Yesterday, 12 of the richest soccer clubs in Europe announced the creation of an independent “European Superleague”, designed to showcase must-watch matchups of the top teams in the world in direct competition with the current Champion’s League format.   For an American viewer or a casual fan of soccer like myself, it seems like a great deal – matchups that were once reserved for a few special days a year now playout over the course of a season, with powerhouse clubs like Chelsea, Real Madrid, and F.C. Barcelona playing each other week-in and week-out.  The backlash for this league, however, has reverberated far past sports media, with world leaders like PM Boris Johnson and President Emmanual Macron pledging to sign legislation stopping the Superleague within just hours of its announcement.  To understand exactly why the Superleague is so destructive to club soccer’s traditions, and so blatantly offensive to diehard fans, you need to first understand the structure of European club soccer.

Perhaps the most widely followed soccer league in the world, England’s Premier League provides the perfect example of what makes European club soccer so special.  The Premier League sits at the top of England’s club soccer pyramid, made up of 7 “tiers” of play.  Each year, the best performing teams from each league move up, and the bottom teams are relegated to the level directly below them.   This means that no matter how small or how poor your organization is, you are given the chance each year to advance and play some of the top competition in the world.   This creates generation after generation of diehard fans, who support the clubs of their fathers’ fathers, and blends rich tradition with tight community ties to make club soccer so special.   This structure exists in some form in every European country – no matter how small your team is, given enough time, you could compete in your country’s top league – and if you perform well enough there, you move on to the pinnacle of club soccer:  The Champions League.  Every year, The Champions League takes the top club teams from each country to compete in a tournament to crown one final champion.   

While that might be a lot to take in, it means that your team – which could be made up of players making only 50k a year, which fills its 1,000 person capacity stadium with your neighbors and relatives, is always somehow tied to the Billion dollar clubs that compete with the best of the best.  The European Superleague destroys these ties, separating the top 15 teams into their own competition that replaces the Champions League.

To provide an easy analogy, I’ll reference March Madness.  In March Madness, every team plays a schedule of conference games to determine their seeding in an end-of-season tournament to declare the best team in the nation.  Some of the most inspiring and memorable stories in March Madness history come from the underdogs – the Loyola Chicagos and the UMBC’s.   These teams overcome their lack of prestige and funding to showcase their talent against the best-funded programs in the nation, providing their passionate fanbases a chance (no matter how slim) to watch their team compete for a national championship.  The European Superleague would be akin to the perennial powerhouses in each division seceding from March Madness and creating their own season schedule and tournament.  Sure, they will still play their conference games, but they now choose to rest their starters against conference opponents.  Why play your starting five in a meaningless game against Rutgers when you have Kentucky on the schedule later that week?  The dream of the cinderella team is dead – the blueblood teams have their own tournament, and your 12 seed isn’t invited. 

So if the concept of a European Superleague is so detrimental to the traditions of club soccer, why go through with it?  The simple answer is money.  The owners of the top 12 clubs in Europe built this league together knowing that their matchups would be must-watch television and that passionate soccer fans will all but forced to pay a subscription fee to watch the best teams compete.  Games against lesser local opponents may give fans a game fueled by 100 years of tradition, but they don’t incite the same excitement that a powerhouse international club matchup does.   The idea that the top clubs in the world will make more money off of these matchups is not inherently bad – the problem lies with the fact that this league will harm the poorer local teams in domestic leagues.  English teams like Chelsea, now with less motivation to win the Premier League and because they automatically qualify for Superleague, will rest their top players against smaller local teams.  This means reduced TV revenue for those games, suffocating the smaller team’s best sources of profit, in turn widening the monetary gap between the top teams in the world and your local team.  

This attempt by billionaire owners to rake in even more cash is especially offensive to fans because of the current pandemic.  Fans are finally being given the chance to return to their local club’s grounds, traditionally a place of community and celebration.   Even in an economic crisis, games are incredibly affordable, with even the most expensive tickets in the premier league topping out at around 100 pounds and an average ticket costing only 30 pounds.   Soccer offers a chance for communities to heal and forget about the year’s troubles, and now, before the Pandemic has completely ended, a small club of the richest owners in soccer has robbed that experience from the people in an effort to further stuff their pockets.  

The backlash against the Superleague has been intense – FIFA, the International Federation of Football, has threatened that players who compete in the Superleague will not be able to play in the World Cup.  Each domestic league has launched threats at the teams who seceded, and governments are already looking into writing legislation to stop the Superleague in its tracks.  The move is not yet set in stone, but it appears so far that the owners of these top teams are ready to fight both in legal court and in the court of public opinion against overseeing organizations, individual domestic leagues, their respective governments, and even their own fans.