European Super League

paulm

Bullion

paulm

Something I really like about this is that it's a win for capitalism.
The modern sports league formats (often considered the american style but in reality seen throughout the world), are a more socialist style model, with salary caps etc, and guaranteed participation regardless of performance. And they bring the typical socialist problems - hypocrisy and greed at the leadership level. 
It's great that football fans reject that, and really value merit-based participation. 

That's a biased way of looking at things. What the ESL clubs were trying to do is what capitalism, without regulation, leads to - the wealthy and powerful setting up markets to their benefit.

The debate of socialism vs capitalism is best left alone in this forum as it will go wild and most probably result in me being reprimanded, as has happened in the past. This place tends to get policed by opinion rather than rules when it comes to these sorts of topics. 
Lets just say I don't believe my post was biased toward anything or anybody, and move on!

Yeh the class politics of football are insane.
Champion of the people Jamie Vardy and his club's underdog billionaire.
I don't think that restricting what billionaires can do with their power and dosh after a working and middle class revolt can really be spun as a victory of capitalism. And when the proposed salary caps that are a leveler elsewhere would be to stop rampant inflation of already obscenely high player pay.
But I can see the point you are aiming at. 

The two team ESL. Madrid v Barca. I believe there was a 5 Billon dollar deal on the table for the ESL to start etc. I also believe these two club are the serious movers for it as they are in some very serious debt. One has 700 Million pounds due to creditors later this year and the other is in a similar situation. There's some very interesting stuff on FB about it. Yeah I know FB can be a load of bollox, but some of the football fans are quite switched on. There's only a very small number of fans in favour of it. Not the Italians, English, French, Germans. 

any deal driven by recovering debt is fraught with dangers.

So what do you think UEFA does now? I'd kinda like to see each of the teams who signed up for this banned from European competitions for at least a season. And then when they return having any prize money that they receive in the first year being redistributed to the non-europe playing teams in their league/pyramid. 
Quite punitive actions I know, but I don't think they are as drastic as creating your own league. 

I dont think banning them solves anything, in fact it will likely just encourage them to plan further for a separate league. Hurting them in the respective leagues ie EPL hurts the fans as well as the owners, ie they might not qualify for champs league - but this too might just encourage them to look to move on. Its a tough one, but I'd think a fine of some nature rather than a ban or deduction of points would hurt more. 

Yea I'd be very careful.
In the end it wasn't UEFA or any threats like that that stopped this thing, it was the english football fans, all by themselves, and the serious sh*ts they put up their club owners. 
The power of these clubs remains. If they come up with something the fans do not revolt against, like the exact same concept but somehow finding a middle ground in the argument of qualification vs guaranteed participation, then look out. 

martinb

paulm

Bullion

paulm

Something I really like about this is that it's a win for capitalism.
The modern sports league formats (often considered the american style but in reality seen throughout the world), are a more socialist style model, with salary caps etc, and guaranteed participation regardless of performance. And they bring the typical socialist problems - hypocrisy and greed at the leadership level. 
It's great that football fans reject that, and really value merit-based participation. 

That's a biased way of looking at things. What the ESL clubs were trying to do is what capitalism, without regulation, leads to - the wealthy and powerful setting up markets to their benefit.

The debate of socialism vs capitalism is best left alone in this forum as it will go wild and most probably result in me being reprimanded, as has happened in the past. This place tends to get policed by opinion rather than rules when it comes to these sorts of topics. 
Lets just say I don't believe my post was biased toward anything or anybody, and move on!

Yeh the class politics of football are insane.
Champion of the people Jamie Vardy and his club's underdog billionaire.
I don't think that restricting what billionaires can do with their power and dosh after a working and middle class revolt can really be spun as a victory of capitalism. And when the proposed salary caps that are a leveler elsewhere would be to stop rampant inflation of already obscenely high player pay.
But I can see the point you are aiming at. 

