European Super League.

[Guest TheJTS98]

14 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

They'll probably stagger games throughout the day, to capture as many audiences as possible.

Something like a 12 - 2 - 4 - 6 - 8 timeslots on Tuesday/Wednesday, there's your 10 games.

Possible.

We know the football without fans has now been done, so they might be fine with this. But do these clubs fill a stadium at 12 on a Tuesday? On a regular basis?

I have my doubts.

Also, putting a game on at 12 in the afternoon gets you viewers in Asia, but must surely reduce the value of that match in Europe. Seems a bit of a risk to me. Do they really kick off 60% of matches when people are at work to pursue viewers in Indonesia who will be paying less to watch? Your quoted proposal would involve a European Super League only having 20% of its games kicking off primetime in Europe. I doubt that will be acceptable.

There's a wider point about how popular paywall tv is in general. Its popularity is massively over-estimated by the public, encouraged by hype from the companies themselves. I'm not sure having the same teams playing each other in perpetuity is a way to make people more eager to pay for it.

I suppose we'll find out soon.

Edited April 19, 2021 by TheJTS98

[Mark Connolly]

I'm struggling with this a bit tbh.

On one hand, I'm disgusted by the greed and self interest of the "Super League" founders, but on the other I'm really enjoying UEFA, the Premier League, and, to an extent, Sky drowning in the shite they've created for themselves.

It's all a bit Ray Patterson

 

[Detournement]

I think they will clearly eventually look to get the Super League on the weekend but times won't change. The revenue projections will come from Asian and American revenues gradually getting bigger but the significant change will be 15 clubs grabbing the whole pot.

Long term they could add Asian and American teams to hoover up even more TV cash. 

They will also be hoping that they can pauperise non Super League clubs by becoming the only competition with international interest so they don't have to pay transfer fees and keep wages under control NFL style. 

Edited April 19, 2021 by Detournement

[Spring Onion]

11 minutes ago, Dynamo Needarest said:

Been laughing all day at the faux outrage from the various people/associations who are opposed to this. Fifa, uefa, la liga, epl etc have all sat back for years and allowed an untouchable elite to form. They've never given a single thought to integrity or fair play as long as the money flowed into their pockets too. Now that same elite have realised that Fifa et al are nothing but a drain on their finances and are set to cut them off, it's brilliant. Fifa have had a monopoly on football since day one and it's nice to see them getting fucked over by the very monsters they created.

 

 

3 minutes ago, Mark Connolly said:

I'm struggling with this a bit tbh.

On one hand, I'm disgusted by the greed and self interest of the "Super League" founders, but on the other I'm really enjoying UEFA, the Premier League, and, to an extent, Sky drowning in the shite they've created for themselves.

It's all a bit Ray Patterson

 

Exactly, who would have thought greedy clubs, UEFA and Fifa would be at odds over money.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Spring Onion

[charger29]

No vote required.

Any serious breach of the Rule Book results in an independent three-person tribunal sitting to hear the case, ascertain guilt and set the punishment, which can range from fines to points deductions and, in extreme cases, expulsion from the competition (this has never happened in the history of the Premier League).

https://www.premierleague.com/about

You might be right but the part I quoted from the Handbook seems to suggest something different. It was tweeted by a sports lawyer this morning.

[RandomGuy.]

25 minutes ago, TheJTS98 said:

Possible.

We know the football without fans has now been done, so they might be fine with this. But do these clubs fill a stadium at 12 on a Tuesday? On a regular basis?

I have my doubts.

Also, putting a game on at 12 in the afternoon gets you viewers in Asia, but must surely reduce the value of that match in Europe. Seems a bit of a risk to me. Do they really kick off 60% of matches when people are at work to pursue viewers in Indonesia who will be paying less to watch? Your quoted proposal would involve a European Super League only having 20% of its games kicking off primetime in Europe. I doubt that will be acceptable.

There's a wider point about how popular paywall tv is in general. Its popularity is massively over-estimated by the public, encouraged by hype from the companies themselves. I'm not sure having the same teams playing each other in perpetuity is a way to make people more eager to pay for it.

