Has enough time passed to talk about a fair and competitive European Super League model yet?
Reports a few months ago of a proposed closed-shop European Super League was met with almost universal disdain from fans of football worldwide. As a fan of many sports, the thing I admire about football (outside of the sport itself on the pitch) is the pyramid league structure that most countries operate with, where good performance is rewarded by promotion, and poor performance is punished by relegation.
This adds a huge degree of competitive tension to many matches and allows teams to find their natural competitive level against teams of similar ability. Give me a tight match against two mediocre teams any day over a 5-0 thrashing between a giant and a lesser credentialled opponent.
The proposed European model lost this pyramid structure and reward for good performance, as the top teams in Europe were protected from missing out on the Champions League if they perform poorly in the previous season’s domestic league, and likewise a lesser team (such as Leicester City or Sevilla) would no longer be rewarded for unexpectedly good league results in the same season.
However, this does not mean the current model in European football and the domestic leagues that underpin them are at their optimised best currently. Bayern Munich, Paris Saint Germain and Juventus have a near mortgage of the domestic league title each season (although it must be noted only one of these teams did indeed win the title in the past season, which was good to see), which renders those leagues pretty boring and non-competitive for many fans.
(Photo by Aurelien Meunier – PSG/PSG via Getty Images)
La Liga only fairs a tiny bit better with its three-horse race. The Premier League is in an okay position when it comes to competitive tension. Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs and maybe Leicester can jostle over every second Premier League title, with Manchester City looking likely to win every second year themselves moving forward (or worse).
In Scotland, it is Celtic, Rangers or bust, and in Portugal there are three genuine contenders in Benfica, FC Porto and Sporting Lisbon only. Is this predictability what fans want out of their football leagues? I don’t.
The Champions League in the current format fairs little better on a competitive-tension front. The matches from the round of 16 onwards are of course excellent, but the group stages are mostly forgettable. In any given season, even the round of 16 ties usually features one or two total mismatches. The lack of interest in the Champions League group stages is what led to the 12 big clubs going rogue with their proposal in the first place.
So hopefully people have calmed down regarding the model proposed a few months ago (I’m going to call it ESL 1.0 henceforth) and are ready to discuss a more fair and equitable way of developing a Super League across Europe (I’m going to call this ESL 2.0 henceforth).
Proposal overview
ESL 1.0 proposed that teams would compete in their domestic league as they had always done, as well as a closed-shop European League. In ESL 2.0, I propose that teams compete in either their domestic league, or a European league, but not both.
To do that, three divisions of European football (with 20 teams each) would sit above the domestic leagues in the pyramid across Europe. Promotion and relegation would exist between all three, with teams relegated from Europe division 3 returning to their domestic league each season. The champions and runners-up of all domestic leagues would then play-off at the start of each season for promotion into Europe division 3.
Europe division 1 – possible teams at first
Bayern Munich
Real Madrid
Manchester City
FC Barcelona
Juventus
Atletico Madrid
Manchester United
PSG
Liverpool
Arsenal
Chelsea
Sevilla
AS Roma
Borussia Dortmund
Tottenham Hotspur
FC Porto
AFC Ajax
Shakhtar Donetsk
Lyon
Napoli
(Photo by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images)
How are champions crowned? The top four playoff after a full home-and-away season. One versus four, two versus three over two legs, then a final at a neutral venue.
How are teams relegated? Three teams are automatically relegated to Europe division 2 each season.
Europe division 2 – possible teams at first
RB Leipzig
Villareal
FC Salzburg
Benfica
Bayer Leverkusen
Inter Milan
Atalanta
Zenit
Basel
Besiktas
Dynamo Kyiv
Sporting Lisbon
Dinamo Zagreb
Lazio
Slavia Prague
FC Copenhagen
Olympiacos
CSKA Moscow
Valencia
AS Monaco
How are champions crowned? First past the post.
How are teams promoted? The top two teams are promoted automatically to Europe division 1 each season.
