Forgive the shorter newsletter today as I have paid work to do!
There were a few headlines from this past week that reveal—surprise!—Europe’s richest and most powerful clubs want to be even richer and more powerful!
The New York Times’ Tariq Panja wrote about the worrisome leaks around UEFA’s plans to yet again tinker with the Champions League format, including the possibility of ‘locking in’ a set number of teams in the competition based on historical performance (thereby rendering domestic results meaningless), and moving some fixtures to the weekend, potentially in direct competition with domestic league matches.
These ideas, of course, naturally degrade domestic leagues, and that is precisely the point. Despite repeated odes to the glories of the promotion/relegation system that has been in place in Europe for over a century, some rich clubs are apparently tired of the pesky requirement to have to win a certain number of points each season to maintain access to European competition.
In addition to a free pass to the Champions League, rich Premier League clubs also want more money. The Telegraph reports that the league’s overseas rights deal, which was once doled out to clubs equally, will now skew to shower the top six teams with more money, thereby ensuring even less competitive parity.
All of this comes when Manchester United’s owners and the executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward have offered a three-year contract to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, as well as an ostensible final say in player transfers, before putting into place a technical director.
Doing this, of course, completely undermines the entire point of the role and practically ensures that when Solskjaer inevitably gets sacked in the next three or four seasons (just going on Bayesian priors here), the club will have to once more start fresh and let the next manager completely dictate the culture.
This is before we get into the wealth of football intelligence increasingly available to Europe’s elite teams, which they can actually afford in addition to having first pick in the transfer market, an exploitative system that somehow continues to survive challenges and legal threats from groups like the PFA.
All of this is to say I have very little sympathy for wealthy clubs and their owners continuing to extract concessions from UEFA by making empty threats about a breakaway league via the ECA when they continue to run clubs inefficiently.
Worse still, if they get their way, they will have effectively removed most of the remaining pathways for smaller, less historically successful clubs to ride their way to glory on the back of smart operations and savvy team process. Part of the spirit of sport is open and fair competition; it’s high time the leagues get their shit together and help reverse course on a trend that represents a grave, existential threat to the club game in Europe.