Over the weekend, several of Europe’s biggest soccer clubs* announced the formation of something thrown about here and there in gossip for years – the creation of a European Super League in 2024.
For those of you not familiar with how professional soccer works over in Europe, each country (more or less) has a soccer league and most of them have several leagues where teams can be demoted to lower leagues if they do poorly and replaced with lower-level teams who did well in the previous seasons.
This is known as promotion and relegation and it’s something that evolved over the 20th Century when it became clear there were too many professional teams for all of them to play each other in a season. Bringing a codified promotion and relegation system to all levels of American professional soccer has been another ongoing topic and the resistance to that plays into the root cause of what brought the Super League.
Major League Soccer, the highest level of professional soccer in the U.S. and Canada, was founded in the 1990s and most of its franchises were founded later than that**. In England, of the 102 fully-professional clubs, only six were created after 1941 and all of those were new editions of earlier clubs.
In North America, the people who brought those teams to life saw them as businesses, just like teams in other North American sports leagues and relegation due to one off year would jeopardize those investments. In England, the people who brought those teams to life saw them as either way to get exercise or build social and community bonds. However, the North American model has slowly been creeping into Europe over the past 20 to 30 years and the Super League represents the undistilled essence of this.
The dozen teams that want to create Super League basically feel that their slice of the revenue pie is not large enough and they’re tired of sharing it: basically the same reason behind the creation of the English Premier League in the early 1990s. Unlike the Premier League however, these teams don’t want to be relegated. They don’t want their investments jeopardized by poor performance or by other teams they see as inferior.
Response on social media has been universally negative outside of representatives from the proposed Super League teams, and there’s already talk of banning players on the Super League teams from being a part of national teams if the Super League becomes a reality.
We here in the United States like to pretend that our sports teams belong to us, the fans. Indeed, this illusion is what gives them their value as commercial entities. However, this is a lie. The New England Patriots are in reality the Robert Kraft Patriots. The Boston Red Sox are in reality the John Henry Red Sox. The Dallas Cowboys are in reality the Jerry Jones Cowboys. The owners of those teams allow those places to be part of the teams’ official names because it suits their purposes. Once it does not and they can get approval from their colleagues, the team is sent somewhere else, regardless of what the fans want.
In most other parts of the world, teams cannot move out of their communities without losing the essence of what they are. In England, Chelsea Football Club contractually cannot move out of their current stadium without changing their name first. Outside North America, soccer teams belong to the people that care about them and the people that own the teams are caretakers of that trust.
If the Super League is successful, that way of looking at things dies, or at the very least is put on life support. It’s bad enough that we have to put up with that here, we can only hope that our fellow fans across the sea don’t have to experience it as well.
*-I know they call it football, but I am American, so I don’t and that is a whole other big thing I will get into at some point.
**- A few were reborn from earlier leagues, but again, that is a whole big other thing.
