Earlier, I've put it to a German club official that the Super League 12 must have some really clever ideas to get around all the obstacles, relative to the huge reputational risk they're facing.
Answer: "Never underestimate the incompetence of people."
— Raphael Honigstein? (@honigstein) April 20, 2021
Everything I know about soccer I learned from a Japanese manga in translation, but I have a certain experience with How Humans Are, so the brisk demise of the Super League did not surprise me. (Especially the fact that everyone on my feeds seemed to be blaming the whole idea on Americans.)
Some entertaining potentially enlightening details via a German expat working in DC:
1. We say in Soccernomics: "Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business." https://t.co/lB7ZD4tAji
— Simon Kuper (@KuperSimon) April 20, 2021
It's that uniquely football mixture of stupidity plus greed that we saw in action this week
— Simon Kuper (@KuperSimon) April 20, 2021
4. Related: football is an industry where practically everyone in a boardroom is a white man, so the talent pool they are drawing from is not large. There's also a fast track for ex-players, sons of senior officials, people's mates etc where intelligence is not a criterion
— Simon Kuper (@KuperSimon) April 20, 2021
6. That's the basic weirdness of the football industry. On the field, it's pure meritocracy. There are no bad professional footballers. (I hear your jokes, but really, there aren't.) But off the field: zero quality control, many mediocrities in top jobs (including some coaches)
— Simon Kuper (@KuperSimon) April 20, 2021
there is already a new winner in the european super league and it is Billable Hours FC https://t.co/rBXkHOIWDU
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) April 19, 2021
"Rarely, if ever, do you see a plan hatched by billionaires fail so fast against the will of the people."@AlexWardVox explains why the Super League super sucked. https://t.co/n8GS8C79RC
— Emily Stewart (@EmilyStewartM) April 20, 2021
Long, sercon (serious / constructive) explainer:
… On Sunday, 12 of the richest teams from England, Spain, and Italy — the richest, mind you, not necessarily the best — announced they would create the European Super League. It would likely replace a more inclusive, preexisting annual tournament, the Champions League, where the top teams from European countries’ leagues compete to determine the continent’s strongest squad.
Then came the backlash, leading all six British teams and reportedly two Spanish teams to back out of the proposal after just two days of relentless fan pressure. The chair of one of them is on the verge of stepping down. And all clubs plan to discuss abandoning the idea, at least for the time being…
The road to the Super League proposal was paved with greed, but also genuine panic caused by declining revenues during the coronavirus pandemic. And other than executives poised to make big bucks, few were happy about the plan. The backlash from fans, current and former players, and football/soccer media was thus fierce.
The idea is “nothing less than the death of football as we know it,” Germany’s leading sports monthly, 11 Freunde, wrote this week. “[It’s] an attempt to turn a sport which millions love, into a weekly circus show in order to squeeze the last shitty cent into the pockets of the superrich.”…
While fans were angry at the idea in general, what they were really upset about was that the scheme proved that the decades-long ethos of soccer — a game for anyone and everyone, where prestige is won and lost on the pitch, not bought — isn’t really valued by the executives running things…
Many of these investors didn’t come from the club’s local fanbase, or even the countries where the clubs were located, but rather from places like the US, Russia, and the Middle East. Generally speaking, their main goal was less to give local fans something to be proud of, and more to fund win-at-all-cost machines with global reach and revenue streams.
That’s long been a source of conflict. Gary Neville, once Manchester United’s captain and now a commentator for Sky Sports in the UK, railed against this trend during a television hit. “It’s pure greed. They’re impostors,” he said about foreign owners caring only for big bucks. “They’re nothing to do with football in this country … The fans need protecting.”…
Gary Neville is the people's hero right now. Unreal piece of television about the European Super League. pic.twitter.com/ypdQbdQfs7
— Football Tweet (@Football__Tweet) April 18, 2021
NotMax
We need a second opinion on that whole sapiens thing.
