I can see the motives - greed. But the game is littered with greed as it is and we pretend it’s all fine. People screaming about fair play and all the rest are hypocrites - we’ve watched the game being destroyed from within and keep watching it pretending like it’s all above board. We saw Russian blood money and murderous oil money come in and take over and very few batted an eyelid… genuine local fans have been sounding off about this stuff for years but they are drowned out by corporates and the likes of Sky. But no one cant honestly start wagging their finger at the break away clubs here when the game has been dominated by greed and corruption for over two decades now. … I follow the fortunes of Liverpool but i’ve also long said the game is hollow. While we get a nice story now and again the same teams are competing at the top in every league for 30 years now, money is buying money but uefa and the smaller clubs dont mind as they are getting a slice of the pie. As are sky and the players and their agents - they’re all in on it. Greed.
What’s happening now is an elite few want a bigger slice of the pie, but it’s the same pie we’re looking at. i’m wholly opposed to them being part of their domestic leagues if they do go ahead with it - what’s the point of that? Of course the real people who suffer are the genuine local fans - this is the owners telling them to fuck off - these are the people over generations have built the clubs to what they are and what ever happens now they will be the ones shafted.
But if this thing doesnt happen now, it will happen eventually - I think like @Big_Dan_Campbell said, if they had gotten a few more clubs from around Europe locked in it would have made their position a bit stronger - but this league is inevitable in some shape. The CL has been brilliant over the last 10 or so years once you got to the knockout stages and it will be sad to lose that drama … football at it’s best is hard bet, but the game itself has become so cynical, so brand aware and so devoid of personality that a lot of games are very hard to watch bar a handful a year - would the new product give us more of the same or would the cream of the crop playing week in/ week out give us a great spectacle? …
The sport needs a huge overhaul at governing levels, but that’s never gonna happen. The money involved with players and their agents also needs addressing - sky and other blabbing on about it’s not fair on the players, well they’ve also played their part in bringing the game to here - i’d never deny anyone a right to earn and yes they are the product but the wage demands in the last 10 years are ott.
So now we’re stuck between the continued corruption of FIFA/UEFA and pretending it’s the beautiful game or a new breed of greed that wants to break away from them and I dont know what the answer is.
The issue for the premier is it would make a lot of games completely irrelevant. As in last night Leeds
V Liverpool was sort of interesting because Liverpool were desperately chasing down fourth place. That’ll be a huge blow to sky and bt.
The majority of the romance has gone from the game in the past 20 years but even then we’ve seen some really beautiful things - league titles for Liverpool and Leicester spring to mind. The birth of the superclub in the past 20 years has been a complete disaster. I don’t completely understand the situation between the Spanish government and Real Madrid and Barcelona but if they’re being bailed out with European money then the Spanish government are cowards and Angela Merkel has to put the foot down.
My big disagreement with you is that I now think that the big clubs should be allowed stay in their domestic leagues. So long as they are allowed stay in their domestic leagues then the only change is that European football just got a lot shitter. Once in a blue moon a Leicester City or Napoli will come along and be invited in for a season. Tottenham and Arsenal will languish in mid-table PL and will have no incentive to improve. It will get boring quickly. We’ve seen this year that sports without passionate crowds is a poor product. All the best players are in the Champions League already and there are already loads of European games. What does the fan get now that he didn’t get before?
The commodification of tradition is an ugly side of capitalism. People love something precisely because it isn’t commodified yet and that makes it the perfect thing to commodify. But don’t tell me this is “late stage capitalism”. There’s nothing capitalist about a country buying a football club in a foreign country, like has happened with Man City. This will end up being about world politics. “Late stage capitalism” means nothing and has no rules, other than the powerful get more powerful and the weak get weaker.
If the big clubs do leave their domestic leagues then I hope they all go bankrupt, even Man Utd and Liverpool. I don’t know why any Liverpool or Man Utd fan would keep following their team because it seems to spit in the face of everything they were saying mattered only a few years ago. There will always be football in Liverpool and Provisional Liverpool FC or Continuity Liverpool FC is something I could get behind. Relegation was good for the Aston Villa, Leeds and Rangers fan bases.
If it wasn’t true, the Super League would flop. And so the gravy train would end just as soon as it began. But it would be true - because that’s where the money would be - not in the Premier League.
I’m disagreeing with point that clubs would treat it like the league cup. Many clubs just won’t be competitive in the super league. They will then focus on their bread and butter.
Genuinely, why does anyone give a fuck about this?
Any football fan who thinks their local EPL franchise is some sort of community organisation is a blithering idiot and total loser.
This is just a power struggle between the elites of the uefa board, and the elite club owners, who are, by and large, two arses of the same cheek. The owners plotted their way to super wealth, and the uefa lads schemes their way to the uefa board. The owners want more money (and good luck to them), the uefa lads don’t want to lose their perks.
Uefa are by far the slyer, viler and more loathsome hypocrites of the two groups.
I hope the clubs don’t blink.
But those clubs would see an additional 300-500m revenue a year. I think Liverpool got 70m for winning the CL… How would the domestic leagues fare with the top clubs getting a 300-500m a year advantage? Unless they forgo the domestic tv money and spread it out to the rest of the league, that might be something. … We of course havent touched on who administrates this new super league? What changes will they make? Water breaks, 6-8 subs - all kinds of shenanigans.
But then the Super League effectively ceases to have a purpose. The managers of the six will be told in no uncertain terms by the owners where to focus - on a competition which guaranteees them 300 miliion quid.
There is a lot of nonsense talked about money and owners alright.
Like 50 years ago, most of the owners were total scumbags who paid the players like shit and herded fans into sheds.
Football lost its way when Abramovich came in, not when Glazer bought Manchester United. It’s the owners fucking cash with no business sense to it that has brought the game to this point.
It would be easy to give up on it all with the money and the egos involved at top table of all these Super Clubs. You can look at the Champions League and say its a fraud of a competition only there to line the pockets of the greedy.
But then you see young Manchester lads like Phil Foden or Marcus Rashford or Mason Greenwood glide around the pitch so effortlessly for their home town clubs and you say to yourself its worth fighting for.
There are some posters here who believe life has no higher purpose than to fumble in a greasy till. People who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Soulless feckers with hearts of ash.
We will have to just disagree on that. In my opinion clubs are not anything like what they were even 20 years ago. The vast majority of Liverpool and United fans don’t live in the UK, history matters not a jot to them, success and glamour is what matters. Go to any City home game when crowds return and see the amount of tourists at a game, what history is it that attracted them to Eastlands? I have no idea at all what PSGs history is, it won’t stop them becoming one of the worlds biggest clubs if they join this Super League.
There would still be champions wouldn’t there? It would just be that they wouldn’t necessarily be the representatives in Europe if from outside the big 6 but happy to be corrected on that. And of course the very small chance of anyone outside the big 6 winning it diminishes, but it has been very very small for quite some time now.
That’s not the point I was making at all …I’m saying new stadiums were a way for clubs to generate more income at the expense of smaller atmospheric grounds and all the history that went with them …
I was watching the cup semi final the other night with my father who’s been watching high level sport now for well over 60 years. He says he has never seen anyone in any sport move around a pitch like young Phil Foden of Manchester City.
Hold the back page, this has become political now. The tories are worried, it’s the average thick as two planks jingoistic footix they owe their majority to, they won’t want their base being upset. Boris might just save football yet, what a headline that would be
