Confusing, I say.

“Florentino Perez has warned that no club can leave the European Super League after signing binding contracts to participate and denied JP Morgan have pulled their backing to fund the competition.

Speaking out yet again after a flurry of clubs withdrew, Perez - who heads the controversial competition - slammed teams for 'manipulating our project' and vowed that the tournament 'still exists' and will go ahead regardless…”

https://mol.im/a/9506633

To those of us whom the soccer bug has not bitten, it seems mystical.

Apparently, the existing deal is that the Euro-soccer equivalent of the Super Bowl is open to everyone to qualify for, somehow. And this gives every fan of every team the (possibly unrealistic) hope that their team would be in and win the Big Game.

The "Super League" took some well-capitalized big name teams and put them permanently into a group (and thus excluding all the others) that would be eligible for the Big Game.

This (understandably) made the excluded groups and their fans hopping mad. And (incomprehensibly) also enraged a lot of the fans of the teams that would have been in the Super League, and thus benefited (I think) from the change.

I bet some SIGforumer who is either/both an intense soccer fan and/or intimately familiar with the Euro-soccer setup will be able explain it. But for me, starting from scratch and trying to figure it out from media reporting, it's like Churchill said (on another topic, of course) - "It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."

it is confusing and I follow it some. needless to say -- soccer is beyond huge in Europe.

countries have several levels of professional soccer. think about American lower levels of baseball -- and imagine 40,000 people showing up to see the Tupelo Penguins (imaginary team ) play baseball every week. the hometown fanaticism in many cases is legendary.

one cool thing about it is the process of promotion and relegation. in a league -- based on the final win / loss / tie record -- the bottom 3 or so teams drop a league down ... and the top 2 or three teams bump UP a level. that's a pretty cool feature and adds a ton of drama. again -- imagine the Tupelo Penguins getting bumped up to the 'bigs' and playing the Red Sox, Yankees, and Oakland As...

the Super League was supposed to incorporate 20 or so team berths from across the major countries : France, Spain, England, Germany, etc. there were supposed to be like 10 or 12 PERMANENT / founding members and the rest would 'earn' spots into the league based on performance.

in concept it sounds cool but the execution of the roll out was abysmal. and the backlash has been incredible.

the main thing driving the train ?? as you can imagine : $$$

the respective leagues were leaving a lot of money on the table. a couple American billionaires were involved trying to get it launched...

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Best analogy explanation for how this 'super league' structure was to work was this:

NCAA college basketball has its annual playoff tournament to determine its champion: 64-teams are selected based upon their season record than put into regions, brackets and over a month of games a champion is declared. Instead, this 'super league' would have teams like Duke, N.Carolina, Kentucky, Kansas, UCLA, Syracuse, Indiana and a handful of other blue blood programs decide, instead of playing towards the annual tournament, they'll have their own yearly tournament. All members of this 'super league' gets to play, records and standings don't matter, they're in; revenue and earnings are guaranteed for all members.

If there's one thing about Euro soccer that they get right over US sports, is relegation. Revenue sharing and the salary cap allows teams and their owners to continue to milk the welfare system, not field competitive teams or, making any effort (Baltimore Orioles, Oakland Raiders, etc) to be competitive. Fans of these teams blindly root for these teams and ownership/management continue to receive checks without any fear of getting removed to a lesser league; Mark Davis is happy just to sit in the same room as a Stan Kronke or, David Tepper. Some of these fans and communities are so blind, they'll vote to use tax money to build new arenas for these teams, even though they aren't competitive.

WSJ article here:

The U.S. Sports Origins of Europe’s Soccer Super League

Four of the 12 rebel clubs are owned by Americans. But the influence of stateside sports models has been around much longer.

For as long as the English Premier League has existed, its most powerful owners have watched the NFL. The founders, self-made British businessmen, had seen it firsthand by traveling to the U.S. and loved it all: the glitz, the lavish television contracts, the lionized dynasties. By the time they founded the Premier League in 1992, they had a clear picture of how to make money from modern sports.

Nearly three decades later, the owners of Europe’s most storied soccer clubs—no longer just domestic business magnates, but rather global billionaires—are taking that vision to its logical extreme.

By unveiling a new Super League on Sunday, 12 teams—six from England, three from Spain, and three from Italy—hope to create the closest thing soccer has ever known to an elite, money-spinning, made-for-television competition. And they’re doing it by borrowing the single greatest advantage of membership in any American sports league: Once you’re in, you’re in forever.

