On Sunday, the European game was rocked by revelations about a breakaway super league. Here’s what happened and why it got to this.
On Sunday, the European game was rocked by revelations that a number of leading clubs — anywhere from 12 to 15 — had either signed an agreement or expressed interest in joining a breakaway league that would effectively be a direct competitor for the UEFA Champions League. Among them are Manchester United, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Juventus and Barcelona. It’s not the first time such rumours have emerged, but the timing is what makes this situation different. – Sources: Fifteen elite clubs in Super League talks – Stream ESPN FC Daily on ESPN+ (U.S. only) – ESPN+ viewer’s guide: Bundesliga, Serie A, MLS, FA Cup and more On Monday, UEFA are expected to approve changes to the Champions League that will include an expanded format, more games and tweaks to the revenue distribution. These changes were agreed only on Friday after protracted negotiations with Europe’s leading clubs and the European Club Association (ECA). (They also voted to approve it, sources told ESPN.) All of this would now be overshadowed — and rendered potentially meaningless — if Europe’s biggest clubs renege on that agreement and are really ready to walk out as early as 2022, as some have reported. The implications, though, go far beyond this. UEFA isn’t merely a competition organizer; it’s a confederation whose job is to redistribute revenue and develop the game across the continent. The Champions League is its biggest cash cow, and a severely weakened competition would have a serious impact on the sport throughout Europe, which is part of the reason one UEFA executive told ESPN they were prepared to « fight until the end. » Q: Haven’t we been here before? Didn’t you write back in October about how we were ripe for this sort of change? A: I did, but it appeared that the genie went back in the bottle during the ECA’s negotiations with UEFA over the expanded Champions League. The ECA wanted more teams and more games (to generate more revenue); they also wanted more governance and oversight over how the Champions League is run commercially, and they wanted changes to the revenue distribution. It took a long time — originally, UEFA were hoping to announce this reformatting last month — and it was a tough negotiation, but at the eleventh hour late on Friday, the ECA hammered out a deal with UEFA. So you can imagine that when UEFA found out the potential breakaway on Sunday, they weren’t best pleased… especially since ECA president Andrea Agnelli also happens to be the Juventus president. And Juventus are reportedly one of the signatories to this deal. Q: How would the new Super League work, anyway? A: Details are still sketchy — there are different versions of this floating around, and all of it subject to negotiations. But for it to work, you’d imagine up to 20 teams playing each other regularly, most likely with a league format followed by playoffs. But more than the format, what matters here is that the clubs would not be playing in the UEFA Champions League and would, instead, share the revenue among themselves.