Teams finishing third to sixth playoff for the final division 1 promotion slot, in the same format as the English Championship.
How are teams relegated? Three teams are automatically relegated to Europe division 3 each season.
Europe division 3 – possible teams at first
Club Brugge
BSC Young Boys
SC Braga
Schalke 04
Krasnodar
Celtic
Viktoria Plzen
Borussia Monchengladbach
Eintracht Frankfurt
FK Crvena Zvezda
Leicester City
Rangers
AC Milan
Lokomotiv Moskva
Genk
PSV Eindhoven
Marseille
Ludogorets 1945
APOEL FC
Instanbul Basaksehir
(Photo: Paul Ellis/Getty Images)
How are champions crowned? First past the post.
How are teams promoted? The top two teams are promoted automatically to Europe division 2. Teams finishing third to sixth playoff for the final Europe division 2 promotion slot, in the same format as the English Championship.
How are teams relegated? Ten teams get relegated from Europe division 3 automatically each season. They are replaced by ten teams from various domestic leagues that win through a European playoff system.
This means that in Europe division 3, only four teams in the middle of the table will neither be up for promotion to Europe division 2 nor relegated to their domestic league. They are safe in mid-table mediocrity for another season. Expect Everton to occupy one of these positions with clockwork regularity in coming years.
Domestic leagues
Below this 60-team Europe league sit all the domestic leagues across Europe. An example of what the English domestic league might look like is as follows:
Wolves
Burnley
Everton
Southampton
West Ham
Leeds United
Aston Villa
Newcastle United
Crystal Palace
Brighton and Hove Albion
Fulham
West Bromwich Albion
Sheffield United
Norwich City
Watford
Brentford
Swansea City
Barnsley
Bournemouth
Reading
(Photo by Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)
I don’t know about you, but that looks like a pretty competitive league to me as compared to what exists now with six contenders and 14 pretenders.
The increase in competitive tension would be more evident in France, Germany and Italy as PSG, Bayern Munich and Juventus vacate their position in their respective domestic leagues for a place in Europe division 1.
Each season would commence with an all-of-Europe playoff series featuring the champions and runners-up of each domestic league fighting it out for one of the ten slots in Europe division 3.
Domestic cup competitions
All teams would continue to compete in their domestic cup competitions regardless of whether their league participation is domestic or European in each season. This would increase the ability for fans to travel to away games against fellow domestic opponents, which would be lost a tad in this proposal.
Europe is however a reasonably small continent with international travel for away matches well established.
European league matches would be played on weekends instead of midweek as per the Champions League currently, so some away fans could indeed make a weekend of it if they so desired.
League cups could change from a straight knockout format to allow for a couple of extra guaranteed domestic match-ups each season.
(Danilo Di Giovanni/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)
Easing of fixture congestion
As teams would compete in either a European league or a domestic league, but not both, the fixture calendar would be eased somewhat for teams, which is something that coaches like Jurgen Klopp have been calling for every season.
Teams that regularly compete in Europe would play anywhere from six to 12 less games a season by my calculations.
TV rights payments back to domestic FA organisations
Of course, one stakeholder likely to prevent any such move are the respective governing bodies of each country. Were the big six to vacate the English Premier League, the value of the TV rights of that competition would drop significantly. The possible solution to the likely resistance of ESL 2.0? Money of course.
UEFA should make payments back to all domestic FAs according to players represented in the three European Super League divisions. Across the three divisions, there will be 60 teams.
Each of those 60 teams will need to monitor the match minutes of their squad (which they do for sports science and performance reasons anyway) and provide a list to UEFA of the top 20 players used in each squad each season.
For each of those players, a fee would be paid to each player’s domestic FA according to their nationality (which of course in the case of Lionel Messi would result in a payment back to the Argentinian FA. Likewise Sergio Aguero and other South American players).
(Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)
Sixty teams, 20 players per team, 120 payments in total. Make these payments commensurate with a percentage of the TV rights deals attached to ESL 2.0, and all of a sudden you have domestic leagues being adequately rewarded for developing players of sufficient ability to play in one of the top 60 club teams in Europe.
