For most football fans, the announcement last year that twelve of Europe’s richest clubs planned to set up their own self-selected ‘Super League’ was a step too far by the game’s greediest.
A furious reaction by supporters forced the dirty dozen, led by Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, to quickly back down, a sign that club football is nothing without supporters.
The ESL project died because it was so transparently motivated by greed, was anti-competitive – a league of twelve self-selected clubs with no promotion or relegation is little more than a glorified exhibition – and because, ultimately, most fans value their national league above all other competitions. The ESL was, and still is, a bad idea.
But the protagonists have not gone away. They are now having their days in the European Court of Justice and are mounting a none-too-subtle lobbying campaign.
The ESL argues that the European football governing body UEFA is crushing competition. They also contend that its roles as regulator and operator of Europe’s club competitions should be separated.
The latter argument actually has plenty of merits, provided that neither of these roles is handed to politicians.
For its part, UEFA retorts accurately that the ESL is a classic cartel. The case is set to run for many months.
The ESL’s apologists are now mooting the idea of a specifically EU league. However, it’s not clear whether this would be on top of UEFA’s existing competitions and the national leagues or to replace them.
Again, it’s an idea riddled with flaws.
More games, on top of already packed domestic and international calendars, means more injured players and fan fatigue. Besides, a European club competition that excludes many of the continent’s best teams seems like an exercise in pointlessness.
Rather than create new tournaments that no one wants, the focus should be on giving UEFA’s financial fair play rules some teeth to stop them from being exploited by the richest clubs and on increasing financial solidarity by forcing UEFA and the wealthiest leagues to distribute more cash to clubs further down the pyramid.
Collective sales of TV rights would help with that. However, that is not what ESL stalwarts Real Madrid and Barcelona, who sell their TV rights individually, rather than collectively as La Liga, want to do. Both, incidentally, are heavily in debt after years of financial mismanagement, which perhaps explains their desperation to find another cash cow.
It is telling that most EU governments have made written submissions to the Court opposing the ESL.
They did that because most genuine football fans do not want to scrap a pyramid scheme that needs to be made fairer just so a handful of team owners can rip up club football for a few more million.
Indeed, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the ESL’s advocates, for all their protestations, still don’t understand the beautiful game.
The Roundup
The European Union has “shot itself in the lungs” with ill-considered economic sanctions on Russia, which, unless rolled back, risk destroying the European economy, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said on Friday.
Germany’s energy-intensive industries, hard-hit by record prices and over-dependence on Russian gas, will receive €5 billion worth of subsidies after the EU’s competition authority gave its green light to the scheme.
The proposed new rules on substances of human origin (SoHO) aim to provide donors and patients with a future-proof and harmonised framework for transplants and donations while maintaining some limits on the supply side of these therapies.
The Commission on Friday (15 July) started an infringement procedure against Hungary for its discriminatory fuel price policy and took Budapest to EU court over a law banning LGBTQ content to minors and the closure of an independent radio station.
Germany’s agricultural sector and environmental experts are divided over the European Commission’s proposals to gradually restore farmed peatlands to their natural state, with one saying it will cause arable land losses and the other viewing it as beneficial for food security
Rising energy prices saw the euro tumble to parity with the US dollar in the past days, while concerns over the energy supply forced the EU Commission to significantly revise its growth projections downwards.
EU4Health programme funds were made available for the Ukrainian health system on Friday (15 July), making another “historic step” in EU’s Ukraine’s partnership, EU’s health chief said.
The EU is being urged to take a tougher stance on the political crisis engulfing Tunisia ahead of a referendum in ten days that could entrench the increasingly autocratic regime in one of the Arab spring’s last remaining democracies.
Read the Tech Brief and Agrifood Brief.
Last but not least, check out the season finale of Tweets of the Week.
Look out for…
- Foreign affairs ministers exchange views on the Russian aggression against Ukraine on Monday
- Agriculture and Fisheries Council meeting on Monday
- Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders opens the 6th session of the UNCTAD Intergovernmental Group of Experts on consumer protection law and policy on Monday
Views are the author’s.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/ Alice Taylor]
Source: euractiv.com
