A Super Rant for the Super League

This week’s Phthursday Musings garnered actual complaints, on the grounds that I did not write even more about the Super League nonsense. I try not to have Musings devolve into outright Rants, but the thirst of META-SPIEL readers must be quenched. Quashed? Squashed? Squished? Anyway, here we go…

So, Super League.

I’m going to talk about sports and money and international politics here. If that’s your nexus, sit back and enjoy. If that sounds horrid to you, well, yes, I understand, but this being a rant, and my being something vaguely akin to an entertainer… y’all sit back and enjoy too, ok?

As a reminder of what we’re talking about here, the Super League was a proposed, and apparently contractually executed, group of 12 of the world’s most famous soccer teams, with an intention of it turning into 20 teams. The original 12 were from Spain (Barcelona, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid), Italy (AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus), and England (Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur).

All of these teams compete in leagues in their respective countries: Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, England’s Premier League. They also - if they qualify - compete in an European-wide annual competition called the UEFA Champions League. (UEFA is the European federation; other continents have similar federations.) Every year, 32 teams qualify for the Champions League, including 4 each from Spain, Italy, and England, and multiple from Germany and France, and some combination of teams from other European countries, all based on where they placed in their respective domestic leagues the previous year. Whichever team wins the UEFA Champions League is more or less considered the best soccer team in the world that year.

The Champions League first played in 1992-93, and is almost always won by a team from England, Spain, Italy, or Germany. In 2004, Porto (Portugal) won. In 1995, Ajax (Netherlands) won. Otherwise, it’s been a team from one of those four countries, with 9 of the last 12 won by Barcelona, Real Madrid, or Bayern Munich. The dominance of a handful of teams at the pinnacle of the sport can best be compared in America to college football. Barcelona and Real and Bayern are, roughly, Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State.

The “problem” these famous clubs have with the Champions League is threefold. One is that they think they’re more important so they deserve more power. One is that they think they’re more important so they deserve more money. We’ll come back to those.

The other “problem” is that the most famous clubs in the world are not guaranteed entry to the Champions League every year. Consider Italy. Often in recent years, Italian Champions League slots have gone to Napoli, AS Roma, and even Atalanta, thereby relegating AC Milan and/or Inter Milan to the second-tier Europa League. Or, consider England, where there are a “Big Six” of teams, but only four can qualify for the Champions League in a given year, and every so often one of those four slots is “stolen” by some “upstart” like Everton or Leicester.

Imagine if Alabama complained about missing out on the college football playoff in a given year, not because they’d won the most games, but because they were more famous than Mississippi State, and how there would be zero sympathy for them. Now imagine that their solution for this was to just form a league with Clemson and Ohio State, where every game could be gigantic, pop huge TV ratings, and they could keep all the cash between themselves. That is how to understand the Super League.

American college football, of course, technically consists of universities, which are technically not-for-profit institutions, all of which leads into a very different kind of mess from the one at hand. The huge European soccer teams have actual owners, and they are the drivers of the Super League concept, and it is worth stopping and considering who some of these people are. I know more about the English clubs so I’m going to focus there.

Manchester United is the most famous of the English teams. They are, today, owned by the Glazer family. Wait, you say… isn’t that? Yes, the same Glazer family that owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Liverpool’s ownership group is FSG - Fenway Sports Group. That’s right, same ownership as the Boston Red Sox.

Arsenal is owned by Stan Kroenke. Los Angeles Rams.

See a pattern?

Now, they’re not all this way. Chelsea is owned by a Russian oligarch. Tottenham… well, look, Tottenham’s inclusion in all of this is silly, but let’s not dwell on that.

Manchester City is owned by Sheikh Mansour, deputy prime minister and member of the royal family of United Arab Emirates. Ahh, well, we’ll get back to this as well, as this is part of the whole problem.

All of this background information is important because it establishes some of the groundwork for where all of this is heading.

I want to tangent here for a moment to talk about American sports, to provide better context, especially since most of you are from the Midwest like me.

The Green Bay Packers are the only team in the four major North American sports which is owned by the fans. There is no majority owner. There is a team president who represents the team at owners’ meetings, but the Packers, in North American terms, are a unicorn.

The Chicago Bears are, amazingly, still owned by the McCaskey family, the heirs to George Halas. Virginia McCaskey, Papa Bear’s daughter, is older than Queen Elizabeth. On the one hand this is a sore subject for Bears fans, because the team has clearly not been well run for decades. On the other hand, this should arguably be a point of pride for Bears fans.

