Last week on FanHouse, I wrote about the G-14, an elite group of European football clubs that’s billed as “the first international club organization in world football,” and its fight with UEFA president Michel Platini over his proposed reforms for the Champions League.
Basically, the G-14 likes the current Champions League format just the way it is and wants nothing to do with giving Champions League spots to domestic cup winners, which is what Platini is proposing. So the G-14 has decided that if Platini gets his way, its member clubs will boycott the Champions League and create its own European Super League — words that are the Association football equivalent of “nuclear deterrent,” because nobody wants a Champions League filled with UEFA Cup teams.
At first, I thought that a European Super League might mean that the G-14 clubs would pull out of their domestic leagues and create their own league, but that probably wouldn’t be the case — especially in England, where the top clubs rake in tons of money from both the Premier League and Champions League. Those clubs don’t want to cut themselves off from domestic competition, but they would certainly welcome a new European competition in which they could collect stupid TV money without having to win their way in every year.
On the other hand, a home-and-away season in a separate league would be far too many games for the number of clubs they want to include. So how about modeling the Super League after, say, the NFL?
After all, the current Champions League format consists of 8 groups of 4 teams, just like the current National Football League structure. Teams within groups play home-and-away games against each other, just like the NFL’s division rivals do, though each NFL team also plays four games each against opponents in two other divisions.
The G-14 could set up for the Super League in similar fashion, creating a fourteen-match season where intra-group opponents play home-and-away games, while each group draws to play one game each against two other groups. Plus, in a Super League where all the clubs are set, you could create divisions that exploit national rivalries. After all, the G-14′s 40 members and invitees include 4 English clubs, 4 Spanish clubs, 4 Italian clubs, 4 French clubs and 4 German clubs. There are your first five divisions right there.
Unfortunately, because the G-14 has 40 clubs rather than 32, that’s where it all breaks down, because your divisions would look something like this:
CONFERENCE 1 CONFERENCE 2 English Division Western Division ---------------- ---------------- Arsenal Ajax Chelsea Benfica Liverpool FC Porto Manchester United PSV Eindhoven Spanish Division Northern Division ---------------- ----------------- Barcelona Anderlecht Real Madrid Celtic Sevilla FC Copenhagen Valencia Rosenberg Italian Division Central Division ---------------- ----------------- A.C. Milan Austria Vienna Inter Milan Basel Juventus Red Star Belgrade Roma Sparta Prague French Division Southern Division --------------- ----------------- Lyon Fenerbache Marseille Levski Sofia Monaco Maccabi Haifa Paris Saint Germain Olympiacos German Division Eastern Division --------------- ---------------- Bayer Leverkusen CSKA Moscow Bayern Munich Dynamo Kiev Borussia Dortmund Steaua Bucharest Werder Bremen Wisla Krakow
Some of those division rivalries would be hard to sell to an international TV audience. What’s Celtic without Rangers? Does Fenerbache v. Levski Sofia excite anyone nearly as much as Arsenal v. Chelsea or Milan v. Inter? Sure, it puts some lesser-known clubs on the map, but it can’t do all that much for ratings.
Furthermore, how do you determine inter-division pairings? If you put England against Spain and France against Germany, whom does Italy play? Are they stuck playing two divisions in the opposing conference? Mathematically, it doesn’t seem to add it.
Perhaps that’s why any Super League will probably end up looking a lot like the Champions League — 40 clubs drawn randomly into 8 groups of 5, each group playing an 8-match home-and-away season from August to December, with 16 clubs making the knockout stage starting in February. There wouldn’t be any natural rivalries in the group stage, but hey, that’s why we have domestic leagues, right?
The only real question, then, is whether the G-14 and Platini would let the current standoff get to that point. If they do, you can be sure that the Super League would become the next big global brand, and the European Cup will lose its value faster than an XFL franchise.