The failure of this venture doesn't "restrict what billionaires can do with their power and dosh" whatsoever. The point of it was to generate new revenue for the club. Revenue that doesn't exist now. They can still do what they like with their money, they just wanted to generate more of it. 
Salary caps are explicitly anti-capitalist, so not sure what that last bit was about. 
The english football pyramid is very capitalist. Merit-based, no ceiling for what you can do, no regulation of wages etc. If you can win, then you reap the spoils, and build yourself a platform for longer term success.  Far cry from salary-capped, ring-fenced franchise leagues. And also very little safety net if things go awry. 

I'd be very uncomfortable with UEFA banning any of them - that'd be too much power in the hands of the organisation.

Imagine if, in protest of Qatar, a bunch of countries decided to host their own world cup. How would you feel about Fifa punishing these countries?

20 Legend

I'd be very uncomfortable with UEFA banning any of them - that'd be too much power in the hands of the organisation.

Imagine if, in protest of Qatar, a bunch of countries decided to host their own world cup. How would you feel about Fifa punishing these countries?

kind of a different scenario though, ESL wasnt done in protest of anything, it was a case of the rich big wigs wanting to get more money from a sport that is/has already earned them a truckload of cash. If it was done in protest of some unjust/unfair thing then I'd expect the fans would be more willing to understand.

theprof

20 Legend

I'd be very uncomfortable with UEFA banning any of them - that'd be too much power in the hands of the organisation.

Imagine if, in protest of Qatar, a bunch of countries decided to host their own world cup. How would you feel about Fifa punishing these countries?

kind of a different scenario though, ESL wasnt done in protest of anything, it was a case of the rich big wigs wanting to get more money from a sport that is/has already earned them a truckload of cash. If it was done in protest of some unjust/unfair thing then I'd expect the fans would be more willing to understand.

Totally, but do you trust UEFA / FIFA to draw that line in the future? I don't think the clubs have broken any hard and fast rules - I don't think UEFA should be able to down and retrospectively hammer them. Sets a dangerous precedent.

it sure does, without knowing what agreements and contracts are in place we may never know what rules (if any) were actually broken. From a fns perspective the clubs have simply broken trust and offended on a moral level. Any "punishment" needs to be directed solely at the owners of the clubs in question, not the clubs themselves. It's the owners greed that caused this.

@paulm won't quote everything. Essentially a salary cap here is price fixing by a cartel. They're not trying to make it easier for poorer clubs to compete. Not in any way aiming for equitable outcomes, but to prevent profits being lost in increasing wage demands. Cartel behaviour and other attempts to avoid competition aren't socialism- they're still capitalism.　

 And owners restrictions - they can't go and set up their own football competition. FIFA owns and regulates the game. They were prevented from setting up their own league. That's a restriction on their behaviour.  There has been some attempt at FFP. That's a restriction. And the fact that it's been a protest appealing to working class roots makes it an incongruous way to look at things.
And to argue that the EPL  had some kind of equal playing field of perfect competition would be delusional.
It just makes it a little more difficult to dominate and hoover everything up, but it's not a particularly genuine competitive structure. It's more competitive on a continuum, but.
It also is based on fixed geographic locations in the UK which is another restriction on owners, when they could make more money perhaps as a travelling circus in Asia and the USA where a one off ESL game would probably allow better return per punter. 
It's also hard to argue that moneyball land is socialism writ large and thus destroying all that is good. 
Actually think this is kind of the guts of it- can there be a competition run where the organisers can say no to owners? The clubs thought there were enough of them to call the shots. This time yes. Next time?

So what does the President of Napoli mean when he talks about bringing, err, ‘real entrepreneurs’ to the football board room? 

Not surprised Uefa lost this case. It’s all about how European law overrides football law. Like in the Bosman case where the employment system was shown to illegally conflict with EU labour laws. Football clubs are privately owned. Under business law you can’t stop a private owner wanting to maximizing their profit by engaging in other activities. If the owner of Real Madrid wants his team to play in  a separate competition midweek then it’s his legal right as long as his team turns up to play in La Liga in the weekend. How it might work in practice is a completely different thing. I suspect that European football will look entirely different in a few years time. There will be EPL games regularly played in Doha and Miami. Top end club football has become a cesspit of greed.

Last sentence sums it all up for me. Fudgeing joke what the game has become at the elite level. Throw in the fudgeing nonsense that is VAR as well. A sad state of affairs.