The Packers and Bears are the oldest American football franchises. They are deeply steeped in their respective histories. They are, in many respects, the two closest examples in American sports to English soccer teams, and their ownership structures are part of what makes this so.

Imagine if the Bears were sold tomorrow. Maybe for Bears fans, this is a thrilling thought. But imagine if they were sold to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates. That might be a bit of a pisser, eh?

Well, let’s look at the Chicago Cubs instead. Several years ago, they were bought by the Ricketts family. The Ricketts poured a lot of money into the Cubs - a lot of cash at players, hiring the brightest executive in the game (Theo Epstein), all sorts of work to Wrigley Field. And it all worked, didn’t it? They finally won the World Series, after all. And yet…

Have you driven by Clark and Addison recently? Have you seen where all of this Ricketts cash has been going? Oh, it might not be the Emiratis, but this isn’t ownership you can actually feel good about. And I’m going to argue that it’s not so much about politics per se. It’s about this basic fact: For the Ricketts family, the Cubs are first and foremost an investment.

An investment.

I’m a Packers fan. I love the idea that the team is not just owned by the fans, but has also been, to the extent that such a thing can exist in American football, something of a model franchise, not just in spite of but arguably because of its ownership model.

But I wish the Bears could also be a model franchise as is, without having to be - like the Cubs - flipped into an investment to make it worth somebody’s while to bring the franchise up to snuff. (I wish they could be, well, the Steelers, I guess, another old franchise - just not quite as old - still owned by the original family and which has been a model for decades.)

Think about other well-known owners in American sports today. For how many of them are we ultimately talking about paydays? Used to be that the whole point of getting rich was so that you could do something crazy like… buy a baseball team. But even that’s not good enough anymore.

Here’s where the Glazers and Kroenkes and their ilk come in. Do any of you, for a split second, think that Stan Kroenke gives two shits about what some Arsenal supporter group thinks? Have you seen this crazy bullshit he’s building in suburban Los Angeles so that he can have twice as many shiny surfaces as Jerry Jones? Buying Arsenal for him was the equivalent of laying down 2 billion armies on north London in a game of Risk. Don’t be surprised when he moves on Madagascar next.

You know what Kroenke gets to do today, that he couldn’t have done a few years ago as merely the owner of an NFL team? He gets to rub elbows with Sheikhs. He is important to them. He is them.

Now, at least in the NFL, if you’re Stan Kroenke, and you’re at an owners’ meeting, you’re necessarily dealing with… other billionaires. Yeah, there are still weirdos around like the McCaskeys, but you’re probably eating at the cool kids table with Shad Khan (who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars and also Fulham F.C.) It’s a billionaires club with just a couple weird interlopers. It’s all good.

The Premier League? For every Sheikh, there’s somebody running around who just happens to own the likes of Huddersfield Town. Don’t even get them started on the FA as a whole, which is like having to deal with minor league owners as though they matter. And lord, Europe? The president of the Romanian federation? Andorra??? Who has time for any of this?

The Super League brings all of these tensions to a head. All of these outside oligarchs buying their way in, the marginalization of fans, the breakdown of traditions, the existential reckoning that your prized club is really just another fucking investment for these people…

So let’s talk about Newcastle for a moment.

Newcastle United F.C. is old school English soccer. They’ve been around since 1892. They’re one of the most storied clubs in soccer history. They haven’t been especially good for 20 years. They’re owned by a man, Mike Ashley, who seems to be phoning it in at this point. They’re from a relatively remote part of the country, far in the north. The best comp I can make is to Pittsburgh, some hybrid of the Steelers and the Pirates.

The Saudis have been trying to buy Newcastle F.C. for a couple of years. I’m a little fuzzy on what exactly I mean by “The Saudis” because the purchase is indirect - they don’t really want people to know exactly who’s making the buy. But certainly it’s the royal family, and I can think of almost no group of people in the world more antithetical to how Newcastle sees itself than the Saudi royal family.

Do Newcastle supporters want to win the Premier League? Would they want to be seen as big enough to be included the next time a Super League is talked about? Yes, yes, yes.

Would they be willing to accede to Saudi ownership to make it happen?

Well, is it like the Bears? Years of mediocrity can set a fanbase into accepting change in any form, right?

