Der Spiegel Football Leaks revelations

[Giovanni]

You can bet youre bottom dollar that the likes of real, barca and especially juve, bayern and psg are pushing like crazy for something of this sort to happen asap.

These teams are all slowly being caught and overtaken by pl clubs. Even the midtable teams in the pl are above most european teams in terms of income.

Would be good for plastic fans and supporters in countries such as the US asia ect but terrible for all else. I dont think it would last long either way.

 

[Doctor Dinkey]

If it happened- I don't think it will, but if it did- the resulting reduction in TV revenues for us as a club outside this 'elite', matched against our existing debt for the stadium, would almost certainly bankrupt us.

 

[nailsy]

It’s the English clubs that I don’t get being involved. The Premier League is the goose that laid the golden egg. Are they really going to risk killing it?

I don't see how the Premier League would allow any of the English teams to take part. As you say this competition would devalue the league and the TV revenue so why would they let clubs move their PL matches to midweek to benefit the new European league?

 

[Saoirse]

I don't see how the Premier League would allow any of the English teams to take part. As you say this competition would devalue the league and the TV revenue so why would they let clubs move their PL matches to midweek to benefit the new European league?

That's why I think ourselves and Everton would at least be involved at the proposed lower level. The PL would presumably need a rule change to stop English teams playing, which need 14 clubs to vote in favour. So if 7 are on the gravy train...

 

[SugarRay]

Seems like a non-starter for me. Fans don’t matter to these people you may argue and probably argue correctly but I think a shitload of fans would refuse point blank to get involved with such a load of bollocks.

It’d be a good way to get the Johnny come lately glory hunting wankers out of the game perhaps?

 

[pffft]

Seems like a non-starter for me. Fans don’t matter to these people you may argue and probably argue correctly but I think a shitload of fans would refuse point blank to get involved with such a load of bollocks.

It’d be a good way to get the Johnny come lately glory hunting wankers out of the game perhaps?

I think a lot of football fans with long memories and club allegiances are strongly against it, and I also think that the clubs know this and don't care. It's the " Johnny come lately glory hunting wankers" they'll be relying on to keep the cash rolling in, because it's those people that think football is all about money and have no understanding of the depth of emotion the rest of us have for the game.

In a world where money is everything and a handful of football clubs generate ridiculously big money, this or something like this, is practically inevitable.

 

[Dundalk_Spur]

If UEFA have knowingly helped City continue their financial doping then every other English team should swamp them both with lawsuits. That would put a firework up their respective arses.

 

[nailsy]

That's why I think ourselves and Everton would at least be involved at the proposed lower level. The PL would presumably need a rule change to stop English teams playing, which need 14 clubs to vote in favour. So if 7 are on the gravy train...

Good thinking. Do the PL have to put it to a vote though?

 

[nailsy]

Thinking about it a premier League without the big six could be pretty interesting. Anyone could win it.

 

[C0YS]

Ok lets get one thing clear. This is a bluff, no more no less. Its the big clubs trying to get a better deal out of UEFA. I highly doubt anyone is stupid enough to actively want this.

Why?

The Champions League is a well established money maker, this new league is not. There is no guarantee of success. For the PL clubs this league would completely undermine the PL so they would have to have this project make waaay more money for them than the CL does now.

If it does happen I bet it would be a failure.

Why?

1) No fan wants it. The creation of the league will isolate fans a lot may boycott or simply leave football in domestic markets. Maybe the international markets would be for it, but there is less money in the international market, because most people outside Europe are not super into the idea of forking out lots of money on subscription packages.

2) Likely negative effect on Match attendance. Most likely many local fans may not want to support the competition. Attendance still contributes roughly a quarter of an entire clubs revenue. Could be a big loss.

3) Misunderstanding of what makes people watch the CL. The assumption seems to be people watch the CL to see the biggest games. But the majority of the CL audience are actually casual observers who are more interested in the prestige of the competition not the clubs. The CL works because to win it you need to be the very best, any club could be there, but only few are. People are into games like Barca v Juventus not so much because of the club 'brand' but because these are two contemporarily successful teams. For example 15 years ago Milan were a seriously good team if we played against them we would be super excited. Now no one really cares who Milan plays. The success of a club brand can work even in periods without success, history matters, but never as much as contemporary, or medium term success. Without competition you undermine what makes these clubs worth watching in peoples eyes. You play with the magic formula you get egg in your face.

If it happens, good riddance. The world will continue. People will still care about domestic leagues and it wouldn't surprise me if attendance and viewer figures will continue to match that of this crazy show. In fact you could even see a revival of support for smaller clubs as fans leave these clubs in droves. Not just in the UK. Will we have financial difficulty? Maybe a little but in all honesty the stadium will ultimately be funded by attendance not by TV money. If people keep coming, and prices stay competitive it'd be fine.

 

[joey.leone]

LOL Man City and PSG founders! There are about a dozen or more european clubs more succesful than these two ****s. Even our greatest comedy act West Ham have more European success than fucking City!
Man I'm drunk and fucking pissed at this shit

 

[DCSPUR]

Please let them do this!
Only conditions they leave the Premier League and if they want to return have got to start at the base of the football pyramid and that their players don't get to play for the national side.

