At midnight from Sunday to Monday, 12 of Europe’s most successful football clubs, led by Real Madrid, and with Barcelona and Atlético de Madrid among their ranks, announced the creation of the football ‘Super League’. A competition outside the control of UEFA and the federations and that has unleashed a strong counterattack, with threats of expulsion from the rest of the competitions for the participating teams and players. But the twelve ‘rebels’ have support behind their backs: JP Morgan will finance the competition, with payments of some 3,250 million euros to the teams that join.
The specific data of the competition are still blurred, but according to the Financial Times, the American financial giant would be the great supporter of the great schism in European football. JP Morgan has promised to offer 3,250 million to the teams that join as “infrastructure expenses” and to compensate for the effects of covid, which they would have to return in 23 years with the income from the broadcasting rights paid by televisions . In addition, as they explained in their initial statement, the teams expect “solidarity payments” of more than 10,000 million during the duration of the initial agreement.
Anas Laghrari, partner of the Spanish firm Key Capital, will be the general secretary of the organization, and Florentino Pérez, president
The beginning of the season will require some 5,000 million euros, which the US bank would also advance. Negotiations with television networks for retransmission rights have been carried out in secret, but it is estimated that they would reach 4,000 million euros per year. Without the percentage that UEFA and other intermediaries take, the prizes could multiply several times the 100 million that a Champions League champion currently takes.
The company that will manage the rights to this competition will be based in Spain, and its general secretary will be Anas Laghrari, partner of the Spanish firm Key Capital. The president of the organization will be Florentino Pérez. With the millions that television rights are expected to generate, that company would even be large enough to enter the Ibex if it decided to go public at some point.
Rejection in the Governments
The reactions have not been long in coming. Numerous clubs, especially the British ones, which are the core of the competition -half of the initial twelve are English-, have registered criticism from their followers, and the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has announced that his Government will seek to take legal measures to stop these movements. Among the options that the Minister of Culture and Sports, Oliver Dowden, has put on the table are the possibility of prohibiting foreign teams from traveling to England to play those matches, imposing a confiscatory tax on the teams that participate, or forcing the shareholders of the clubs to sell a majority of their shares to the groups of members, so that the supporters have the right of veto.
An equally harsh position has been seen in France, where the president, Emmanuel Macron, has also been against the creation of this league. The EU, for its part, has warned that this schism could break the antitrust law by limiting the number of places open to the rest of the teams, despite the fact that it has not objected to the fact that the great basketball teams have been celebrating the Euroleague for decades with an almost identical format and without the support of any federation.
For its part, the Government of Spain has announced that it “does not support” the initiative as it understands that “it has been conceived and proposed without counting” on the representative organizations at a national and international level. The Minister of Culture and Sport, José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes, called for “dialogue” between “the clubs, UEFA, and here with the League and the RFEF”. Rodríguez Uribes was very concerned that “the League is not devalued, that the Spanish team is not affected and that the values of the sports model that have to do with open competitions and solidarity are preserved.”
Threats of expulsion
The strongest words, however, have come from UEFA. The president of the European federation, Aleksander Ceferin, has threatened to ban the signing teams -Milan, Arsenal, Atlético, Chelsea, Barcelona, Inter, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Tottenham- from participating in any other competition, “immediately”. This could see Madrid, Chelsea and City ejected from this year’s Champions League semi-finals, leaving PSG the default winner. To this would be added the ban on their players participating in World Cups and European Championships, which would leave this year’s tournaments -Euro and Copa América- and the next one -World Cup in Qatar- in the picture.
The twelve rebel teams have announced that they are willing to go to court to stop any type of sanction, and have made it clear that they want to continue participating in national leagues and cups. The only victim would be the Champions League.
What changes would there be compared to the Champions League?
The teams’ decision is based on the fact that it will be more interesting for viewers to see Europe’s greats play each other every week, rather than seeing them play minor teams in the group stage, and that the knockouts then reduce the number of matches between the best to a minimum. With this format, the participating teams would be in two leagues of 10 teams, all of them at a higher level as they do not include many of the small ones that do have a place in the Champions League. After facing each other twice, at home and away, the top four from each league would advance to the quarter-finals.
In response, for their flagship tournament: 10 games, instead of 20 or the 6 of the current group stage, with teams chosen at random. There would be no back and forth, but each team would face 10 different rivals, half at home and half away. To avoid highly unbalanced draws, there would be different pots with coefficients to ensure that each team ends up with a similar number of high, mid and low level opponents. The best eight of this league would go to the round of 16 and the teams from 9 to 24 would play a round of 32.
The key is that both the federation and the teams want more games and a format more similar to that of a league. The problem is in the access to the smaller teams: UEFA considers that the fact that the champions of smaller countries, or the third or four teams of the big ones, can qualify, is a point in favor that increases the excitement of the national leagues and that rewards teams that do well in those tournaments. But the teams that win practically always believe that teams like Ferencváros or Dynamo kyiv, who have no chance of winning, do nothing but leave the fans without seeing several direct confrontations between, for example, Manchester United and the Manchester City, or several classics and Madrid derbies a year. And they remember that there are 8 more places: three that they hope will go to as many teams that join as ‘founders’ and annual fixed members in the coming months, and the remaining 5 that would go to the most outstanding teams on the continent every year that they are not fixed, which keeps the competition open to teams with sporting success but reduces the number of ‘filler teams’.
At the moment, this situation is reminiscent of the Premier League, which was founded when the English First Division teams decided that if they put on a tournament on their own they could receive more money from television rights than under the control of the English Football League (EPL). The biggest difference is that this movement had the support of the English Football Federation, which did not have much sympathy for the EPL and which turned the new league into the true first division. The biggest difference is that the Champions League is organized by UEFA itself. And the battle can go on for a long time.