The idea is that 12 of the richest clubs in the sport can make themselves even richer because they know they won’t be going anywhere. For them, there would be no relegation from the Super League and no need to requalify every spring, as they currently do for the Champions League. The teams would be set, the profits would be guaranteed over several years, and the odd crummy season wouldn’t matter. The Super League could have its own New York Jets and that club would still make money.

The cost, as fans around Europe have cried this week, is a split with the history and authenticity they value most about soccer culture.

“It’s pretty appalling watching 150 years of English football history singing up an Americanized, franchised model,” said Tim Payton, a board member of the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust.

Foreign investors first began flooding into European soccer in the mid-2000s, attracted to the relatively low prices of clubs and the rapidly growing value of television rights and player trading—plus the prestige of running some of the most popular sports outfits on the planet. Over the next 15 years, they became such desirable properties that today only three of the 20 Premier League clubs are majority-owned by British backers.
Manchester United owners Avi Glazer, left, and Joel Glazer at Old Trafford in 2015.
Photo: Jon Super/Associated Press

In the Super League, four of the 12 founding clubs of the Super League are American-owned—Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United and AC Milan—but their influence amounts to far more than a third of the project. United, owned by the same family behind the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is one of the key drivers of the conversation and has been prodding other members of the Premier League’s Big Six clubs in that direction for years, according to people familiar with the talks. Manchester City and Chelsea—owned by a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi and a Russian oligarch, respectively—had to be talked into the scheme at the last minute, the people said.

Yet if American owners have had one thing in common in their sports ventures across the pond, it’s that they have never been quite prepared for how wild the soccer ecosystem can be. When the Glazer family bought Man United in 2005, they needed to be snuck into the stadium past the protesting fans chanting “Die, Glazers, Die!” John W. Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool, had to throw out his Moneyball approach and spend mountains of cold, hard cash to start winning.

Stan Kroenke, who bought into Arsenal in 2007, tried to steer clear of all of it by speaking in public less often than a Carthusian monk. That simply earned him the nickname Silent Stan and the wrath of fans who accused him of doing nothing to improve the team.

All of these owners are troubled by the same bugbear—the idea that they live at the mercy of one bad season. Just ask Arsenal, which currently sits in ninth place and hasn’t played in the Champions League since the 2016-17 season. (In fact, four of the 12 Super League clubs are not currently in qualifying positions for the Champions League as things stand.)

Sooner or later, they all make versions of the same inquiry: can’t we just close the door behind us? This has been true since the first major wave of foreign investment crashed on to English shores in the early 2000s.

“There are a number of overseas-owned clubs already talking about bringing about the avoidance of promotion and relegation in the Premier League,” Richard Bevan, the CEO of the League Managers Association, said as far back as 2011.

As far as the 12 rebel clubs are concerned, the Super League solves that problem immediately. What had been a joke among the old hands of English soccer is now an alarming reality threatening the future of their domestic soccer.

Where Premier League owners who are newer to the U.K. might have underestimated the challenge is in the political sphere. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had already been vocal in his anger about the project and reiterated that opposition in an emergency meeting with representatives of the Premier League on Tuesday morning. Johnson even opened the door to legislation that would prevent clubs joining the Super League.

Angry reactions only piled up as the day went on. Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain, two of Europe’s uber-rich clubs who would have been natural candidates for the Super League, came out forcefully against it. The head of soccer’s world governing body, FIFA president Gianni Infantino, also said “There is no doubt whatsoever of FIFA’s disapproval for this.”

Even Amazon, which had been rumored as a potential broadcast partner for the Super League, denied any involvement while condemning the prospect of a closed shop. “We believe part of the drama and beauty of European football comes from the ability of any club to achieve success through their performances on the pitch,” Amazon Prime Video tweeted.

None of the U.S.-based members of the Super League have spoken publicly beyond a few bland comments attached to Sunday’s press release. They preferred to leave the first comments to Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, who chose to make them on a Spanish television show that aired at midnight on Tuesday with flashing graphics and dramatic music.

The way he presented things, the top teams had no choice but to copy their counterparts across the Atlantic.

“The attractive thing in football is playing between big clubs, the value for television increases and more income is generated,” he said. “It’s not just the rich who want the Super League, we’re doing it to save football.”

Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com

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