Or do they look at their closest comps and think, fuck that, the Saudis are just the Ricketts on oil-based steroids, we’ll take our chances and be… the Packers? Because that discussion is very much present in Newcastle today. Forget the Saudis, forget Mike Ashley - the fans can run this club better than any of that.

I hope the Saudis are finally sent packing. (Though I suspect they will inevitably just buy some other club somewhere else.) I’d love to see a fan coup in Newcastle. I’d root hard for that.

Can it work? I’m dubious, and here’s why. It’s not just about what’s going on on the field. It’s not just about selecting a manager. There are a lot of other insane things in professional sports today.

I am of course talking about consultants.

The Houston Astros won the World Series in 2017. A few years earlier, when they were the worst team in baseball, Sports Illustrated famously predicted their WS triumph. How did they pull this off? (It’s all aged poorly given the pitch stealing scandal they were associated with, but for my purposes here I’m going to pretend like that didn’t happen.)

Yes, their front office made excellent choices in the draft, and in signing key free agents, and all that jazz. In the end you can’t win a sports championship unless you’re putting a sufficiently superior team on the field.

There was another thing though. Consultants. Specifically, McKinsey.

McKinsey is a huge global consulting firm. They have loads of government contracts with loads of governments. Their approach to consultancy is very much in line with modern neoliberal thought: Data. Analysis. Invest in what matters most. Cut the fat - which, naturally, means firing a lot of people.

The Astros’ general manager was a man named Jeff Luhnow. He was not a baseball lifer. No, he was a businessman, an engineer, an entrepreneur. A McKinsey man. He was first hired by the Cardinals in 2003, and joined the Astros in 2011.

Luhnow brought a sharp analytical eye to the Astros front office. He also brought a broad disinterest in baseball tradition per se. His goal was to forge the Astros into a championship franchise. He succeeded. But at what cost?

McKinsey was brought in, and they looked near and far. Relevant to our overall story here, they went to Europe and spent time evaluating soccer training facilities. Unlike the systems we know best in the U.S., in Europe, the large clubs have academies. They’re not quite minor leagues, and they’re definitely not like college programs. The Astros found that the model focused more on structured training for smaller numbers of players, as opposed to the typical baseball minor league model of having multiple farm teams playing a lot of games.

Fast forward a couple of years, and Major League Baseball has gutted the minor leagues, contracting the total number of teams. Small cities with decade-long traditions like Clinton, Iowa lost their minor league teams. Yeah, they can add independent league teams. But no minors… now they’re not part of something larger.

English soccer is different. A small city like Clinton has probably had its own team for a century. Oh, they might be buried in the fourth division. But that also means they have a shot at making the third division. And every so often, teams long buried in the English hierarchy suddenly emerge and make it all the way to the Premier League, like Huddersfield a couple of years ago, or Bournemouth a few years ago. All of these places are all part of the English Football Association. It’s different. It’s tradition.

Luhnow and the Astros said, screw that. Our goal is to win, not to preserve tradition.

The Astros, until the pitch stealing scandal broke, were not only seen as a championship team. They were seen as a model franchise. Other teams started emulating them. Well. Do you really think that stopped? Do you really think that they didn’t all bring in their own consultants? Come on!

All of this of course coincided with the way that game play has evolved. This year, strikeouts are up even more. Balls in play are down even more. Pitchers are throwing filthier and filthier stuff. Every team is shifting. There’s a through line here, from the Billy Beane Moneyball A’s, to the Red Sox under Theo Epstein going from perpetual losers to an unquestioned one of the four largest teams in the game, to the Astros under Luhnow. Epstein, at least, loves baseball. Luhnow? The Ricketts family? A lot of the rest of these fools? Only a couple of franchises seemed to care at all about what was happening to the minor leagues. It spoke volumes.

Soccer is a different game, you say? You better believe that all of the biggest clubs are spending gobs of money on whatever consultation they can find. A whole lot of money is going into sports science, nutrition, you name it. But their academy system is already in place, they’re already locked in to their systems. The Astros learned from them, and they learned from the Astros, and one of the things that all of these people have learned together is that they can’t afford to be sentimental, they can’t afford to worry about tradition. The Red Sox? Liverpool? You’re thinking, these can’t be places where they no longer care about tradition, right? But it’s not the traditions you see. It’s broader stuff. The stuff that can be trimmed at the edges. Small towns don’t matter.

Small towns don’t matter? Only championships? Hanging out with sheikhs? Forgetting the little guy? You know what all this sounds like?

Trump Country.

