Soccer seems broken. Not the sport itself, the one where the ball bounces and you can control it with only your feet — that’s as powerful and as popular as ever. People are still playing it everywhere, so long as they can find a tiny patch of space and something to kick around.
It’s the architecture around it — the institution of the sport — that seems like it’s on the verge of falling apart.
If things were healthy and stable, the Super League never would’ve been attempted and the world’s top clubs wouldn’t have tried to launch their own league. You wouldn’t have players and managers telling us that they’re being forced to play too many games as more competitions keep cropping up or being expanded. The major talking point coming out of the most popular league in the world every weekend wouldn’t be arguments about refereeing technology protocols.
If things were healthy and stable, then the three richest leagues in the world — the Bundesliga, Premier League and LaLiga — would’ve produced more than six combined champions over the past 18 combined seasons. Then Kylian Mbappé wouldn’t be making more money this year than the entire payrolls of every other team in Ligue 1. Then players from Champions League clubs wouldn’t be joining middling Premier League teams. Then Newcastle’s most realistic path to ever competing in the Champions League again wouldn’t be “get bought by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia‘s sovereign wealth fund.”
There has to be a better way, right?
While there’s something truly special hidden within the bounce of that ball — the intoxicating essence of the game itself, the thing we all love — there’s nothing inherently special about the professional structure of this sport. The fixture list and the league table were all created a long time ago, in a much different world, before airplane travel and television — and yet the competition structure hasn’t really changed. If baseball — perhaps the only sport more wedded to tradition than soccer — can find a way to fix itself, then why not soccer?
In other words, what if we kept the game the same, but created the competitive structure from scratch? Unfortunately, it would still have to look a lot like it does now.
Why soccer is too big
The fundamental problem is that the sport is too big. Too many leagues, too many executives, too many fans, too many players.
If we were creating the structure of soccer from scratch, who would we actually be trying to please?
“There are a bunch of different stakeholders,” Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at the consultancy Twenty First Group, told ESPN. “So you’ve got fans, who ultimately fund the whole thing, and they’re obviously a big group. But then fans break down into local fans and international fans. Then you’ve got clubs and teams and investors, wrapped up in one group. Then you’ve got players. Then you’ve got the competition organizers themselves, and then you’ve got sponsors, broadcasters.
“There’s a bunch of different people who all contribute in some way to global football. It’s very difficult to come to an answer that satisfies all of those.”
Take players, for example — let’s say you wanted to focus on prioritizing what they want. Would it be possible to give all the players everything they ask for?
“What do players want?” Chaudhuri said. “Well, we know that at the moment there’s a lot of pushback from players around the volume of games that they play, and that’s a legitimate concern. But we should have a conversation about the number of professional players. How many professional players do we want the sport to sustain?”
Per FIFA’s estimates, there are approximately 100,000 professional soccer players in the world. That’s a roster of about 25 players, across about 4,000 teams. Compare that to the world’s most lucrative sports competition, the National Football League, where there are 52-man rosters for 32 teams, or 1,664 professional football players.
Heck, round that up to 2,000 NFL players and, well, there are still 50 times as many professional soccer players as American football players. On top of that, there is approximately an equal number of support staff who work for all of those clubs, so let’s say that 200,000 people across the world are employed by professional soccer clubs.
Given the financial success and structural stability of both the NFL and the NBA, if you were creating soccer from scratch, then you’d likely try to look at those much, much smaller competitions for inspiration.
“There is an NFL- or NBA-style model where you’ve got 20 or 30 teams,” Chaudhuri said. “You have the best teams in the world, all concentrated with the best players. And it’s a super-attractive product because it’s really best on best. Each week you create some scarcity around it, so that you’re always looking forward to the next game.
“But as much money as that would make — and it would probably make a ton of money, probably not a world away from what is currently generated in global football — that money’s not being redistributed to all those other people that are put out of jobs by the model that we’re moving from today.”
On top of that, you have all of the fans of local teams whose players and other personnel make up that massive workforce. And on top of that, it’s not clear that model would even be more entertaining than the one we have now.
“American sports tend to excel in promoting jeopardy,” Chaudhuri said. “There’s unpredictability about the winners, but there’s a trade-off. The stakes aren’t as high because in European football you have relegation, which really increases that kind of existential threat. But the trade-off of that is huge losses and unsustainability within European sport, which gets you back to the big question again: Is your objective actually financial sustainability for the clubs? That takes you down the route of closed leagues and redistribution models and so on.”