I suppose we'll find out soon.

It won't be PPV, it'll be a subscription service.

[Dons_1988]

18 minutes ago, Spring Onion said:

 

 

Exactly, who would have thought greedy clubs, UEFA and Fifa would be at odds over money.

It is difficult not to feel schadenfreude to the likes of sky etc but ultimately the losers here will be, as always, the paying customer. 

[Guest TheJTS98]

2 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

It won't be PPV, it'll be a subscription service.

That's still paywall tv.

[Detournement]

Gary Neville has been excellent on MNF. 

Leeds protesting with T shirts saying Earn It in reference to the CL. They also gave some to Liverpool to wear which Klopp declined.

Edited April 19, 2021 by Detournement

[RandomGuy.]

Just now, TheJTS98 said:

That's still paywall tv.

Well yeah, but you'll get subscribers from every Continent if you guarantee 4 matches each midweek at a convenient time for them, IMO.

Timings I gave were just rough estimates, they might even just play 2/3 different timeslots a day.

Major purpose behind this being able to get money from a global audience regularly, the Champions League is Euro-centric so these sides can't schedule games for their Asian/American audiences.

[kiddy]

But..but...but..why haven't the invited 'the' Tribute Act & Shellac?[emoji23][emoji1787][emoji23][emoji108]

[Dons_1988]

Just now, Detournement said:

Gary Neville has been excellent on MNF. 

Leeds protesting with T shirts saying Earn It in reference to the CL. They also gave some to Liverpool to wear which Klopp declined.

I think he’s being genuine in his anger at this to be fair to him but there is definitely an irony to him doing it from his position at sky. 

[Monkey Tennis]

8 hours ago, G51 said:

Said it last night but it likely will mean that European income for the Old Firm is reduced. 

Which would damage only the OF, so it's all good.

Some would suggest the whole game would suffer, citing trickle down nonsense.  However, If Celtic stand to get £20m and Motherwell get £200,000, Motherwell are much better off if both sides instead get nothing because football finances are entirely relative, and Motherwell are required to compete with Celtic in competitions, using resources which cost money.

 

Edited April 19, 2021 by Monkey Tennis

[Salvo Montalbano]

Can’t help but getting a bit of the dry boak when people defend the fairness of the UCL compared to this proposal.
The same UCL where third place in the EPL / La Liga qualify directly and the winners of the Scottish or whatever other league have to play various difficult qualifying ties to get into. Fair? Spare me.
The change in format from the original European Cup to the UCL was the original sin and money grab. This is just a further extension of that and is hardly surprising.
As anyone who has had the misfortune to watch a UCL group match recently will know, that format has been tired and needing reformed for years.
Take Group G in this years UCL as a case in point. Juve, Barca, Dynamo Kiev and Ferencvaros (who knocked Celtic out). Some selected results from that group:
Ferencvaros 0-3 Barca
Kiev 0-4 Barca
Ferencvaros 1-4 Juve
Kiev 0-2 Juve
Just picked the away ties for the ESL clubs as they tend to be trickier. Barca and Juve top the group with 15 points out of 18 having lost once against each other.
I mean, what’s the point in that? Anyone with a passing knowledge of football could have told you the top two in that group before a ball was kicked, it was just a complete waste of time. It’s no surprise that attendance and viewing figures for these games are going down, fans just aren’t interested and it needs to be changed.
Now instead of drubbing teams like Ferencvaros home and away for a few months in the autumn before the real stuff starts, these teams will just skip that part and play more against each other. Is that a surprising outcome? It has had an air of inevitability about it for a while.
Won’t affect the Scottish game of course, if anything it could help us as our teams will be more likely to get in the UCL. Which although diluted will still have appeal.

Or we could look at Group B, where Shaktar Donesk beat Real Madrid in Spain, yet still didn't qualify for the next round, and ESL Founder club Inter finished bottom.

