European Super League? - Pass me the Sick Bag
Ever wonder what happened to the European Super League? Well, it didn't go away...
Yes, it’s back! About as welcome and inevitable as a pool of vomit on the last train home, the mysterious A22 (a sports management company, apparently) spent this week retching up their new plans for a European Super League, complete with early 1990s Netscape webpage knocked up on a Commodore64. Except this time they’ve hit upon a cunning ruse, and it’s not actually the European Super League at all. No, now it’s the “Unify League”, which sounds so cuddly and friendly that I’m sure everything’s going to be ok.
You can picture the marketing meeting that came up with the name – “at a time of global conflict and division, let football be a force for unity and healing”. I made that bit up, but it’s probably in the press release somewhere. Meanwhile, the utterly vacuous name “Unify” hovers somewhere between last desperate attempt to milk the Avengers franchise, middle-aged inter-faith dating app, and team name dreamt up by the fuckwit lads’ team in the first episode of the Apprentice. In other words, whichever way you look at it, it’s a bit shit.
The good news – good like finding out that you’ve only lost two of your three children in a car accident – is that the most deplorably unacceptable part of the last plan has gone. This time it won’t be a closed shop and teams will have to qualify through their domestic leagues. It’s not clear how exactly (or even how vaguely, for that matter), but, hey, details schmetails. In fact, it looks like they’ve gone from one extreme to another. Instead of 12 pre-selected teams, there’ll be 96 teams that qualify and get put into four leagues. Soon everyone will be in Europe. Except Sunderland obviously.
And this is where it starts getting a bit baffling and, frankly, tin-pot primary school sports day. Those four leagues will be called “Star” (cos they’re shiny, twinkly, and high up - nice), “Gold” (ok, an actual precious thing, but surely better than a star, which let’s face it you can’t actually touch or own), “Blue” (maybe the A22 CEO is a boy band fan?), and “Union” (worryingly socialist, you’d think). The first two leagues will contain 16 teams divided into two 8-team divisions; the second two will consist of 32 teams in four divisions. After the league stage, eight teams will qualify for the knockout rounds of each league, out of which the champions of each league will emerge.
Now the observant among you will have realised that this is basically an excuse to play lots more games of football. And that a great deal depends on the criteria for qualification. Call me a cynic, but presumably the domestic leagues of England, Spain, Italy, and Germany will have places reserved in the top Unify tier, so we’ll just end up with a 16-team Super League by another name.
Mind you, based on past evidence, the qualification criteria are likely to be a) the top four US-owned English teams, b) the top team in La Liga from the capital that’s not called Atlético and c) the top Italian team beginning with the letter “J”.
The “big idea” – with the word “big” doing so much heavy lifting that it’s going to put its back out – is that every match will be available free (with adverts) on the new Unify streaming platform, a similar broadcasting model to that being used with DAZN for the Club World Cup this summer (talking of pointless invented club competitions). And, of course, the clue here is that FIFA only went down that route because no-one wanted to pay up for the rights to a meaningless tournament invented with the sole purpose of generating TV money.
And this is what these people really don’t seem to understand about football. Or about the world as a whole for that matter. Value comes from scarcity. The more widely available something is, the less valuable it is, and this applies particularly to the prestige of sporting tournaments. We don’t need another European competition. We’ve got too many as it is.
I mean I know that UEFA is a vain, corrupt, immoral, self-serving nest of vipers. A bit of competition to make them get their house in order might seem like a good thing. But think about boxing and its baffling proliferation of Mickey Mouse “world titles”. A load of freeloading promoters and hangers-on might be making a mint, but what’s the point in being world champion if 143 other people are too? And if no one even knows who you are? The reality is that we only end up with another nest of vipers. Or fifty-five as the case may be.
Fundamentally, football is not a free market enterprise. You and I don’t get to change our consumption patterns based on the product on offer. We don’t want more choice. A Toblerone is a Toblerone. A Wispa is a Wispa. NUFC is NUFC. I don’t need a novelty flavour of a trusty chocolate standard or a footballing competition (though I might make an exception for a Wispa Gold). And as one of the those hardy souls who attended the Zenith Data Systems against Oldham in 1989, I very much know what I’m talking about.
So let’s clean the sick up off the floor, including the diced carroty bits, stick it in a bin bag and not talk of it again.
Matthew Philpotts
P.S. I hope the poor lass who decorated the floor of the 22.53 to Hexham on Wednesday night got home safely.