;)
Baud
I’m trying to determine whither this is a better or worse idea than the extra innings rule in baseball.
marcopolo
As a St Louisan, all I needed to know to know this was a terrible idea was that Stan Kroenke was involved. He personifies the idea of not bright billionaire (married to a Walton) who is only interested in making $$ no matter how disruptive or idiotic his plans are (see his moving the Rams from St Louis back to LA and how that was handled or his attempt to name the football stadium at U Missouri after his daughter).
Am glad the entire Super League idea has gone down in flames so fast.
Now off to make dinner.
MattF
So, a bunch of euro-oligarchs looked across the ocean and saw a bunch of American oligarchs buying sports teams and getting rich from TV contracts. And thought— ‘Why can’t we do that?’ Now they know.
smith
@NotMax: Was thinking the same thing today in another context: the inability of humans to accurately estimate risk. How did we not all get eaten by cave bears?
Anoniminous
@NotMax:
Only a person deeply infected with Dunning-Kruger and devoid of any Critical Thinking Skills could have name our species Homo sapiens, i.e., “wise man.”
Ken
According to burnspbesq in last night’s thread, the six English clubs involved were owned by three Americans, a Russian, a Gulf sheikdom, and a British ex-pat who left the country for tax reasons. So Americans deserve at least a quarter of the blame.
Gin & Tonic
@MattF: They’re not just Euro-oligarchs, USian hedge-fund types are represented as well (i.e. Liverpool owned by Fenway Sports Group, with John Henry eager to show that his mis-management of the Red Sox was not a fluke.)
Jeffro
Super League flamed out so fast, you’d have thought it was a trumpov business unit.
Ar-ar-ar
Off-topic (but then again this is an open thread): where are the blessed libertarians? Why aren’t they crowing and cheering the conviction of Derek Chauvin, this victory over unfettered state power to kneel on your neck and expect to get away with it? Where are the uber-conservatives, always looking out for individual freedoms and rights (like the right to not die in the street over a $20 bill) above all else?
Gin & Tonic
@smith: Some got eaten, and the lucky ones were around to reproduce. So accurate risk assessment has been bred out.
Humanities Prof
Not sure if this was the Gary Neville clip in which it featured, but I’ve gotten vocabulary-builders from him this week.
Had never heard the term “bottle merchant” before (which he was using–repeatedly–to refer to the owners of the 12 aspiring Super League teams). British English has so many charming euphemisms….
piratedan
as they are wont to say, the pooch, she is screwed…..
dr. bloor
@NotMax: What we need is what the dinosaurs got.
NotMax
@smith
Turns out hibernation worked in our favor.
;)
mrmoshpotato
@dr. bloor: Have you always hated the Yucatan peninsula?
NotMax
@dr. bloor
Shrink and grow feathers?
Baud
@NotMax: It would be cool to fly.
HumboldtBlue
@MattF:
It’s actually the opposite. This proposal was headed by three American owners Henry, the Glazers and that ass Kroenke. They looked at their closed model of American franchise sports and then glanced at the huge money in European football and even bigger opportunities to make MORE money in Asia with this proposal so they went forward with it.
The proposal went against a century of European football pyramids with promotion and relegation and that led to its demise.
What is interesting is watching the hypocritical posturing from orgs like FIFA, the FA and UEFA about how scandalous this all is and yet while this bomb was causing a distraction UEFA went ahead and expanded the Champions League format to 36 teams and who will benefit the most from those changes?
The 12 clubs who just forced UEFA’s hand.
VOR
@Jeffro: Because they don’t expect the leopards to eat their faces.
NotMax
@Baud
A cue for a (longish) musical interlude is ever ’twas one.
craigie
Money changes everything.
misterpuff
Of course, the Americans saw the closed nature of The Super League as a positive, because sports (professional and bigtime college sports) in America is set up to skim the cream off of athletic talent. It is not in their pysche to understand that cow must be fed, cared for and milked daily to produce that product. Not their problem, we just sell the cream.
