European Super League

 How did we get here?

1. The club has trumped the individual.

There are several stages where this has happened. First was World Cup 1974, when the Dutch invented total football. If Brazil 1970 was the celebration of a team of great individuals, then Holland 1974 was a celebration of the team as the star of the show. Players were not so much defenders, midfielders and strikers, but rather fingers of the same fist. Then there was World Cup 1982, when Brazil had great players like Zico and Socrates, and yet they were defeated because they failed to play as well as the Italians, who emphasised the collectivist ethos of defence.

The latter stages of this shift of emphasis from the individuals to team ethos was the rise of Guardiola to be the “it” coach of the 2^nd decade of the 21^st century. His teams played systems. In fact, he was less a manager of a team than a squad, where players were slotted in and out of systems, and the selection was a revolving door of players whose talents were or were not best suited towards the particular variation of the system that he tried to play.

2. Football stopped being local and started becoming global

Let's face it. Liverpool FC doesn't mean “Liverpool's football club”. It means “a football club with its origins in Liverpool, but where the players, the ownership and the coaching staff are not necessarily from Liverpool. It's not a kind of nationalism that's borne of attachment to the land or the environs. It's more like some kind of tribal loyalty that includes people from anywhere and everywhere.

So if Liverpool represents people from all over the world, then why should they necessarily take part in football competitions which are restricted to England? What does the brand even mean anyway? Liverpool Football club had various things that was attached to its brand over the years: first, it was the Shankley / Paisley empire which dominated England and maybe even Europe in the 70s and 80s. Various things enhanced their legend: the big personalities of players like Kevin Keegan, Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness, Steve Nicol, Ian Rush and John Barnes. The boot room, where a collective of senior coaches plotted and schemed to further the “Liverpool Way”. Then it was the club that endured the twin tragedies of Heysel and Hillsborough stadium disasters.

Later on, there were the narrative of the club that lost its way under Graeme Souness, then the spice boys who had swagger and flair but no solid backbone, then a more tough and defensive identity under Gerard Houllier, then the miracle of Istanbul side of the Houllier – Benitez transition, then the Gerrard-Mascherano-Torres-Alonso-Reina side which came close to a title, then the Gerrard-Suarez-Sturridge-Sterling side which also came close to a title, and finally the Klopp side who actually won the title.

That being said, the “Spice Boys” side was probably the last Liverpool side which had an English core, and the last one that was managed by a member of the boot room. Liverpool became sorda cosmopolitan under Houllier, sorda Spanish under Benitez, and sorda Dortmund-esque under Klopp. It became less and less compellingly English or English / Scottish as time went on.

And the rise of the cosmopolitan super-national clubs has been a bane for many other local leagues. It's hard to imagine now, but in the early 90s, the most popular club in Singapore was the Singapore FA playing in the Malaysia Cup. The football was markedly inferior, although some of our best players were pretty good. But the rise of the EPL as the world's greatest league practically decimated our system.

3. Huge amounts of money coming into the sport / The economic ecosystem that revolves around the sport

Huge amounts of money may come from different sources. They may come from wealthy owners, or from more expensive gate receipts, or from a lot more TV money, or from merchandising or advertising or whatever. And the sources of this money, increasingly, were not local tycoons. This is another force for clubs to be less tethered from the land around them.

Closely related to this is how there are small industries that revolve around the players. Their agents. Their talent management systems. Their media consultants / management companies. Players, increasingly, are influencers, with their own branding and personalities. They wear the shirt, but they increasingly have an identity which is distinct from their clubs, and the leagues. They may hail from foreign lands, or they could have roots in Europe, but are from minority communities.

4. Concentration of power into relatively few clubs.

Consider this: there were times when relatively minor clubs could dream about European adventures. The 80s and 90s were relatively egalitarian times for football clubs. Hamburg, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Porto, PSV Eindhoven, Red Star Belgrade and Olympique Marsaille won the European Cup. (Some of this was aided by the English Clubs being banned from European competition for 5 years). Clubs like Aston Villa, Norwich, Ipswich, West Ham, Sheffield Wednesday, Crystal Palace, Southampton and Newcastle flirted with qualifying for Europe. Leeds, Blackburn and Everton were winning the league.

After Newcastle's failed title challenge, the balance of power shifted back to the usual suspects with big money. No doubt this trend was exascerbated by clubs who tried to spend their way into the big time but failed and went into administration: (Leeds, Ipswich, Bolton, Leicester, Man City, Portsmouth, Sheffield Wednesday, etc etc) That made it particularly clear that there was room for only a few clubs at the elite level.