 

[Frozen_Waffles]

To be honest, this could be a good thing.

A European super league would further alienate fans from the bigger teams and make for a more competitive English league.

I am glad, and I hope spurs don't join such a league.

I do hope the English teams stay though, except Chelsea, they can fuck right off.

 

[spurs9]

1) No fan wants it. The creation of the league will isolate fans a lot may boycott or simply leave football in domestic markets. Maybe the international markets would be for it, but there is less money in the international market, because most people outside Europe are not super into the idea of forking out lots of money on subscription packages.

Actually that isn't true, most money for TV rights for the PL comes from Asia.


https://www.statista.com/statistics/277566/tv-broadcasting-revenue-premier-league-outside-uk/

 

[Gb160]

Please let them do this!
Only conditions they leave the Premier League and if they want to return have got to start at the base of the football pyramid and that their players don't get to play for the national side.

The best players would all want to play in this league... our best players would want to play in this league, and our manager.
Amazing to think some people want this to happen.

A few interesting bits in this piece...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...pose-premier-league-breakaway-could-threaten/

 

[Dov67]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...ue-are-selling-the-soul-of-the-game-b0s9sd6pq

great piece by David Walsh, with a big THFC/Poch slant to it

In their search for quick riches, Premier League clubs are betraying their friends

There is a story from Mauricio Pochettino’s 2017 book, Brave New World, that is hard to forget. Young Poch is 13 years of age, one of 3,540 people living in Murphy, a town in Argentina. His potential has been noted and once or twice a week he takes a bus to Rosario, 100 miles distant, to train with Central, a team in Argentina’s Primera Division.

He hates the three-hour journey but dreams are dreams and it’s a trade-off. One Monday evening there is a trial for young players at Villa Canas, a town 31 miles from Murphy. Not any old trial but one arranged by a local coach for the benefit of Marcelo Bielsa and Jorge Griffa, well-known coaches at mighty Newell’s Old Boys, Central’s big rivals in Rosario. Pochettino was invited to Villa Canas but even at 13, the boy had a mind of his own. He had had a long day at school that Monday and the tiredness from two weekend matches was still in his legs. He told his dad he did not have much enthusiasm for the drive to Villa Canas. His dad said that was fine.

On the outside looking in: Mauricio Pochettino’s Tottenham are not included in the new Super League planFACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA
The trial ended shortly before 10pm. Bielsa and Griffa sat down to eat with the local coach. Having assimilated the evidence of the evening’s trial, the visitors from Rosario asked the local man if there was any boy who had not played that evening but who might be one for the future. “There is one lad from Murphy, a kid called Pochettino, who is good.”

“Murphy,” they thought. “That’s not that far away.” It was after 11pm when they left Villa Canas, well past midnight when they got to a service station on the edge of Murphy and almost 1am when they knocked on the door of the Pochettino home. Mothers sleep lightly, so it was Amalia Pochettino who answered. They explained who they were. She refused to allow them in, returning instead to the bedroom, where she told her husband about the strangers.

“What, Bielsa and Griffa? I know who they are.” A minute later the Pochettinos sat with the coaches and heard what they had been told about young Mauricio. It made them proud. Fifteen minutes into the conversation, the coaches asked if they could see the boy. They would not wake him, just observe him while he slept. Inside his bedroom, the four adults gazed at the sleeping beauty.
“Would it be possible to pull back the covers,” asked Griffa, “so I can see his legs.” Amalia rolled back the covers. “He looks like a footballer,” one of them said. “Look at those legs.”

The boy became a man. Played for Newell’s Old Boys and Jorge Griffa became his football father. He spent most of his time playing at Espanyol in Barcelona and played 20 times for Argentina. It is, however, as a manager that he has built his reputation. Over the past four years his work with
Tottenham Hotspur has positioned him in the front line of the world’s best football coaches.
Bielsa and Griffa’s late-night visit to his home in 1985 struck a chord with Pochettino. For in them he saw reflections of his young self. Their passion was his passion; their obsession his obsession. He cried when his hero Diego Maradona spoke after his testimonial game at Boca’s stadium in 2001. “I’ve made mistakes,” said Diego. “I’ve paid for them. But my love for the ball is still pure.” So, too, it has always been for Pochettino.

With the cost of their new stadium, Tottenham do not have the hundreds of millions their rivals spend so freely. His job is to convince some of the best young players in Europe that there is more to football than the monthly transfer that swells their bank account. Convincing them of this is not as straightforward as getting them to press the opposition but, so far, Pochettino is winning. In the Premier League narrative, Tottenham have been one of the inspiring storylines.

So, put yourself inside the head of Tottenham’s manager travelling to the Black Country for yesterday’s match against Wolverhampton Wanderers. Sitting on the coach he searches for Der Spiegel’s English website and begins to read their long article about Europe’s biggest clubs forming an exclusive Super League. It would begin with seven clubs, the founding fathers: Manchester United and Arsenal, Real Madrid and Barcelona, Juventus and AC Milan, Bayern Munich. An American, Charlie Stillitano, is the entrepreneur driving the talks. His numbers had turned people’s heads, drawn them to clandestine meetings and got them asking big questions of their legal advisers. What can we do here? Would it be possible to just walk away from the Champions League? And domestic leagues? Could we exit La Liga, Serie A, the Premier League?