What American sports need is relegation, when the Bengals, the Wizards or the Twins are sent down to the next level (or the threat of it), then the owners would do what they need to do to maintain their status (and income streams).
But of course, that would be Un-American, failure is not an option, especially if you lose that sweet, sweet TV rights moolah. (And no real next level down available in Football or Basketball, due to the “free” feeder systems of College Sports).
SiubhanDuinne
@Ken:
…walk into a bar.
Brachiator
Greed will find a way, and a lot of avaricious sports team owners are hot to squeezed even more out of soccer.
It is noteworthy that Boris Johnson and his cronies are sticking it to the people with their corrupt mismanagement of BREXIT, but what finally gets the populace up in arms is dirty dealings concerning soccer.
guachi
@Ken: Ouch. At least every NFL team, for example, has an American as principle owner.
Van Buren
Looking at a B&B website and it says, “all rooms come with TV, ironing board, hair dyer, and wi-fi” The dyer is an unexpected perk.
Robert Sneddon
@Humanities Prof: “Bottling” means to turn tail and flee, run away etc. A “bottle merchant” is someone who’s done just that. I’m not sure of the derivation of “bottling” though.
If the Super League had actually launched there would have been heads piked on the stadium fences, and I’m not being euphemistic.
“Football isn’t a matter of life and death, it’s much more important than that.” attrib. to Bill Shankly, the revered manager of Liverpool FC who would have been the first through the doors at the head of the mob at Anfield if the Super League had come to pass.
sab
@SiubhanDuinne: Bless you. My reaction but much more succinct.
Brachiator
@SiubhanDuinne:
Nobody has any money to pay for drinks because its all squirreled away in a tax haven.
debbie
@MattF:
The BBC interviewed a Super League supporter a couple of nights ago. I know less than zero about soccer, but even I could tell the guy was delusional.
Flying Fox of the Yard
What’s fascinating is that there is true fan power in Europe:
– The Bundesliga (Germany) has a rule where no outsider entity can own more than 49% of a club. This prevents an owner from taking a city hostage (i.e. threatening to move/pay for my stadium). The fact Bayern Munich and Dortmund (and PSG in France) didn’t join this cabal was probably the real dagger).
– Many clubs play in stadiums owned by fan-owned trusts.
– National politicians – even odious Boris – jumped all over this. Perhaps performative certainly, but who knows. But it sure was popular!
And in the Rugged U.S., there would be local squawking and that’s it.
Personally, I don’t think U.S. pro sports should be allowed to have a city or state in their title. Instead, it should be the owners – the Jones Cowboys or the Buss Lakers.
Ken
Maybe one of those endlessly-fascinating Cockney rhyming slang things. “Bottling” = “throttling” from “throttling my wife” = “wife” = “trouble and strife” = “trouble” = “double” = “on the double” = “fast” = running away, or something equally ridiculous.
Brachiator
@smith:
Bears are fortunately even worse at calculating odds than are humans.
dr. bloor
@NotMax: Not what I was thinking, but an appealing alternative to the meteor.
Tom Levenson
@Gin & Tonic: I keep getting this mismanagement of the Red Sox, but while there have been bad missteps (why can’t we get players like Mookie Betts, goshdarnit)
After a bit of a wait (you may have heard about it), the Henry ownership group brought World Series titles to Boston in 2004, 2007, 2014 and 2018. That’s more than one out five championships since they took over the club in 2003. Fenway’s a much nicer park to see a game in than it was (I’ve been a 5-6 times a year regular there since 1985) and while there have been some true stinkers of years (the last two included), as baseball ownership goes, they’ve been at least above average.
So he may be an oligarch, but he’s not bone stupid (see Kroenke, et al.) and has a pretty good record of hiring competent baseball people and listening to them.
