Superlega, the top greedy clubs and Uefa bureaucrats
The Super League will not be the solution and in itself it is a horrifying idea. Seeing the same teams play over and over will end up boring everyone. But it is equally true that without those top clubs the show no longer exists. The italics of Tullio Fazzolari
Please don't be fooled. And let us not delude ourselves that we are defending noble ideals. In the war between Uefa and Superlega, sport has very little to do with it. The only ball in play in this match is money and who controls most of it.
It is a derby in which there are no good and bad. More or less they are all and only malicious: on the one hand the business men of the big clubs, on the other the bureaucrats of the federal bodies.
We saw a war like this, in our small way, in Italy in the 1980s.
The bulk of the revenues from national sport was represented by the football pools. The cost of the show was borne entirely by the teams who, however, had to live almost exclusively by selling tickets at the stadium.
The money from the football pools went to the Coni which rightly financed all other sports. A little more had to be given to the teams now on the verge of bankruptcy.
But the CONI bureaucrats won and the clubs threw themselves headlong into sponsorships and TV rights.
The starting point is quite similar.
After a year of pandemic and without even that little cash flow from stadium revenues, most of Europe's top clubs are on the gas and need to find more income.
The Super League will not be the solution and in itself it is a horrifying idea. Seeing the same teams play over and over will end up boring everyone. But it is equally true that without those top clubs the show no longer exists.
You subscribe to Sky or Dazn to see Liverpool and Real Madrid and not for Cluj or Red Star.
In other words, a large part of the revenues would move from Uefa tournaments to the Super League.
The top clubs have launched the initiative with arrogance.
Uefa is reacting in an angry and broken way like a child who is deprived of a toy.
Everything would be resolved if the Superlega were one more tournament in addition to the already existing ones, thus bringing new resources. But it is a far from simple undertaking.
Everything could be resolved even if top clubs and Uefa behave differently from Coni and Italian teams in the 80s. And that is sitting at a table to reorganize the Champions and Europa League and redefine the division of resources more rationally.
That is to do without some Cypriot team whose existence was unknown to assign more funds to Barcelona or City.
This will not be easy either because of UEFA's internal balance.
Everything suggests that it will be an exhausting tug of war.
But without an agreement between Uefa and the top club, football will come out not only divided but halved.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/superlega-i-top-club-avidi-e-i-burocrati-uefa/ on Tue, 20 Apr 2021 15:11:57 +0000.