From the start, American professional sports knew what they wanted to be. First and foremost: vehicles to enrich the owners of the teams, growing revenues and increasing the valuations of their assets. European soccer, though, started somewhere very different from where it finds itself today.
“Men’s football started off to serve the local fan base above anything else”, Chaudhuri said. “It was entertainment on a Saturday after workers stopped working. European football — particularly English football — has grappled with that versus what it has become because people realize the potential of that local product to have a global appeal.”
And when those local and global forces come together, you get the biggest clubs in England trying to break away and form their own NFL- and NBA-style leagues — only for their hometown fan bases to protest so aggressively that the clubs themselves were left with no choice but to sheepishly back out.
“In many ways,” Chaudhuri said, “European football doesn’t quite know what it wants to be.”
Does it want to be a global product with top-to-bottom competitiveness that competes with the NFL and NBA? Does it want to remain the local, unifying cultural object that it initially represented? Does it want to maximize revenues? Does it want to support a 100,000-plus-large workforce? Does it want to promote superstars? Does it want to be fair? Does it want to favor the biggest clubs?
The problem is that the answer to all of those questions is “yes.”
What we’re left with
Earlier this week, my colleague Gabriele Marcotti broke down the facts of the growing inequality across European soccer. He wrote:
Would you enjoy [an NBA] where one team fielded a starting five of Luka Doncic, Steph Curry, LeBron James, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Nikola Jokic, with, say, Joel Embiid, Kevin Durant, Jimmy Butler, Rudy Gobert, Damian Lillard, Devin Booker and Ja Morant coming off the bench? Would it be fun to see them face another team whose starting five included Tyrese Haliburton, Austin Reaves, Caleb Martin, Harrison Barnes and Nic Claxton, with a bunch of no-names coming off the bench?
I’m going to guess that once the novelty value passed, probably not. But that’s what the NBA might look like if the ratio between the highest paying team and the lowest paying team matched the Premier League’s distribution of wages.
No guardrails were ever put into place to promote any kind of financial equality in European soccer. All investment was welcomed. And while the one major change, Financial Fair Play, did drastically increase the financial stability of clubs across the continent, it also codified inequality by tethering each club’s spending levels to their revenues.
Per data from the newsletter Swiss Ramble for the 2021-22 season, this is how the wage bills compared between the richest and poorest teams across each of the five major European leagues:
- Ligue 1: PSG 41.5x Clermont Foot
- LaLiga: Real Madrid 18.5x Rayo Vallecano
- Bundesliga: Bayern Munich 15.5x Greuther Fürth
- Serie A: Juventus 9.5x Spezia
- Premier League: Manchester United 5.7x Brentford
Over the past decade or so, the Premier League has easily been the most competitive of those five leagues. But it still can be only so competitive: just four clubs have won the title over the previous 10 seasons. Manchester City have won six of those 10 titles while spending roughly the same amount of money as both Manchester United and Chelsea during that same span. At least, as far as we know as investigations into possible breaches continue.
“The Premier League distributes broadcast money flatter than virtually anyone else in the world,” Chaudhuri said. “They do a very good job of it, and it has sustained a level of competitiveness. But there are trade-offs. The deal they’ve made with clubs is that clubs get to own their sponsorship rights. And that gets into all sorts of issues around associated-party transactions with the likes of City.”
By distributing revenue more equally, the Premier League has created a much more competitive league that has made everyone richer. Even with the flatter distribution, the demand from fans is so high that the broadcast deal is so lucrative that Premier League clubs posted six of the 10 highest revenues among all clubs in 2021-22.
But it’s a very delicate kind of peace. The English clubs still need to compete with other European clubs for the best players in the world so they can then compete with them in the Champions League. Any attempt at making the finances in England more equal would hamstring the bigger clubs, who would likely push back in the other direction.
The same kind of issues exist in all the other Big Five leagues. If television revenue were distributed more equally, then the best teams in those leagues would suddenly find it harder to compete with the best teams in England. While these leagues could experience a similar kind of success to the Premier League — the league becomes more competitive, so more fans want to watch, so everyone ultimately makes more money — it’s less likely because the Premier League already exists. How do you convince more casual fans to watch your league — with the same home-and-away structure — when the Premier League is already doing a better version of it?