It could of course be 25 or 30 payments per team, or different payment amounts for each European division. I’ll leave it to the accountants to work out the finer details.
An end to the ridiculous wages paid to players
Of course, players would be playing less matches per season, so they would reasonably need to be paid less than the astronomical wages currently floating around Europe. It is high time something is done about this before the bubble bursts.
As much as I love the sport, I resent people getting paid so much money to kick a football around, acknowledging the pressure involved in playing at such a high level.
According to this model, players wages would likely still be significantly higher than most other sports, but lower than they are now. They will play less games, which will allow them to better manage injuries and have a life outside of football, so let’s not let this be a barrier to ESL 2.0.
Conclusion
This model would be a significant step forward in the competitive tension across football in Europe. No more would we have to sit through Manchester City thrashing Burnley 5-0 what seems like every season, with instead every team finding their natural place in the overall pecking order.
Man City would play a 38-game season against the might of Real Madrid and PSG and co, while Burnley would fight it out with the likes of Wolves, Everton and West Ham for the right to enter a European division 3 playoff series, and if successful, start their quest in Europe competition from the foot of the pyramid, to the top if they are good enough.
The big clubs in Europe have in many cases transcended their domestic leagues, and it is time for them to play more regularly against their own kind. The relatively small size of Europe allows for this kind of weekly competition.
Every team in Europe would be rewarded for good performances, and punished for poor performances, which is the cornerstone to the football structure the world over (barring a couple of exceptions of course).
This proposal won’t happen because ESL 1.0 was solely about a money grab from big clubs with no regard for competitive tension and respecting football’s pyramid structure, but don’t let anyone fool you into believing that the current model is the most competitive, interesting and fairest way to structure football in Europe.
Yes, ESL 2.0 throws the tradition of domestic leagues out the window a little bit, but in life, all that is certain is death, taxes and change.
Blood Dragon
Roar Rookie
You cant stop change that's for sure, the way I look at the ESL defeat is the Boomers won the battle but they will lose the war in the end
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
Indeed. Current attitudes of fans are well documented in the replies here I don't doubt them to be correct as they stand now. But things do change over time. It wasn't that long ago women couldn't vote. Gay marriage was inconceivable not that long ago. Not to draw too long a bow, but my point is, attitudes do change over time in all facets of life. Travel will become quicker and cheaper. Someday, one day, fans will be more accepting of an ESL and the criticisms given in this forum won't resonate quite as much with the next generation of fans. You cannot stop change and progress.
Remote
Guest
Spot on Waz Whilst I appreciate the work put in by such contributors as Jordan, it is impossible to comprehend the fan mentality involved in the “get football” mentality countries, living in Australia. I was brought up on it and the characteristics of sport here, just don’t resonate in countries with a historical football culture and that has included football and the people involved in it in Australia in my experience. A Super League may or may not occur one day, but if it does the thinking in traditional football countries will have to change dramatically. At this stage at fan level, there are no signs of it. Otherwise if this had changed the English football pyramid etc would not exist, Scunthorpe et al would have disappeared and their fans defected to ManU or Liverpool. Anybody wanting to research this, just check into a pub in Scunthorpe, Plymouth or Sheffield and find out just how community orientated support of their local football team(s)is.
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
Such a proposal would devalue EPL and increase the value of ESL. Rights in Aus as an example were $73million for the EPL, $12million for UCL. So perhaps these figures flip around and clubs just make their money via a different stream. ESL more so than EPL. Individual clubs own the EPL only for the duration they participate in it anyways. The fines they have agreed to pay for joining an ESL in the future are petty cash to them if I recall? A 20-team competition featuring the best teams in the world played on weekends is likely to generate unprecendented interest from TV broadcasters. Could "big" clubs make more money competing ONLY in this competition compared to BOTH domestically and in Europe as they currently do? That part is certainly debateable.
