Own Goal

Just over a week ago, twelve of Europe’s leading football clubs announced the formation of a new European Super League (ESL).  Their aim was to create an annual tournament, that would run alongside the various national league competitions and would rival the existing pan-European tournaments, namely the Champions League and the Europa League.  The two main differences between the new ESL and the existing competitions, were that the ESL would be smaller, with twenty clubs rather than thirty-two or forty-eight, and that fifteen teams would be guaranteed participation in the ESL each year with only five places to be secured through competitive qualification.  The twelve clubs’ goal was to create a competition with greater quality and focus, to showcase the “biggest” teams playing against each other regularly, the “best” players competing against each other all season. 

Three days later the plan appeared to be dead and buried as all six English teams that had signed up as founder members of the ESL withdrew from the initiative, in the face of a storm of protest from other clubs, former players, and groups claiming to representing the “real fans”.  But, if the proposal for a new tournament is off the table for now, it has not gone away for ever.  Just like at Easter, a form of resurrection is possible.  There are two sorts of people who really like the idea, the owners of the top European Clubs – many of whom are from America, the Middle East, and Asia – and the millions of football fans who do not live in Europe.  This alliance – between the super-rich and the mass consumer – is likely to triumph in the long run against the protectionist instincts of those in the middle, predominantly Western European commentators and fans, who care about the preservation of the traditions of the game for their own sake.

I was amused to hear both the Prime Minister and the Prince who is second in line to the throne, telling of their deep concern about the damage the ESL would do to England’s national sport.  Rather than voice their delight that, despite the poor track record of the national team, English clubs had secured six of the fifteen guaranteed places – as many as the Italian and Spanish clubs combined – they expressed their horror that football was being threatened with corruption by money.  (It would be a distraction at this point to detail the various ways in which money has corrupted Britain’s political parties and monarchy, and not a short distraction either.)  The Prime Minister even threatened legislation to prevent English clubs from participating.  One can only imagine that both the monarchy and the government, suffering as they both are from bouts of unpopularity, thought they might improve their public image by championing the cause of national working-class pride: how dare the foreign owners of English football clubs make this decision without first seeking a popular mandate from the English fans?

The reasons why the club owners liked the idea of the ESL is not hard to discern.  For the past year, revenues have been falling because stadia have been closed to fans.  Football is still being played and the games are being streamed globally on television, but the matches take place without crowds.  The revenues of the largest clubs are already dominated by income from television rights, and other forms of advertising, selling replica shirts for example.  The income from ticket sales is falling as a percentage of total income and this trend is likely to continue as the global audience for the game grows, but most of this audience cares more about watching the best players.  A competition that showcased only the best teams in Europe, without the distraction of regular games against less capable opposition, would draw more reliable television audiences, confident of seeing the best players going head-to-head every week, rather than only a handful of times a year.

Sport is a form of entertainment.  Just like popular music or popular film, there is a large global audience for standardised products which feature star performers, where the quality is reliable and repetitive.  When you pay to watch, you can be confident about what you are going to see.  Football is in competition not just with other sports but also with other forms of entertainment, to attract paying viewers who do not currently have a strong loyalty, either to football in general or to any football team in particular.  The club owners want higher and less volatile revenue streams, and the attraction of the ESL as a product was that it would provide the permanent members with just that: a guarantee of participation in the world’s top club competition every year, with confidence that viewing figures would rise steadily as more and more viewers around the world became able to afford to pay for a viewing subscription.  A large football stadium can hold 75,000 to 100,000 fans, whereas the television audience for a top game would be counted in the tens, perhaps even hundreds of millions.  The economics of sport, as with entertainment more generally, suggest that a smaller tournament with fewer games, but a strong likelihood that all the games will feature top teams with top players, would be more likely to be exciting and competitive, and therefore more likely to attract a bigger audience.  It is the marginal increase in television viewers that matters for income growth. 

Why, then, are so many fans against?   The answer is that there are two sorts of fans: those who enjoy some sort of geographical or conceptual proximity to the club they support and consider their team to be part of their national or cultural identity, and those who enjoy watching exciting football but have no real care about whether the best team in Europe this year comes from Barcelona, Turin, or London.   Purely in terms of numbers, there are, of course, many more of the latter, that is, fans who enjoy enough to watch without feeling the need to be tribal about their loyalties.   The former, who regularly pay to attend games in person rather than watching on television, consider themselves to be the real, hardcore fans without whom the game could not survive, but this claim is stronger on sentimentality than on evidence.  Without the global fan base, the television revenues would be insufficient to maintain the levels of salary and other expenses that the large clubs are committed to.  The local fans are an adornment to the game – providing atmosphere and colour – but they are no longer the key consumer segment.

When I think about my team – one of the founding members of the ESL, despite rather poor recent form – it includes among its players the captains of the English, French, Welsh, and South Korean national teams.  Of these, the South Korean is the most important in terms of attracting new fans and therefore new television revenues.  I suspect my team now has more fans in Seoul than in London, and since most of them are unlikely to be able to attend a live game – although there were always a small, enthusiastic group of Korean fans at the north London stadium when international travel was still possible – if they watch at all, they will watch on television.  And they will be more likely to watch if their country’s star player is on television every week, playing against famous teams from Milan or Madrid or Manchester.

Preserving the status quo, with its privileging of local against global interests, is part of Europe’s new backward-looking, insular politics.  It is the Brexit mindset.  We welcome footballers from all over the world to come and play in Europe if they are good enough, and we welcome investors from all over the world to provide finance for our clubs and television rights if they are rich enough, but we see no need to listen to the voice of the global consumer, who might prefer “our game” to be played somewhat differently and who have no nostalgia for the legends and traditions of years gone by. 

Thirty years ago, if you had described the idea behind the Indian Premier League cricket tournament –white balls, coloured outfits, twenty-over format, and the associated showbiz atmosphere – to a blazer- and tie-wearing Member at the MCC headquarters at Lords, they would not have believed it possible and certainly would not have thought it “proper cricket”.  Today, given its success with players and fans, they mostly wish it were being played in England not India.   Cricket’s future now resides with the current innovators rather than the original inventors.  This week, the former players, the self-proclaimed real fans, and populist politicians are all celebrating the rapid demise of the ESL proposal, but I think the future is likely to show that it was not the ESL founder clubs but rather their detractors who scored the own goal.