Brexit.

I’m not going to claim to be an expert on Brexit, but the way that right populism is able to bounce itself off of neoliberal-style globalism… do I really need to spell all this out?

Shut down minor leagues? Tell small towns they’re just flyover country and don’t matter? COASTAL ELITES.

Buy out century only clubs? Do away with traditions? Blow off the FA Cup? FOREIGN ELITES.

ELITES ELITES ELITES. It doesn’t matter that the people who like to cry about it are themselves elites. Correction: It does matter, because they know what it’s like from the inside and are uniquely equipped to spin things. That’s what Trump did. That’s what Boris Johnson did. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I haven’t mentioned the FA cup until now but I really should. The FA Cup is kind of like NCAA March Madness, except every single team is in the tournament. And soccer being what it is, with a lot of 1-0 games, it is entirely possible for gigantic upsets to happen. Imagine a single A baseball team legitimately beating a big league team. Imagine not just a directional state university but even a small liberal arts college getting to host Duke - and possibly even beating them. There’s nothing quite like it in America. It’s a way that England can pretend that it’s all one united country. Now imagine Manchester City saying, oh, well, we won this cup a few times recently, we just don’t care anymore. Imagine the ire. That’s part of what would have happened with the Super League.

Here is where I really think you can see things all come together. It’s about billionaires, it’s about small towns, it’s about beer songs, it’s about people who think they’re all that matters, it’s about people desperately insisting that they really do still matter… it’s not just some game. It’s so much more than that.

That the drivers of the Super League concept didn’t understand how angry everyone would be demonstrates far more than them just being out of touch. It belies that they’re not just a bunch of greedy bastards, but that they’ve fully come around to believing the myths that they’ve used to justify their money grubbing.

It’s something beyond hubris. What the soccer executives and owners are trying to pull is an extreme manifestation of Clinton-Bush economics. It’s about oligarchs and even literal royalty. Consider the idea that someone making $20,000,000 a year for kicking or throwing a ball around might still somehow feel “owned”. Do you find that offensive? Do you know people who do? But isn’t that, ultimately, what these people are about? In soccer they don’t even bother talking about contracts half the time. When a player goes from one team to another, he’s not traded, he’s sold, he’s bought. Those aren’t my words. Those are the words that they really use. And at the highest levels of the sport, I think the owners have internalized the words. It’s not about contracts. It’s about complete ownership.

If a person who makes so much money feels owned then how about someone struggling to make ends meet?

The way we say things matters. The way people position themselves matters. The COASTAL ELITES and FOREIGN ELITES concepts wouldn’t resonate if there wasn’t a lot of truth to them.

But, of course, it’s hard to be on the other side of elites, because you’re not actually negotiating with them, not actually bargaining with them, not actually in direct dialogue with them. They are abstractions, straw men as much as they are actual actors in most cases. Only for the likes of Trump are they legitimately more. A Sheikh from Abu Dhabi is an actual person for Trump. A baseball fan in Clinton, Iowa is not.

All said, that the entire Super League concept suddenly collapsed so quickly tells me that the fans really do matter after all.

Yes, the players were also opposed. Yes, some of the world’s most famous coaches were also opposed, most notably Jürgen Klopp of Liverpool.

But fans literally showed up and demonstrated at Chelsea and at Manchester United. In many of these places they are calling for the ouster of billionaire owners. I struggle to see how this is actually going to work, but if there’s a narrow path to all that, it is this: A man like Stan Kroenke expects to be able to buy his way past nuisance, and if he can’t, then he’ll sell his way past it. If I were an Arsenal fan, that’s how I’d be thinking right now.

Growing up, I didn’t know shit about international soccer. As a little kid I never played soccer myself. It’s not a hard game to understand, and I’m a big sports fan, and even I didn’t even know about what all the positions were and what the whole offsides thing was about until I was in my 30s. Out of sight, out of mind.

I have come around to embrace it only in the last 6 years or so, in part because I have gotten to be so fed up with American football, in part because I just needed something new to think about… but also largely because the game itself is very easy to digest, very easy to warm up to. You go to a match, and from kickoff to the final whistle, it’s less than two hours. You can see your kid playing and actually getting what’s going on. It’s not a fluke that it’s the world’s sport.

The big clubs are, obviously, an important part of the fabric. How wouldn’t they be? But, call me naive, I think their importance is overblown, and I even think that the narrow domination of the leagues in so many countries by so few teams is working against them.

