listed a bunch of potential solutions and reforms to adopt in order to move things forward: reforming the financial fair play regulation system with more cost control regarding players but also staffs; reforming the calendar and synchronising as much as we can domestic leagues and international breaks; taking more into consideration the players and the rest period to promote enhanced performance; reforming the governance and how decisions are made: top clubs bear the financial risk of their operation and investments but may have relatively limited say on the distribution of their revenues and finally reforming smaller markets.
“Since the 2015/16 season, the top 10 clubs by operating revenues generated higher income in every year than all the non-big five European first division leagues combined (approximately 600 clubs). In the last 20-years, only three clubs (out of 80) playing outside of the Big-5 leagues, reached the semifinal of the UCL, with only one of those winning it in 2004: FC Porto.” KPMG wrote.
Football’s governing bodies, associations and clubs really have to rebuild trust and start negotiating vital reforms. Unprecedented flexibility, wisdom, responsibility and cooperation from all parties at all levels is needed. There is no other way concluded KPMG
What is next? – Football after Super League turmoil
Interviewed in SportBusiness, Uefa’s former head of governance Alex Phillips is also giving some elements and proposals to be further investigated. “It is time for a global package of measures to overhaul European Football and it should include the following ones”:
A cap on the number of professional player contracts any club can have: “The precise number should be the result of detailed analysis and consultation and this would stop the current arms race which stockpiles the world’s best young players in a few big clubs.”
Performance-related contracts for players: “football needs a standard player contract that foresees player salary increases or decreases broadly in line with forecast revenue changes.”
A true league and a true cup for European club competitions: “Currently in Europe it’s a fudge. What we have now is a hybrid: a tournament format but run over a season – a mini-league followed by knockout.”
Regionalise club competitions, with a new level of club competition between national and European: “When Red Star Belgrade were European champions in 1991, the former Yugoslav and USSR championships were extremely strong – but they are now 22 separate national championships. The clubs there cannot compete with the biggest Western European clubs”
Structure national team competitions on football not politics: “Football politics – as opposed to sport or business – still determines competition structures, especially in national team football”
Focus seriously on women’s football: “Whether your goal is to increase participation or to make money (or both), women are half the world population and by far the biggest future market open to football”
Improve player and coach behaviour: “Federations have always had the tools to change player and coach behaviour: refereeing and disciplinary rules.”
Reform governance structures: “The major federations need to be broken up into separate organisations responsible for their main activities: judicial/regulatory, competitions, development and marketing. A real separation of powers.”
Scrap bidding for major events: “Bidding is a relic from the pre-TV era when federations needed to find hosts who would cover the event costs – yet it is retained because it is good for politics.”
Redefine football development: “The individual clubs and leagues are each doing their own thing. It’s a Wild West (and East). There needs to be a co-ordinated approach, and the clubs closely involved to oversee players that play in the World Cups and the Euros that generate the money.
Re-educate the breakaway owners: “Whoever happens to own, or be president of, those 12 clubs today has huge revenues, but not thanks to their business acumen – it’s thanks to over a century of passion, investment, talent and hard work of previous generations of players, fans, owners, managers and others.”
Breakaway ESL owners ‘need to be re-educated’ says Uefa’s former head of governance Phillips
And it seems that UEFA is already taking the bull by the horns. They have announced on May 21st “the launch of a landmark consultation process to unite European football stakeholders and strengthen the future of the game for the benefit of all.” explaining that “over the next months, the Convention on the Future of European Football (‘the Convention’) will bring together representatives of national football associations, leagues, clubs, players, coaches, fans and agents to discuss long-term policy and governance reforms. UEFA intends to lay the foundations for European football’s sustainable and inclusive recovery and future together with its major stakeholders.”
UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin said: “Now more than ever people across Europe expect action and solidarity in the interest of all of football in all of Europe, and that is what we will focus on delivering.”