Super League? Why Not?

At St Mary's, Southampton, 2016

If you asked me which football teams were in the FA Cup Final in any year between 1960 and the mid-1990s, I could tell you. So could any other person of my age interested in football. Ask me about recent cup finals, and my mind might well go blank. Is it just that I have lost interest, or maybe that compartment of my brain filled up in around 1995, like a memory game that went on for one or two items too many?

Possibly, but I have another theory. I have done a little wikipedic research, and it turns out that since the beginning of the Premier League (1992), eight different clubs have won the FA Cup. They are the ‘big five’ (the ‘big six’ minus Spurs) plus, just once each, Everton, Portsmouth, and Wigan (Wigan’s victory does stick in the mind – 2013!). They were all Premier League clubs. In the 28 year period of the same length going back from 1992 to 1964, fifteen different clubs won, three of which were from the second division.

I also checked the Premier League. I have a similar blank about recent winners of that too. From 1964 to 1992, nineteen different teams finished in the top three of the old first division. These included such as Derby, Ipswich, QPR, Watford, Southampton, Crystal Palace, and Sheffield Wednesday. Thirteen different teams finished in the top three between 1992 and 2020, six of whom have not appeared in the top three after 2003. So from 2003-2020, only seven teams have finished in the top three, the ‘big six’ plus Leicester.

I think you can see where I am going with this. The same big teams winning titles and cups while playing each other in finals year after year because they are richer than everybody else is, quite frankly, very boring. It is just as bad or even worse in Spain, Italy, France, and Germany (I wonder if Bayern Munich will win the Bundesliga again, he asked sarcastically). What keeps many football fans going is the possibility that Wigan will win the Cup and Leicester the Premier League.

That's what I call a table! (thanks to 11v11 league table generator)

Now we come to the idea of the European Super League. Its creators want to place limits on entry to the league, so that the initial fifteen founding clubs cannot be relegated. They want to do this because not qualifying for the major European tournament (which, at the moment, happens to a couple of the biggest English clubs each year) creates an uncertainty that genuine sports fans love and businesspeople hate.

If the Super League is guaranteed for our ‘big six’ teams, then the scramble for places that characterises the top of the Premier League will disappear. In a season where one team runs away with it (like 2020, with Liverpool), there will be nothing to play for further down as soon as the Premier League itself cannot be won.

When the president of Real Madrid says that they have to do something radical because football is dying and fewer young fans are getting involved, the answer is not to close off competition and privilege the richest clubs, because that is precisely the reason why people are being put off. The answer is to open up competition and thrive on the uncertainty of sport.

One can see why the big clubs want to avoid too many one-sided encounters, like Bayern Munich or Manchester City playing the champions of Slovakia or Latvia twice, for example. This is why UEFA are trying to reform the Champions’ League. I am not sure whether they have got it right, but what is clear is that the Super League breakaway idea is wholly impracticable from a sports point of view, as pointed out today by Pep Guardiola.

The inevitable failure of the Super League is another instance of the problems that arise when high level businesspeople shut inside boardrooms do not consult the practitioners of the business. We have seen this in universities and I am sure people from other professions have experiences of this too. Don’t get me wrong: businesspeople are important. But they are only effective in partnership with the people who operate in the business. Without consultation by the people at the top with everyone who has an investment, an institution just doesn’t work effectively. The place where this is a really big problem is the Roman Catholic Church, but don’t get me started on that.