It was a super fluke that I mostly randomly adopted Leicester a few years ago after they were re-promoted to the Premier League, and got to see a crazy season where they were absolutely the worst team in the league, only to rebound and escape relegation, and them come back the next year with a coach installed at the 11th hour and a team of slight outcasts and underappreciated talents and shock the world by winning the Premier League.

Sure, that was all ridiculous. But the theatre was wonderful. Along the way I picked up more of the cadence of how a year progresses. Part of the thrill of it all is that the big clubs do struggle. Manchester United will just up and lose to West Bromwich Albion for no good reason. But then when they right the ship, the game play can be breathtaking. The narrative quality of it all… it’s somehow more in line with what I’m used to with American sports traditionally. But the narrative spills in every which direction. United can have an off year or two and it doesn’t damage the credibility of the game, it heightens it. I don’t care if the Champions League semifinals are all English teams or all non-English teams, if the teams that are there put on a good show.

I actually think that international soccer marketing keeps screwing up by not expanding the limits. I’ve never been able to find anything Leicester branded at a store, even though they are arguably the 7th largest team in England now and have all sorts of exciting playmakers. I get skeptical of supply and demand arguments when the supply seems to be making a concentrated effort to constrict the demand. Imagine if the Rays won the World Series and you went to a sports store and they had Yankees gear but not Rays gear. Doesn’t that kind of hint that they’re not even trying to sell the championships, they’re trying to sell something else?

It’s just another variation on a core issue with globalism. If globalism is about bringing far-flung corners of the world together as a goal unto itself, that’s one thing. If globalism is about trying to sell me a Manchester City jersey that says FLY EMIRATES when I’m never actually going to do such a thing, that’s something else entirely. Soccer is a vehicle for both the good and bad of globalism. The Super League was a power move on the part of bad globalism, of neoliberal globalism. Let’s not get caught up in thinking that it was a power move on behalf of globalism, full stop. That’s how we get things like Brexit.

Right or wrong, the politics of international soccer have fundamentally changed my outlook on politics generally. The hollowing out of the small cities of the American Midwest is mirrored in other countries, in places like the north of England, and the intersection of sports and geopolitics is abundantly clear to me. The power moves of Emirati or Saudi royals vis-a-vis soccer can hardly be separated from their power moves vis-a-vis oil. Even if you struggle to understand exactly how the connection works, the ongoing war in Yemen and the oil money gushing into European soccer are absolutely related. It’s just like how America would export arms and hamburgers all at once decades ago. Hard power, soft power. It’s all power, and its dynamics have shifted immensely. But the people still have power, and sometimes, they can find a way to push back.

This photo of Chelsea fans protesting has made the rounds, and sums it up well:

(Photo from Getty Images)

There are boatloads of articles out there that will dive more deeply into some of these things. My vantage point - seeing the Super League through the lens of the American Midwest - may help it all make sense for some people, but I’m hardly going to claim to understand more about most of these things than people who follow the Premier League or La Liga religiously. And there are A LOT of those people.

What’s been interesting to me is seeing how some of the themes I’ve thought about have popped up in other stories. Andrea Agnelli, chairman at Juventus, actually blamed Brexit for the collapse of the Super League, a line of argument that seems… horribly tangled. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong! Part of the point in all of this is that things are very much horribly tangled.

Yes, it’s about money. Yes, it’s about power. But “It’s all about the money!” is incredibly reductive, even when talking about billionaires and sheikhs.

We happen to have a house with a long, narrow yard, and an old chain link fence all the way around. That part of the yard lends itself to playing soccer, but in a particular way: a 99 cent plastic ball from the drug store, particular rules about what is and isn’t out, even rules about what Dad is and is not allowed to do.

One day my 7 year old’s friend was here and they were playing soccer and there was apparently a kerfuffle about the house rules. I have no idea what the issue was, but… yeah, there are always kerfuffles about house rules. Even if they’re totally arbitrary, even if by and large you don’t give a shit about rules, you are liable to defend your house rules tooth and nail, in part because they’re your rules and in part because of the comfort they bring you.

Well, at a certain level, these soccer barons are all overgrown 7 year old boys, who think they deserve to set the rules because they’ve got the most money and the most famous names. And nowhere is this more pronounced than in the squabbling over house rules. I said arguments can be too reductive, but even still: The Super League can perhaps be best understood as a trillion dollar kerfuffle about house rules. But the house here is the whole world.