Article: What if there was a European super league?......Further on from the other thread | Football Southampton

Should there be a European Super League with say
United
Liverpool
City
Arsenal
Chelsea
Celtic
Rangers
And possibly a few others allowed to leave if they wish ? I would support this if it was in concrete there could be no 2nd team allowed to play in their respective home Countries League so it would yet again lead to a 2 tier system with a side having a domestic as well as a European League team , there could possibly be a promotion relegation if there was a need for it as well .
Lets be honest what do these teams do for the League , they sponged of us and make us poorer in terms of quality and overvalue anything with more than a tiny bit of talent , let them pursue the Eldorado whilst we can watch honest football on a permanent footing of stabilty .
I would love to see a competitive League system right the way through the Leagues with it possible for fans of the lower Leagues to still dream of playing and succeeding in the top flight .

 

No, no, a thousand times no! At the moment every team in the Football League (and non-league as well) has the theoretical dream of being able to rise up the divisions and ultimately compete with the best in their country. They can then qualify to play against the best in Europe. The top four or five in the Prem aren't necessarily the same teams every year. Liverpool used to be a shoe-in but have been replaced by Man City, Newcastle and Tottenham are knocking on the door, and who knows, Saints might be up there in a couple of years.

The point is, once you have a super-league, that dream has gone for ever. Unless you were in it to begin with, you wouldn't ever get in. And it would get really boring watching the same old teams compete year after year for a meaningless trophy.

 

With the greatest respect to Celtic and Rangers, there is a long list of teams who would put up a better fight in such a league.

 

Iteresting debate (glad to see you have some other topics in your locker ). What do you mean in the sentence above in bold? In an earlier sentence you satte that there must be no second team playing in domestic league and then in this bold sentence, you talk about a side having a domestic as well as a European league - I didn't understand that. Do you mean that they will be in both leagues or just the European League?

 

Rangers would have their asses handed to them week in week out.

 

Don't forget though that these teams would presumably getting some bug dosh and I would expect anyone of these teams to be attracting some better quality players.

 

The best players will always pick London or Manchester over Glasgow.

 

Agree in part, however they will be getting a better quality of player than they are now and a good manager can put theose together as a team and allow them to compete better. Signing the best players doesn't automatically win you things. It takes time and signing players who would still be considered "top quality" will help any team.

 

I think this league would be a great idea, so long as promotion and relegation stayed, so that if teams like us could still reach the Super League by reaching the top of our national league (the Premiership).
It could even in later years turn into a world league, which despite problems such as away travel being astronomically expensive (unless by then air flights are cheaper), I think it would be great.
But as I say, so long as the teams can be relegated, and teams can be promoted into it.


The trouble is, there is no proposed way of how relegation would work. I.e. the English/Spanish teams would always be at the top presumably, so then they would never get relegated, so unless foreign teams who get relegated go into the Premiership as the top English teams go up, how would English teams ever get promoted to the Super League? If you get what I mean.
I suppose the Conference South/North must work in a similar way, so perhaps there is a solution there. I'm not myself very familiar with how that system works though.

 

I actually think that something like this will eventually happen. At the end of the day I'm not sure that FIFA/UEFA really care that much about the fans that go to the games, and more about money, and there is no doubt that a European Super League would attract some big TV deals. The biggest ones for the Premiership come from South East Asia (or did last time I looked anyway). I went travelling round that part of the world for a few months and none of the locals there gave a **** about the majority of the Premiership teams, weren't interested in the relegation battle (which many people in this country in my experience find just as entertaining as the title race), all they were interested in was who won the league. If a Super League happened with the "biggest and best" teams in it then it would attract a massive audience from that region of the world and in theory mean bigger TV deals.

The main question would be how quickly the novelty would wear off of Man Utd playing Real Madrid, Barcelona, the Milans etc twice every season, rather than now where it is only if they are drawn against each other in the Champs League.

I also don't think it would be the end of domestic competition either, would make the top flight much more open for the teams left behind, the money wouldn't be the same because, lets face it, the reason the Premiership has such massive TV deals is because of some of the clubs in the league who would be gone if the Super League happened.

 

If those teams were to join a Super League then all the Sky money would go with it and the standard of the remaining teams in the PL would drop as the best players would want to play in the elitist league.

Our domestic leagues would become more competitve and it would be possible to see a team rise from league to to the top tier and challange for the title. It maybe exiting in some respect but how could any team really claim to be champions of England when the best teams in England are playing elsewhere?

Another point would be the cost of travel for fans, to follow the team across Europe every other week. The Champions league have 3 away games in the group stages then the knock out ones. If it was a Euro Super league of say 18 teams then there would be 17 away games and this wouldn't be sustainable for the average fan particuarly in the current economic climate.

 

A European superleague would cover the top teams in Europe. Can't see them letting 7 teams from Britain take part. If it was a league of 18 or 20 teams, surely no more than 3 British teams would be invited in. The top sides would do this to hoover up the money, so would probably not agree to it if relegation was permitted. Therefore, if the top sides just become permanent European League sides, the rest of us would just carry on as usual with the leagues as they are.

 

I dunno, you see players going to ****holes like Makhachkala just for money.

 

How many teams now can claim that ? How many can even dream of it ? We cant thats for sure , it aint going to happen ,

 

Not if there were two divisions comprised of 38 teams , League 1 and 2 , the relegation and promotion could be worked out upon a success/pro rata of the others sides in there ? Or via a play off system from the domestic Leagues ?

 

Barcelona have now a B side which plays lower down their League system , if Barcelona decided to join the European Super League this would not be the case , the same would apply to all prospective club thinking of having their cake and eating it . They would have to choose .

 

Is that the bit about rising up through the leagues and challenging? At the moment not a chance but if the top clubs were no longer in the league then it would become more of a possibilty. Wigan, Fulham, Swansea have all progressed up the leagues and into the PL.

 

Yes but they have not done say what Wimbledon did without money , nor Luton , nor Oxford , if we levelled the playing field by taking out the 5/6 usual suspects of winning everything I think it would make it a far far better League , sure poorer but something like our European conterparts whereby we bring on nearly all of our talent from the locality , surely a good thing .
If we could only spend what we brought in roughly then (like the fair play ruling but actually adhered to without sponsoring some spurious object) surely it would be a good thing , one thing for sure is we would see lower wages for payers and most bar the players would like to see that as that money is out of the game never to come back into it .

 

The problem with the whole concept is money. If the Super League was agreed to then the clubs not in it would see a massive hit to their income, for most of the current Prem teams this could be crippling as they have been used to the TV money for such a long period now that they can't operate without it. So the next thing is to say "yeah Super League is a go ahead, but it will be at the start of the XXXX season" to give the teams not in it time to sort their finances out. Now the time span would have to be quite a large one, and when do they decide in this time frame who goes into the Super League? If it was agreed to 5 years ago then teams like Liverpool would almost certainly have been in it based purely on ability. Now the only way they get in is on reputation.

 

Bah, humbug. I don`t want any of this dicking around with leagues business. Surely there is already a kind of super league with the champions league format as it is. And Saints should play in proper stripes, football boots should be black, and there should only be the manager and the guy with the sponge on the bench.............