L85NJGT
@NotMax:
Quick, somebody get a hot take on the sanctity of the game from Pele!
sab
Totally off topic. But I hope somebody somehow drives a stake into the heart of the Whitehouse Corrsespondants dinner. What a travesty that thing was. Dancing reporters. Worst example of Aristicratic performantive art since whenever. King is bored, so dance or play the lute or tel jokes or whatever.
Ken
Stewardess, I speak Sports Legend…
“Oh thank God! I have no idea what the f*ck these NFT things are, but the Wheaties money is long gone so when these guys offered me $100,000 for use of my name, I said yes. And I get a commission on future blockchain transfers of the token, whatever the hell that means.”
prostratedragon
@Baud: Assuming you mean the new runner on 2nd rule, this is marginally worse, only because it would have affected every single thing. But the extra innings thing is a firing offense.
Tom Levenson
@HumboldtBlue: Don’t forget the Real Madrid chappie. And the Italian team Juventus–both listed as “driving forces” behind the league (Perez from Real Madrid was the chairman of the aborted league).
You don’t have to be an American to be a feckless greed head .01 percenter, however much it helps.
prostratedragon
@Anoniminous: Irony is an ancient concept.
CliosFanBoy
@smith: the ones REALLY bad at it were eaten. oddly, we’re the descendants of the
bestleast-bad at it. scary thought.NotMax
@Baud – @NotMax
I suppose this is also obligatory.
;)
Brachiator
@sab:
Didn’t they cancel it for this year?
Hopefully they will cancel it every year.
Subsole
@NotMax:
How ’bout Homo Vulgaris instead?
dr. bloor
@Brachiator: Still not a good idea to get into a poker game with one.
NotMax
@Brachiator
Based on too much of the quality of the reportage, they’ll instead hold a half-baked sale.
//
smith
@Subsole: Or Homo hubris?
Subsole
@smith:
We may not be able to plan for shit, but it turns out some of us are damn good runners, given sufficient motivation.
debbie
Totally O/T, but great news about Stacy Abrams!
debbie
@Subsole:
Live, and fight another day?
Subsole
@VOR: Worse. They think they’re the leopards…
Old Dan and Little Ann
My feelings about soccer are directly related to taking a ball to the balls when I was 6. That and it’s boring.
Subsole
@SiubhanDuinne:
More like start a news network, these days.
Baud
@debbie: ?
Subsole
@Brachiator: Used to see that in the hospital all the time.
Patients neither knew nor cared if their infusion pump was working, but god save you if the t.v. broke down.
RSA
@Anoniminous:
Further evidence: In some nomenclatures we’re Homo sapiens sapiens. Twice as smart!
MomSense
Kid found Billy Elliott and we are watching for the millionth time. One of our all time favorite movies.
Subsole
@L85NJGT: Immortalized? Dude, it’s a glorified e-ceipt. They ain’t uploading your brainwaves to the cloud, mate.
Amir Khalid
@Robert Sneddon:
Shanks was a man of the people and a self-described socialist.
ETA: And he approved of You’ll Never Walk Alone as the club anthem because he felt it reflected his socialist beliefs.
Subsole
@smith:
You win.
Another Scott
@Brachiator:
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
@Robert Sneddon: The other meaning of “bottle merchant” is a bit more colorful
Subsole
@debbie:
I dunno ’bout fight. I was thinking more “run away and make replacements for Jub, Mung, Hoont and those other two poor slobs I knocked over when the bear started gaining on me…”
NotMax
Have now finished going through both seasons (so far, there’s a third in the works) of the French series Family Business on Netflix. Amusing enough as light diversion to pass some time; an ever higher and tipsier Jenga tower of absurdities. Grand-mère is a hoot.
While much better in the original French (with English subtitles), the English dubbed version is, for a change, moderately passable.
sanjeevs
@Tom Levenson: John Henry had been a pretty smart owner of Liverpool too. Built the best data analytics team there which led to excellent player recruitment.
Also he hired the brilliant Jurgen Klopp as manager.