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
Division 1 could easily be first passed the post, that is a simple fix. The list is based on current UEFA club coefficents. As stated in the article, the previous attempt at an ESL was based solely on greed and money. I don't doubt there are financial implications to any change such as what is proposed. The intent of the article is to develop a model where competitive tension is optimised. What we have currently is not that most people will agree, super clubs have transcended their leagues and the whole set up has become mostly predictable. The intent of this article is very much highlighted in the title. "Fair" and "competitive". So perhaps on a spectrum of greed/money vs. Competition you have the original proposal on one extreme (greed/money), and mine on the other (competition). The model that exists now is somewhere in the middle but skewed towards the greed/money end. Changes should be made to shift the European club football model back towards "competition". Perhaps not to the extreme I have proposed, but somewhere towards it. Imagine another 20-30 years of european haves and have nots? Sure the football played by the big teams will be undoubtedly great, but my viewing attention will shift towards leagues with a great level of competitive tension and equality personally. Others wìll be different. The current model is not sustainable imo.
Blood Dragon
Roar Rookie
One thing I noticed is the old farts on here are assuming that you think the ESL is going back on the table right away but what I think is that once the Boomers die off and Gen X are super old moves will be made at another attempt at a ESL again this is a long term game and the ESL or whatever the next attempts are called will win out in the end because as you said good old capitalism and globalization
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
If the Glaziers are compelled to eventually sell due to fan unrest, it will be for a price that demands the team continue to bring in funding from outside of the country via TV and merch sales. Global brand levels of revenue to put it another way. Nobody could afford them otherwise. The horse has bolt on the globalised nature of those teams, or better or worse.
Waz
Roar Rookie
“ The thing with a Manchester United or a Liverpool is they are now a global brand, achieved via being a massive TV product” That’s precisely the thinking that drove the Glaziers. And look how it worked out. That statement is only true IF they can keep the home fans on side, which they didn’t. No one wants to watch Man Utd play in front of a half empty stadium every week.
Sam Drew
Roar Guru
The concept failed (rightfully so) because the fans didn't want it. Simply introducing a pyramid structure to pan-continental leagues would still illicit such a response. If a club reaches the UCL final, they'll play seven games away from home, and is usually much less. This involves costly travel, hotels, time off work, etc. With this league, you're travelling around Europe more than 15 times a season, and it's simply not sustainable for fans. And your point about play-offs to decide the ultimate winner, after a league campaign, is anaemic to such values, and a very 'American' concept in the aftermath of protests that focused on the American nature of the Super League. Who and how would you decide which teams make up the three tiers? Why should Tottenham (my team), go in ahead of Red Star Belgrade, Feyenoord or PSV, all previous European Cup winners? Or ahead of Portuguese champions Sporting, or Russian league winners Zenit?
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
It would be better if the bubble burst on wages and bought all the big clubs back into line with their less rich domestic opponents. So that any given domestic league had 10-12 genuine contenders in a given year. That would be the dream scenario but its less likely than an ESL unfortunately. Good old capitalism and globalisation...
Winter A League is Awesome
Roar Rookie
There wouldn’t have been much ESL football happening since covid. I doubt the domestic leagues would be keen on letting them back in if they already signed up for ESL. Away fans would be non existent and not many have the time or money to travel fortnightly between countries. Derby crowds wouldnt exist. It would be a sport based on streaming rather than live attendances. Without the fans, the games seem like training games. Without the passion of the fans, I doubt players salaries would keep going up. I am not opposed to a ESL but the domestic/ESL model would be more plausible for fans but didn’t work out so well.
Chopper
Roar Rookie
I cannot see a European Super League without the EPL and the clubs have voted to stop any future attempt at an ESL 2.0 principally because they are concerned at the loss of TV revenue to the EPL. Secondly I agree that Germany may also be a hard nut to crack as the fans control the clubs.
