Could the Super League have worked?
Written by Jack Rigby
If you didn’t already know, the European super league was the idea proposed by Florentino Perez in April earlier this year, and in this episode I will be talking about how it could have worked and any changes or tweaks I would have made.
First of all, I don’t think that the Super League was all bad. It would be great to see European giants like Chelsea and Real Madrid clash regularly. The main problem is the way that it was presented as well as the possibility of clubs being franchised.
If you don’t know what franchising is, it is where football clubs or teams are moved and uprooted from their current area and placed in a new one. Think the NFL in America. For all we know, we could have had Chelsea based in Dubai in a couple of years down the line.
If you don’t know what franchising is, it is where football clubs or teams are moved and uprooted from their current area and placed in a new one. Think the NFL in America. For all we know, we could have had Chelsea based in Dubai in a couple of years down the line.
Remove that, and the idea sounds feasible. You wouldn’t be pulling out of the Premier League, only the Champions League and it would mean that the biggest clubs would get to play each other on a regular basis.
And by big clubs, I mean well supported ones. In my eyes, success in one moment means nothing. If you build a big support base, then you will truly be set to succeed in the future. A game between Arsenal and Barcelona has more meaning than Leicester against Barcelona. There is the history, the passionate fans and so forth. And of course, they want to secure these big clubs by having no promotion or relegation for them. They would be there indefinitely so that those big games were still happening.
People saw this as a cash grab from the clubs, but the thing is that they are big clubs, and with big clubs comes large sums of money.
The other side to this coin though, is that smaller clubs would struggle without the larger clubs. If say Chelsea played Ludogorets in the champions league, then that would generate a large sum of money for Ludogorets, which they have become reliant on. Without the traditional big teams of Europe, the Champions League would become far less lucrative for them and some may potentially go bankrupt.
The Super League seems to have gotten a large amount of bad press from the media recently, but there was an argument for the Super League. What do you think?