But Henry burnt any goodwill he had this week. The Sun Newspaper maligned Liverpool supporters after the Hillsborough tragedy 30 years ago and to this day there is a successful boycott in Liverpool against that paper.
Henry will never set foot in Liverpool again.
Robert Sneddon
@Amir Khalid: Bill Shankly’s been dead for forty years and I’m certain he’d be leading the mob into the Anfield boardroom tomorrow if the Super League was still a goer.
KrackenJack
@smith: Our ability to avoid predators peaked shortly before we were domesticated by cereal grains. It’s been downhill since then.
cf. Slaves to wheat
debbie
@Baud:
Per Twitter, she’s been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Baud
@debbie:
Cool.
debbie
@Baud:
Found it.
Another Scott
Good, good.
The heavy lift is in the Senate. But we need to get it done.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@debbie:
Wow.
I forget which recently defeated political figure thought that he deserved a “Noble” Prize. Drump? Frump? Something like that.
John Revolta
@sab: I still believe that the WHCD gave us the Trump presidency.
Brachiator
@John Revolta:
I think there may be some truth to that. Frump could not stand being made the object of ridicule by a black president.
Subsole
@Another Scott:
Yep.
It seems really hard to object to, in principle. They pay their share, they deserve a say.
Now, if that’s gonna carry Manchin and Sinema, I’m not sure.
Uncle Cosmo
@Van Buren: The bad news is that the hare dire only works with Easter Egg colors.
Elizabelle
FREE EVENT at 10 pm Eastern tonight; 7 pm PDT: President Barack Obama in conversation with Director Ava DuVernay.
For the LA Times Book Club. You know you want to see this! Free, but you must register.
Gin & Tonic
@sanjeevs: Has he ever?
StringOnAStick
I’m sitting here waiting for $200 worth of landscape plants to arrive. They shipped via FedEx on Friday, and the tracking link said they would arrive Monday late afternoon, then Tuesday late afternoon, and this morning it said today late afternoon. Previously when I’ve ordered from this nursery I would get things within 2-3 days. Nothing so far; this is annoying and they can’t be all that happy inside a dark box for 5 days, now probably 6 days. Screwing up the USPS screwed up FedEx too; it seems like they can’t deal with the volume.
Uncle Cosmo
Wuss. I took a baseball to the forehead in Little League practice. Fortunately the pitcher was no Koufax.
I demur. (Let me put it this way: Anyone who’s read both Tigran Petrosian’s Greatest Chess Games and Nimzovich’s The Praxis of My System cover to cover has no right to call anything boring. Including paint drying.)
sanjeevs
@Gin & Tonic: He used to turn up in Liverpool a few times a season and for Cup finals.
If he ever decides to show his face at Anfield again he should sell the PPV rights.
debbie
@StringOnAStick:
I’ve had the same issue this week with three items I ordered last weekend.
James E Powell
@Uncle Cosmo:
For various reasons, no one in my family could make it to watch my little league games. I complained & turned it into a major family drama, so arrangements were made and almost all of them showed up.
My first at-bat, the first pitch hit me hard in the left temple. I (reportedly) took two steps toward first, then fell to the ground. I came to behind the bench with somebody packing my head in ice and my oldest brother saying, “Now you know why we never come.”
Mary G
StringOnAStick
@debbie: OK, so it’s not just me.
debbie
@Mary G:
Get that asshole DeJoy out of there.
laura
This just seems like a mean girl club- just the whole entire international high school girl’s bathroom / underpants gnome / profit.
Jay
@Subsole:
old joke, 2 hikers encounter a hungry bear in the high alpine. One stops, drops his pack, pulls out sneakers and starts to take off his hiking boots.
the other hiker says, “are you crazy, you can’t outrun a bear!”
The hikers say’s, “ I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”
trollhattan
The rollout could have not been handled worse, but the concept has merely scurried back into its cave to be repackaged and relaunched at some time down the road.
