The New European Super League – (Attempt Number Two)

By WherestheMatch Team

The first European Super League proposal in 2021 was met with almost unanimous outrage. Fans hated the idea of a more "streamlined" footballing pyramid, and the clubs involved were quick to backpedal on their support of the new competition. Many saw the Super League for exactly what it was – an egregious attempt at generating even more funding for the top teams and broadcasters involved. After news of the Super League broke, European football associations were quick to act and promptly blocked the new breakaway league before it was able to amass any real support.

Several years on, now in late 2023, the European Court of Justice has ruled that FIFA and EUFA were unlawful in their blocking of the Super League and that should its board of directors wish to restart their push into European football, there wouldn’t be anything that the governing bodies would be able to do about it. Naturally, only hours after the decision went public, an announcement was made for version two of the European Super League.

What’s Different This Time?

It seems that with the second iteration of the Super League proposal, fan feedback was taken into consideration with several key aspects of the competition’s formatting and style seeing change:

Free Viewing of All Matches

Messy broadcasting agreements are a well-documented issue of modern football; fans simply don’t want to pay hundreds of pounds every month to watch the occasional broadcast of their favourite team. The Super League offers a solution in the form of free broadcasting for all of the fixtures taking place across their division. This is actually a pretty good idea, free broadcasting not only appeals to long-time supporters, but also to casual fans for whom watching the Premier League or other top divisions is simply not practical. It’ll be interesting to see how they plan to create a financially sustainable organisation without capitalising on the millions that domestic leagues earn from broadcasting agreements. 

Access Based on Sporting Merit

Possibly the most controversial element of the first Super League proposal was that the division didn’t have any promotion or relegation. This meant that the executives would select a batch of clubs to take part who would then play each other presumably until the end of time. Not so great for anyone who supports a team outside of ‘Europe’s Elite’, and even less great for anyone wanting to watch competitive matches where results actually matter. The new format will not only have promotion and relegation between each of its three divisions, but will also reportedly have teams drop out of the competition altogether if they happen to finish near the bottom of the lowest ranked Blue Tier. Naturally, this will also clear space for new clubs to join based on the easily quantifiable metric of sporting merit. There will be 64 teams taking part in total with 16 in the gold and silver tiers and a further 32 in the blue.  

Midweek Matches with Focus on Domestic Competitions

The previous Super League proposal clashed heavily with domestic competitions; partaking clubs would have likely needed to drop out completely if they had anything short of Man City-esque squad depth. Fixture pile-up would have been ridiculous and it’s only by promising a midweek match schedule has the league managed to convince people that it can in fact run alongside domestic divisions. The number of proposed games has also been reduced with each club now playing only a minimum of fourteen games a season. Teams that placed within the top eight would then enter a knockout stage to crown the league champion; top teams would only play several more fixtures than they would when reaching the late stages of the Champions or Europa Leagues. 

Rumours of Interest From 20+ Clubs

It seems that the scrutiny clubs faced after showing interest in the original Super League project taught them a valuable lesson – nope, not to respect the history of traditional footballing infrastructure, but rather to keep everything secret from fans until it’s too late for them to do anything about it. Anas Laghrari (A22 Sports Management co-founder and the man in charge of marketing the league) has stated that over twenty clubs are already in favour on joining the new breakaway league and that there is now enough support to fully start the competition. He wasn’t willing to say which clubs had agreed to join the project since he didn’t wish to ‘expose them’. We do know, however, that Tottenham, Chelsea, and Arsenal – three of the clubs that initially expressed interest in the Super League have already released statements that they wouldn’t be partaking. Same goes for several members of the German Bundesliga in Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig, and Bayer Leverkusen. The Bundesliga 50+1 ownership rule which gives fans a majority stake in their supported club makes the decisions that these teams make probably the most representative of overall fan opinion. 

On the other side, there are several clubs we know are staunch supporters of the Super League. Real Madrid and Barcelona in the Spanish La Liga heavily backed the first proposal and never backtracked on their support of the new league. In the Serie A Napoli’s president Aurelio De Laurentiis threw his support behind the project declaring that ‘today football is administered by elderly people, but above all they are without vision’ as a 74-year-old club president, he likely has great insight into the footballing vision of the elderly. As for the remaining 17 clubs, there isn’t a great deal of information available. You would presume that there would be a lot of pressure for some of the Premier League clubs to join seeing as they play in the most profitable league in the world and generally attract some of the highest viewership figures. 

The European Super League would likely be pretty beneficial for clubs from less popular leagues that either have very limited access to European competitions, or none whatsoever. Ranking in the top 64 of EUFA’s club co-efficient you have clubs such as Czechia’s Slavia Prague, Hungary’s Ferencvárosi TC, and Slovakia’s ŠK Slovan Bratislava, all teams that need to finish first in their domestic league just to make the Champions League qualifying rounds. An additional European competition would better showcase these clubs and offer more of a platform for other teams from their leagues to progress into the European spotlight.  

The Future of Football – Super League or No Super League?

While the second version of the Super League proposal is infinitely better than the first, it’s still an attack on the footballing ecosystem. The current European format is far from perfect, but it has a long legacy behind it with genuinely high stakes; players and coaches clearly love taking part in these competitions and they’ve given us so many iconic moments over the years. In a similar way to the Saudi Pro League, the footballing world isn’t going to instantly care about the European Super League and the premise of big club playing big club doesn’t always warrant the attention you would expect (look no further than the Club World Cup). What’s there to stop the Super League from being just another competition in which top teams field their under-21s? If you’re asking clubs to abandon the Champion League, Europa League and Conference League, you better make it worth the while.