[Guest TheJTS98]

3 minutes ago, RandomGuy. said:

Well yeah, but you'll get subscribers from every Continent if you guarantee 4 matches each midweek at a convenient time for them, IMO.

Timings I gave were just rough estimates, they might even just play 2/3 different timeslots a day.

Major purpose behind this being able to get money from a global audience regularly, the Champions League is Euro-centric so these sides can't schedule games for their Asian/American audiences.

The last Champions League final got 2m viewers in the USA. That's on a Saturday daytime kick-off and it was the final. Best figures for five years.

There's absolutely no evidence these clubs have an audience for regular fixtures in the USA.

Likewise in Asia. We've never seen the numbers. DAZN recently pulled their regional Champions League deal a year early because they were losing money showing it. There was also the Chinese company that binned off the Premier League. Companies like Astro, Bein, etc are coy about their viewing figures for English football and the Champions League. The best we get is the usual PR stuff about 2 billion viewers for Man Utd v Liverpool etc, which is patent nonsense. If these figures were good, we'd know.

We are constantly told that these huge markets exist. But there's nothing to back this talk up. Certainly no hard enough evidence to take to these clubs and tell them they should be playing games on a Wednesday afternoon.

[Monkey Tennis]

7 hours ago, craigkillie said:

The point is that they will be perpetually members of the "super league" with no relegation or promotion available.

That's hardly the only point.

The SPL strived also to limit the capacity for relegation.  Parallels certainly exist.

There was a proposal in the 80s for a breakaway Scottish Super League of 8 clubs that would have no relegation.  Jim McLean was a prominent mouthpiece for the idea - I think it even had a logo.  As I recall, Celtic showed no real appetite and it died away.  It was a precursor of what followed in 1998 though. 

This proposal is at the extreme end of the scale, but the SPL is definitely on that scale, despite your attempts to pretend otherwise.

[San Starko Rover]

I think he’s being genuine in his anger at this to be fair to him but there is definitely an irony to him doing it from his position at sky. 

I agree and yes it might seem hypocritical as a SKY pundit and ex EPL player but I think his anger is 90% the “closed shop” EPL and UCL were power and greed moves but were never closed shops.

[Hauzen]

45 minutes ago, TheJTS98 said:

Possible.

We know the football without fans has now been done, so they might be fine with this. But do these clubs fill a stadium at 12 on a Tuesday? On a regular basis?

I have my doubts.

Also, putting a game on at 12 in the afternoon gets you viewers in Asia, but must surely reduce the value of that match in Europe. Seems a bit of a risk to me. Do they really kick off 60% of matches when people are at work to pursue viewers in Indonesia who will be paying less to watch? Your quoted proposal would involve a European Super League only having 20% of its games kicking off primetime in Europe. I doubt that will be acceptable.

Millions of folk now working from home, they'll get daytime telly audiences no bother.

[Guest TheJTS98]

The journey to this point for the English clubs is kind of summed up by this video, with Wayne Rooney playing the role of UEFA and the child the role of the English clubs.

In the era when the English champions had to qualify for the Champions League, they never qualified. Knocked out by pesky Portuguese, Scottish, and Turkish teams. So, UEFA move the ball a bit closer to the goal for them by removing the need to qualify.

That still didn't work, since Man Utd were knocked out of their first group (having been parachuted in) by Gothenburg, and this was followed by Blackburn finishing last behind opposition from Norway, Poland, and Russia.

Since then there's been the ludicrous distribution of money (see how Man City and Ajax's payouts worked in 2019) as well as loading the competition with multiple clubs from the big countries and protecting them by seeding. UEFA could not have made it any easier for them. They couldn't fucking miss.

But, capitalism loves a sure thing, so a sure thing it must be. Even surer than the sure thing they had stitched up in the Champions League that means one semi-finalist since 2005 outside Big 4 plus PSG.

Edited April 19, 2021 by TheJTS98

[Michael W]

Would be nice of the likes of Henry and Woodword could muster the guts to come out and defend this rather than let the managers take the heat for something they'll have had no input into. 

Utter cowards.