The Super League Conundrum PART III: Solutions to Real Problems
Welcome to PART III, the final part of this series. And to preface, this is the longest part of the series, where we take a look at potential next steps for European football in the wake of the Super League and it's failure.
So what’s the solution to the Super League problem? Do we have teams break away from UEFA and make a new competition? Does UEFA choose to completely revamp the Champions League (and by extension the Europa League and Europa Conference League)? My preference is to take keep the Champions League as it has the name value and history behind it. But maybe we radically change the format as it stands?
This option would maintain each existing domestic league as the pinnacle of its country’s football pyramid, with no promotion beyond it. The overwhelming majority of fans still want to see their teams play domestically, and I agree. Super League teams wanted to remain in their leagues, and abandon the Champions League. The solutions I'm proposing would act as a more exclusive Champions League made of only the very top performing sides, while the Europa League would see a more drastic (and in my opinion, a much needed) revamp.
Let's start with the big fish, the Champions League. We’re going to reduce the size to 24, which is 4 more than the Super League, but a reduction of 8 from the current format. It’s a still nice round number for what we want to do though. We’ll split teams into four groups of 6, where each team plays the teams they are drawn with once at home, and once away, for a total of 10 matches. The top team in each group gets a bye to the quarter finals, and the second and third placed teams in each group go to a playoff round where they have a home and away playoff against teams from the other groups. Once that's done, the 4 playoff winners progress to the final 8 along with the group winners, where the home and away format would continue until the final, which would remain as a single match played in a neutral venue. However, here’s where we get crazy.
Defending Champion and previous seasons Europa League winner both qualify, unless they already qualified via their domestic league
Leagues 1-5: Champions and Runners-Up qualify
Leagues 6-11: Champions qualify automatically
Leagues 12-onwards: Champions go to qualifying rounds to determine the last 6-8 spots
Yes, we’re really going to exclude some big teams. We're bold around these parts. They can play in the Europa League instead (more on that later). This make the Champions League more of an actual league of Champions, instead of more than half the teams being champions on nothing. It keeps it more exclusive. Teams from the same country have been kept apart in this hypothetical draw, just as UEFA does in real life. Here’s what this years Champions League could have roughly looked like using this format and UEFA’s current rankings:
Now we move to the Europa League. This is where the fun really begins, because we're going to make the Europa League much more attractive to sponsors and broadcasters if all of a sudden you have Barcelona playing Juventus or Liverpool playing Napoli in that competition. So, while it won’t bring in quite the same money for teams who play there, it would likely generate enough money for teams where it’s not looked down upon as it is now, as more big teams and matchups would be taking place with the format I've put forth. I've tinkered with the format, number of teams, and allocation to the leagues several times, but this is what we settled on.
And then the knockout format follows the same as the Champions League. The final stays in a neutral venue. Here’s how the Europa League qualification would shake out:
Winner of the Europa Conference League qualifies, unless they have already qualified for the Europa or Champions League via their domestic league
Leagues 1-5: Places 3-5 qualify
Leagues 6-10: Runners-Up and 3rd place qualify
Leagues 11-14: Runners-Up qualify automatically
Leagues 16-onwards: Runners-Up go to qualifying rounds to determine the last 5-6 spots
I want this to be I want this to have a similar style of format as the Champions league, but larger. We’re going with 6 groups of 6 for a total of 36 teams. Again, teams would play eachoter home and away for a total of 10 group matches. The top 2 from each group would go through to the round of 16 automatically, while 4 of the 6 third place teams would play the 4th place teams from the Champions League in a home and away playoff, not unlike the tournaments already have. And here’s how the hypothetical groups for the Europa League could have looked for the competition this year:
This is a mix of a random and “best case scenario” draw, but it’s certainly not bad. You get a healthy mix of traditional powerhouses alongside a lot of medium teams and a few smaller teams. It gives smaller teams a chance to play some big games and access UEFA money while also providing bigger teams with more games against similar level opposition. I’m not doing the Conference League by the way. I’ve put enough time into the Champions League and Europa League. We can still keep it as a competition, that's fine, I’m just not going through the time to format it. It can follow a same format as the Europa League but it can skew more to smaller leagues and teams as it already does now. Ideally, the Conference League would feature teams who went to the qualifying rounds for the Champions League and Europa league but missed out, with a few teams from higher ranked leagues (1 per league up to a certain league).
By bringing together the very best performing teams of the year (not just historically as has been the case), the competitiveness of the league would be stunning to watch. We get a more equal competition, more frequent big matches, lots of variety and the incentive for leagues to develop and raise their coefficients. It would also have the added advantage of creating some additional competition in the domestic leagues. Currently teams often settle for a top 4 or top 3 spot, but now there would be another incentive to try and make top 2 or to really go for it to try and win the league.
How to solve the competitiveness in domestic leagues is a different story. I would hope more leagues look to the Preamier League in England, where there is more parity in how money, specifically TV money gets spread. All 20 teams get the same amount each season. Burnley gets the same as Manchester City. It helps level the playing field a little, and we've seen England become hotly competitive in recent years at the top and middle of the table in part because of this. Not every league is doing this, at the moment, but it's a small change that can make a noticeable difference.
I would also like to see some sort of salary cap, but with so many different leagues of varying sizes and wealth, it's hard to implement. I do like how La Liga in Spain handles this to ensure clubs don’t over spend on wages and go broke. It is proportional to about 70% of a club's revenues. It’s to ensure that the clubs are well run (to an extent) and they don’t start spending more money on salary than what they make. So ideally, each club has a different salary cap calculated based on a series of factors that include revenues, costs and debts. The adjustments are part of the Spanish league's longstanding financial control measures to reduce clubs' debts and keep them financially healthy. I think a model similar to this would be ideal for teams to use moving forward to ensure teams don't overspend. But what about Manchester City or Real Madrid, who make such a disproportionate amount of money? Maybe after a certain amount of revenue, teams that make so much more get a small percentage less to spend, say 60% instead of 70%. It would limit their spending and perhaps restore some competitive balance across the major UEFA competitions.
What comes immediately next will have to be serious reforms for the sport. It is important to get to work reforming European football in order to eliminate the problems that created the breeding ground for the idea of a closed Super League to grow in the first place. Getting complacent and continuing to embrace the status quo, one that has lead to a landscape devoid of true competition and which will only get worse over time the more it is ignored, will merely delay the inevitable and ensure a European Super League will become a reality later down the line. It won’t be a matter of if, but when.
And that's about it. Is this the perfect solution to fix European football? Probably not. But it's a start. When football was most under threat, the people who matter the most, its fans, fought back and triumphed. For a sport that has become more money driven and increasingly detached from its working-class roots, that chaotic week last April should be celebrated just as much as it was hated as it was a moment in which football regained some of the magic it has lost over the years. It reminded us that football isn't just all about the money.
Reform is needed at the very top. Serious reform to the Champions League or a new competition entirely is needed, on top of financial reforms to ensure that the few teams that can continue getting into bidding wars and arms races while controlling all the finances and leaving scraps behind for the many. I’ve listed just some possible solutions in this article but there are so many directions and possibilities that await. Either way, whatever is chosen, one thing must always remain: The connection between effort, performance and achievement. A closed system that only truly benefits a handful of teams is a non-starter. Those who out-perform must continue to replace those who fall behind and sporting merit must always be prioritised.
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