Ask me about our MLS expansion team. On second thought, don’t.
The “Moneyball” people had no idea.
SiubhanDuinne
@debbie:
It’s good news and takes nothing away from the honour of her nomination (nor your making note of it) to observe that this was announced on February 1:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN2A12HY
Wonder why Twitter only happened to start tweeting about it today.
debbie
@SiubhanDuinne:
Sigh. Twitter is literally inscrutable.
Morzer
@Gin & Tonic: John Henry also owns the Bahstan Glob, which is not what it used to be, let us say.
Morzer
@trollhattan: The concept of the Super League (or Super Sucker, if you prefer) has been around since at least 1968. I suspect that some day there’ll be discussions of the Super Inter-Galactic League.
J R in WV
@Van Buren:
We have an ironing board in the basement by the washer/dryer units. it is covered with non-ironable stuff, and we haven’t ironed anything for many years. More like a long skinny table…
So unexpected and unnecessary both!
burnspbesq
If Everton, West Ham, and Leicester will just get their shit together and keep it together for the remainder of the Premier League season, then four of the six breakaway clubs will miss out on next year’s Champions League, and two (Arsenal and Spurs) will miss out on Europe altogether.
That, mes amis, is karma in action.
tokyokie
@Tom Levenson: John Henry may be a right-wing asshole, but he seems to be a competent steward. Compare him to Tom Hicks, the hedge-fund genius whom Henry elbowed out of the ownership cartel at Liverpool. Hicks decimated the Texas Rangers and was well on his way to doing the same to LFC — and turning LFC into a perennial also-ran is akin to doing the same with the Yankees or the Celtics (not that I’d mind seeing either, mind you) — and Hicks had the Reds on that trajectory. Hicks went on to pretty much lose everything making bad bets on Argentine TV. He still wields power within the Texas Exes, which goes a long way to explaining why the Longwhorns have mostly been an afterthought for years in major-college football.
tokyokie
@Tom Levenson: I was wondering, when I learned of the proposed league’s setup, what the league would do with Juventus the next time its players are caught fixing matches. Which I figure is a matter of when, not if.
Lobo
Have you heard about the Colorado Rockies? It’s the best minor team in the Majors. It does quite well as a farm team for everyone else. It is also the only place where the visiting team has the home field advantage. Monfort, now that is a really bad owner! ;)
Ken
Nice, but did they really wait for 50 other bills just so this would be number 51?
I have much the same cynical reaction when it seems they’ve put more thought into the bill’s acronym (PATRIOT) than the contents.
Ken
@Mary G: I thought the Comstock laws were repealed or ruled unconstitutional years ago.
JAFD
@StringOnAStick: Welcome to the club. FedEx web tracking originally said I’d get package on Friday 4/16, then I waited around all afternoon Monday, arrived Tuesday while I was working for Board of Elections at school board voting, delivered by next-door neighbor Wednesday morn.
(For the curious: One of my minor vices is the 18xx series of games about railroad building and finance, kickstarter edition of 1822 was in package. (More about game can be read at BoardGameGeek.com))
MCA1
@misterpuff: Dead thread here, I know, but can we just replace the Twins with the Rockies or Orioles or someone? The Twins have won the AL Central 7 times in the last 18 seasons, including the last 2. They can’t beat the Yankees in the playoffs, but they’re in the top half of the American League in terms of general success the last few decades. Coming from a smaller television market, they’re close to a model franchise.
Otherwise, I wholeheartedly agree with the idea that U.S. professional sports could benefit from relegation practices. Obviously, the necessary conditions for it don’t exist in basketball and football unless and until the mockery of collegiate revenue sports is broken apart, and none of the powers that be in hockey or baseball would go along with it.
Relegation has its own problems, too; as long as the Yankees and Cubs, et. al. have their own television networks, the current luxury tax doesn’t do nearly enough to make things even a somewhat level playing field. Still, it would be good to see chronic mismanagement and rent collecting ownership get punished.