Allow me to lower my voice to a whisper for a second: another option for, say, the Bundesliga or one of the other Big Five leagues would be to change the competitive structure of the league. Given how fair the home-and-away league structure is when it comes to identifying the best team, Bayern Munich’s massive wage advantage makes them heavy favorites to win the league every season. Hence: 10 titles in a row. Competition-structure changes are addressing the symptom rather than the cause, but the riches of the richest teams are so entrenched that it’s all we’re really left with.
Let’s say the Bundesliga had playoffs to determine its champion: it would make it easier for more casual fans to know when to pay attention to the league, the handful of storylines would be much easier to follow, and the games would be way higher stakes than almost anything we’ve seen in the league over the past decade. Of course, German fans would likely hate the idea. While it might increase the league’s global broadcast deal, that might just be offset by the decline in interest domestically. Plus, it’s not like we see all kinds of unlikely winners across all of the already-existing knockout-cup competitions in the Big 5 leagues, either.
The last lever, then, would be a salary cap. The big clubs not owned by sovereign wealth funds would probably welcome being told that they have to spend less money in order to compete. In that sense, there might be majority support for enacting the idea across a given league.
This would, ultimately, not affect how much owners are making or the valuations of their teams, but it would take money away from the players. However, according to Chaudhuri, professional player wages account for about 70% of club revenues in soccer. That’s significantly above the roughly 50% revenue share in both the NBA and the NFL — rates that, unlike in soccer, are collectively bargained. And maybe the entertainment that comes from an even more competitive league leads to an increase in revenues that actually increases player wages even if they take up a smaller portion of overall revenue.
Of course, all of the same issues apply here, too. If a league caps itself, it would immediately be harder for the best teams in the league to compete with the best teams in other countries. But more than that, well, the Saudi Pro League exists now. And the Saudi league doesn’t have to play by any of the same rules as the big leagues in Europe. If the sport in Europe becomes salary capped, the near-unlimited earnings in Saudi Arabia would become much more attractive for the kinds of in-their-prime superstars the Saudis have still failed to recruit.
And so, we’re left with this kind of rickety balance, where the biggest clubs remain tethered to everyone else and the game remains able to support a 200,000-strong workforce. And the biggest leagues — in terms of a pure competitive endeavor — are all worse versions of the biggest league.
“The Premier League has managed the competing interests of the clubs very, very well for 30 years — despite a couple of blips with the Super League,” Chaudhuri said. “As long as it does that, I think fundamentally it will be a place where it’s the dominant league in football, and the disruption is Saudi Arabia more than anything else. If that league tries to compete directly with the Premier League, there’s enough players out there for it to do that. That’s where it gets interesting. But even then, the Premier League will have so many in-built advantages going for it that I think we’re talking about multigenerational dominance in the league.”
The place for experimentation, then, might be with the growing women’s professional game. With far fewer clubs around the world after the women’s game was deemed illegal in several countries in the not-that-distant past, the size of the player pool is significantly smaller than on the men’s side. In that regard, it is much closer to men’s basketball or American football than it is to men’s soccer.
“One of the biggest issues that women’s football has is comparing itself to men’s football, rather than comparing itself to even the NFL or NBA or anything like that,” Chaudhuri said. “Men’s football is just a behemoth, there’s no comparison.”
Not only does the structure of women’s professional soccer not have to attempt to support such a massive workforce, it might not even need to please the same fan base. You know, the one that has certain expectations for how professional soccer is supposed to work.
“Is the audience the fans of the men’s sport that we drag over? Or is it a brand new audience?” Chaudhuri said. “In women’s football, I think there’s probably a bigger opportunity with fans that aren’t currently fans of men’s football. Being beholden or having this ingrained cultural sense of what is right and what should be done in football — that’s probably less the case for the fan of the women’s game if they’ve not grown up on it in the same way.”
Do you need promotion and relegation? Can revenues be shared? Would a salary cap work? Might playoffs be exciting? Can the European leagues and the NWSL have some kind of legitimized cross-continental tournament? Can you experiment with rule changes? Do you need the same broken system of VAR? Must the transfer market continue to exist? Could you have trades?
The women’s game offers the promise of maintaining the fundamentals of the sport we all love but creating a structure that’s totally new. For the men, though, the answers to all of those questions will remain disappointing.
“You can explore different models, but all of them are going to have pretty major trade-offs,” Chaudhuri said. “As unhappy as a lot of people are with how football is set up today, it’s almost the best trade-off of all the different options that are on the table.”
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