5. Increasing importance of the news cycle to the clubs

The importance of clubs versus players is underlined by how mostly a few clubs dominate the discussion on football. I don't really know why the rich owners of football clubs invest heavily in football clubs. Is it for the sports washing? Is it to present a benign face on an autocratic regime?

One thing that football clubs offer in this day and age, that is rare anywhere else, is the ability to sustain your attention. Attention is a very rare and therefore very precious commodity. There has to be some kind of resentment on the part of the big clubs, where they know that people only pay attention to, say, Crystal Palace when Crystal Palace is playing one of the big six, or if they're playing a relegation six pointer. And they know that they're the ones who are delivering entertaining football. OK, perhaps there will be a few one-season wonders, such as Leeds United, or Sheffield United when they were good, or Leicester during their championship season.

But the big clubs are the ones who have the best players, and who manage to play fluid, watchable football that will entertain the rest of they world, they have the stars, they have the managers who are forever under pressure. They have the best sports science and analytics teams. So why should they always be stuck with playing relatively anonymous cannon fodder most of the time?

6. Financial risks of being at the top.

This is significant. The big clubs who want to remain big clubs have to try to qualify for Europe every year, so that they continue to have the ability to do long term planning. I think what happened amongst the clubs who are mooting for a European Super League, and who also happen to be the same clubs which are monopolising the upper reaches of the UCL, is that keeping up with the Joneses is financially ruinious, and they are trying to find some way to de-escalate the arms race.

In today's landscape, there are two types of relegation. One is to be relegated from the premier league. The second type is to fail to qualify for Europe. Both are risky and financially ruinious. And the way that teams are these days, even some of the best run teams will have peaks and troughs in their performance. Sometimes, you can put a great team together for 2-3 years, and then the wheels can come off very quickly and during that trough, you will fail to qualify for Europe. Just look at the Chelsea season between their 2 championship seasons, or Liverpool right after winning their long coveted league title, or Manchester City for half of this season before they put that great run together.

There are a few special clubs and a few special managers who bring the game forward by doing certain things which give them a temporary advantage, until other clubs realise what's going on and level up their game. Arsenal introduced some special innovations in the game: better scouting, better nutrition and sports science, that gave them some advantages during the early Wenger years. Man U, with their famous “Class of 92” / “Fergie Babes” were one of the first teams to realise that having a great youth team system is of a great advantage. Other than these clubs having some kind of special technological cutting edge, gravity always wins. The clubs with the most financial fire power will otherwise win.

It also has to be said that the media landscape that has drummed up such strident opposition to this idea of a European Super League is one that is invested in this existing Premier League / Champions League system. And that system was already one that was designed to lock out all but roughly 10-15 clubs from winning the Champion's league. No more Dutch clubs, no more Scottish clubs, no more Portuguese clubs, no more Turkish clubs, no more clubs from Eastern Europe, no more Dynamo this or Lokomotiv that.

At the same time, given the vast superiority of the big clubs to the small clubs, you do have to ask yourself if the smaller clubs have a right to exist. If so, what are they bringing to the table. How are they special, do they have a unique identity, other than "we won the title in 1908"? It's much easier to replicate great analytics and great coaching systems than it is to find naturally talented players. So are we seeing that great coaching is the norm rather than the exception? 

What the European Super League is asking for is outrageous, but it brings it more in line with the way that sports is run in the USA. Just one commissioner, and he takes care of all the franchises and helps make sure that the franchises don't suffer financial ruin. The branding is global.

But it doesn't make it all right. The English league is already highly unusual in that there are a lot of former champions – it's a league that, before the rise of the Liverpool and Manchester United empires, used to share the championship around. There are maybe around 20 former top tier league champions of England, and that made it more fun to watch as opposed to, say, the Turkish League when it's always one of the Istanbul big three making off with the prize.

So when the list of possible champions is whittled down to a very small list, it's much less fun to ponder over.

Consider that Maradona played for Napoli, a relatively small club, and Barcelona when it was not setting the world alight. Consider that Pele's club was Santos. Or that Jimmy Greaves stuck with Tottenham through thick and thin, that Tom Finney stuck with Preston, or Stanley Matthews stuck with Stoke and Blackpool. And more recently Matthew Le Tissier played exclusively for Southampton. These days the most famous players go to the most famous clubs, no questions asked. Some people have openly questioned Van Der Sar's right to play for Fulham.