It was more than a year ago that he had seen a story in The Sun about one of those secret “European Super League” meetings in London. He wasn’t sure whether to believe it. But here in Der Spiegel’s well-sourced story, they reproduce a line from an email written by an adviser to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owners to the club’s chief executive, Ferran Soriano, concerning that story in The Sun. “We need to be very careful moving forward and avoid at all costs the perception of a cartel,” said the adviser. Soriano replied by saying that the clubs would have to find a more private venue for future meetings.

So it was true. These guys have been meeting, planning, deciding the best way forward. The original seven became 11. The two English conspirators were joined by Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea. Stillitano was telling them to forget the old Champions League model, with its paltry tens of millions of payments. He was talking of annual revenues of £440m-plus to clubs in the Super League and guaranteed inclusion for the first 20 years.

Of course 11 clubs would not be enough, so Stillitano and his cohorts were going to include Borussia Dortmund, Inter Milan, Roma, Marseilles and Atletico Madrid. These would be “guests,” not part of the cartel. There was talk of Schalke 04 and getting an 18th club from Holland, Russia, Portugal or Turkey.

And as Pochettino reads through to the last sentence of this story, your heart sinks as your anger rises. So much planning for this league, so many “secret meetings” and in this detailed report about what has been going on, there are two words never uttered. Tottenham Hotspur. The big six has been reduced to the big five, with the complicity of the big five. You think of the evening at the Etihad, January 2017. Son Heung-min’s 73rd-minute goal got you a 2-2 draw, probably more than you deserved but satisfying all the same. Afterwards Pep Guardiola came smilingly towards you and said: “Now, tell me all about Monaco.” You had played Monaco in pool matches and now Manchester City had them in the next round. Naturally you wanted to help because even though you are Premier League rivals, there is an affinity with the clubs in your league.

You think about Soriano wanting “a more private venue” for meetings to which your club will not be invited, you think about the people planning for this Super League and you feel betrayed. And you know that every manager and every chief executive of every Premier League club outside the conspirators will feel betrayed. The same for the excluded in Serie A, La Liga and the Bundesliga. In their thirst for ever more riches, the big money men sell the soul of the game. And you think of the little boy you were in Murphy, on the bus journey to Rosario that had so many stops you often likened it to a postman doing his rounds. It was hard back then but at least you could love the game.

How ‘Super League’ might look

Real Madrid are the key players in plans for a 16-team European Super League in 2021, according to a report from the German magazine Der Spiegel based on leaked documents. It claims:
■ Seven of the 11 ‘founders’ of the proposed league went behind Uefa’s back to discuss it: Real, Barcelona, Man United, Arsenal, Juventus, AC Milan and Bayern Munich
■ The other founders would be Man City, Chelsea, Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain. The 11 founders could not be relegated
■ Another five teams would have ‘guest’ status for the opening season of the competition: Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan, Roma, Borussia Dortmund and Marseilles
■ Two more teams could join later: possibly Schalke from the Bundesliga plus a side from Portugal, Holland, Russia or Turkey. Bayern Munich said it was ‘unaware of recent plans for a so-called Super League’ and had not ‘taken part in negotiations relating to such plans’. The other clubs named above have not responded

 

[Dov67]

be honest.....are you more annoyed about the whole concept of closed cartel breakaway, or the fact that we will not be one of the "founding members"?

I'd say i'm about 50/50 at the moment.

BTW - i think this is almost certainly a replacement for the CL rather than the PL

 

[WalkerboyUK]

be honest.....are you more annoyed about the whole concept of closed cartel breakaway, or the fact that we will not be one of the "founding members"?

I'd say i'm about 50/50 at the moment.

BTW - i think this is almost certainly a replacement for the CL rather than the PL

If it's a league with 16 teams, that's 30 games each. It's a replacement for each club's domestic league, not two ways about it.
Even if it were a CL alternative, the problem is that the "invited" clubs would ultimately be doomed as neither their leagues or UEFA would allow them to skip a season or two.

 

[WalkerboyUK]

The best players would all want to play in this league... our best players would want to play in this league, and our manager.
Amazing to think some people want this to happen.

A few interesting bits in this piece...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...pose-premier-league-breakaway-could-threaten/

There'd be a shit load of money, but there's no true victory in it. Winning a competition where teams are hand picked, can't be relegated etc.??
I can't honestly see how it would be all that successful in the long term.

 

[Gb160]

There'd be a shit load of money, but there's no true victory in it. Winning a competition where teams are hand picked, can't be relegated etc.??
I can't honestly see how it would be all that successful in the long term.

The NFL model seems to do ok.
You're right, but lets face it, most players and their agents probably couldnt give 2 hoots about the long term future of the game...they're into making as much money as they possibly can right now.