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
The thing with a Manchester United or a Liverpool is they are now a global brand, achieved via being a massive TV product. On any home match United can get 74,000 in to Old Trafford. An excellent crowd, but compare that to the millions that might be watching on TV all around the world. In-crowd attendances, while important, are a drop in the ocean of the overall fanbase when combined with the TV audience. It is as you say an experience for those fans lucky enough to be able to attend in person, but they are now a minority of the fanbase in 2021. Covid-19 and no in-person attendance for a period has exacerbated this further as well I guess. There might be 6 or 10 "big" English teams that no longer compete week in week out in an English competition according to this model, but for the vast majority of the teams that exist in the English footballing pyramid, the status quo would be maintained. That is, play limited solely to English opponents. For those in Europe division 1, they would play 19 home matches against English and overseas opponents. Assuming all of the "big six" compete in Europe div 1, a Liverpool supporter for instance would then have 5 matches away in England against English opponents. Then another two+ matches in the League Cup and FA Cup at a minimum. Maybe more. So this model does impact Eng v Eng or Spain v Spain match ups, but not all that much when taken in the context of the entire footballing pyramid that exists in England. Of course those teams in a Europe div 2 or div 3 with minimal other teams from their own country would be resigned to away matches mostly outside of their own it must be said. Perhaps two divisions at first only so more sit in the English domestic league.
Blood Dragon
Roar Rookie
that's good to hear also I should note I'm not for the ESL but rather I think its gonna happen and that fighting it is only delaying the inventible
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
These are pretty much listed in order of club coefficient. I believe Belgium and Netherlands coming is moving forward.
Waz
Roar Rookie
The fans hated the idea of a European Super League and their reaction, I think, took the owners by surprise. Attacks on Anfield and Old Trafford and the hatred demonstrated towards club owners and management was palpable and real. Football exists for the players, and professional football exists because of the fans. Any equation that doesn’t consider the fans, which this article doesn’t, is doomed to failure. There are certain countries that are football nations, they just “get football” and there are other countries that don’t get it and constantly want to tweak things - these are countries like Australia (and America) where the generic sports fan is dominant - flipping between codes at a whim but never really immersing themselves in any one code long enough to truely “get it”. To these people, Clubs are not clubs but franchises within a TV product to be moved around from city to city or competition to competition like some extra in ‘The Truman Show’. And if Europe becomes more Americanised/Australianised then an ESL will happen, but if Europe stays close to its sporting roots then not only will it not happen, it can’t happen. The jigsaw that forms the fans resistance to the ESL is quite a rich picture and complex, steeped in the histories and rivalries that date back to peoples great grand parents and in many cases have more to do with local culture than sporting culture. That’s not easy to change - the resistance to a future ESL is being taught to a five year old on grandads knee today … hard to fight that. A Man Utd fan would prefer an away day trip to Norwich or Leeds or Leicester than to watch them on TV away at Madrid or Roma …. football for many is an experience not a tv show, the owner's didn’t get that and badly misjudged things. Surprisingly the British Government did get it and stated openly that they would block any future attempt at a super league - they can change their minds of course, but that certainly emboldened the opponents. The ESL is dead and cannot work as people think.
Blood Dragon
Roar Rookie
I think your 3 divisions and Pro/Rel is a good Idea but I think the teams should be the Top 60 by UEFA Club Coefficient as I think that would be the fairest way to do it for the 1st season, i think the Germans will be the most ressistant because most clubs are majority member owned but in some clubs fans members don't have that much power for example a lot of Bayern Members were unhappy with Qatar Airways being a sponsor and on the shirt but its still there There was talk about the Dutch and Belgians forming a combined top flight a while ago
Jordan Sports Fan
Roar Rookie
My thoughts precisely in writing this. It is coming one day nobody should be in any doubt. Perhap it takes another 10 years of predictable league results, but you can't stop progress. We can only hope that when the eventual model comes in, it gives some kind of opportunity for the "have nots" of European club football.
Blood Dragon
Roar Rookie
a ESL will happen eveuntally its a matter of When not if and while football fans hate change more then someone on the spectrum money talks at the end of the day