For many people in the football world, the three most dangerous words in the English language are now: ‘European Super League’. On Sunday 18 April, 12 of the most famous clubs in England, Italy, and Spain announced that they would be breaking away from the existing structures that govern European football to form their own league backed by the giant Wall Street investment bank, JP Morgan Chase.
The creation of this European Super League (ESL), where some of the world’s wealthiest and biggest clubs will exclusively compete against each other in a closed and tightly controlled format, was a shock to many – including some of the sport’s senior officials. But given the relentless and thorough commercialisation of the beautiful game in recent years, it was also grimly predictable.
From ever-rising ticket prices and leveraged buyouts to the scheduling of games at odd times to fit TV schedules, football – and European football in particular – is increasingly being oriented towards profit over all other considerations.
Lessons from the US
For many of us football supporters in the United States, the ESL plan is depressingly familiar. According to leaked documents seen by the Financial Times, the proposed model “closely resembles the structure of top US sports leagues”.
Most major sports leagues in the US operate essentially as closed, centralised cartels – like the one the ESL is seemingly attempting to create. In other words, US ‘leagues’ are actually distinct business entities, which can (and often do) negotiate TV and sponsorship deals, control team merchandising, establish where teams will play and who can be an owner, and set and enforce numerous rules on team business operations, salaries, etc.
Critical to this structure is that there is no promotion or relegation. The same teams play each other year in, year out and new teams are allowed in only if the league decides to expand or if an ownership group is allowed to move an existing team to a different city. The former is relatively rare, especially in the modern history of the National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) – none of which have added teams since the late 1990s or early 2000s. The latter is more common as wealthy owners often move teams when they are unable to extract enough public subsidies from local communities (for things like new stadiums). Recent examples in the NFL include the St. Louis Rams and San Diego Chargers both moving to Los Angeles, and the Oakland Raiders moving to Las Vegas.
This anti-competitive structure is specifically set up to entrench elite control over both decision making and profit, and is illustrative of capitalism’s inherent monopolistic tendencies. By combining a closed cartel structure with profit maximising values, US sports leagues are able to ensure that economic benefits flow primarily to a small group of wealthy owners rather than to workers or communities.
“In short, the reason that American sports are all organised as cartels is so that the team owners can make a profit,” Tim Worstall of the free-market Adam Smith Institute writes. “Without the cartels all the money would flow to the players.”
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Thomas M. Hanna | Radio Free (2021-04-20T17:16:58+00:00) To see the future of elite European football, look to America. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/04/20/to-see-the-future-of-elite-european-football-look-to-america/
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