Given the number of football people that are still obsessed with golf, many have naturally been messaging friends on the tour about the LIV controversy. The responses have been as varied as they have been predictable. Some are aghast at golf’s august institutions being ravaged, some think it’s fair enough to take the money. A core of the game’s officials fear something similar again for football, others are sensing more opportunity.
Many are describing it as “golf’s European Super League moment”, and it is why the threat of that project is still so pertinent. Its next steps will dictate the future of the game, and decide whether anything even worse – such as LIV Soccer – is yet possible in football.
As regards to something so overt, everything depends on the court hearing being brought by the ESL to the European Court of Justice over 11-12 July. That will decide whether the rebel clubs have a justifiable case that Uefa is abusing a monopoly position as a competition organiser. If that were to be taken forward, and the ESL were to win, it would open the way for the clubs – or any other interests – to set up their own events. Football would be in a whole new world, which could eventually resemble a “wild west” of different competitions.
Your traditional club season feeding into the Champions League and then European Championships and World Cup? You can forget that.
Uefa, for their part, are supremely confident that their role as the game’s safeguard will see an institution as “political” as the ECJ rule on their side. The view is that football has too much social value, and the effect would be too great.
Against that, though, the ESL are going to produce a lot of evidence arguing Uefa instead operates as a monopoly.
Much will depend on whether the case is overseen on a primarily commercial basis or sociopolitical. If the former, and it’s about pure competition, the ESL have a decent chance of winning. That would remove one of the old football world’s few remaining protections.
A LIV Soccer would at least be feasibly possible.
It wouldn’t yet be completely open season, but that in itself would almost open a new world of complications.
In the event of an ESL victory, any new competition would still need a licence from other Uefa or Fifa, which is where this story brings together all of modern football’s main themes and driving forces.
Uefa wouldn’t dream of such a licence, but they are still in a stand-off with Fifa over the future of the club game and an expanded Club World Cup. That hasn’t been resolved, only delayed, due to the ongoing effects of Covid on the calendar.
It is why so many in football firmly believe Fifa would have been willing to give the ESL a licence. In this case, from a situation where Uefa have politically outmanoeuvred Fifa through their relationship with Conmebol, a new competition could suddenly give the global body new power. It would be a game-changer in so many ways.
So much of this stems from the game’s new power bases, and the 2018 discussions that Fifa president Gianni Infantino had with SoftBank, who were willing to financially back that expanded Club World Cup. The conglomerate has deep Saudi Arabian ties, and it was around this time that Mohammed bin Salman’s hierarchy were making overtures to try and get the 2022 World Cup spread across the entire Middle East. A purely Qatari tournament was too much for the Saudis to bear at the height of the Gulf blockade.
It points to how football, and all of its own august institutions, are caught between much greater tensions. The game’s two major driving forces in 2022, transforming it and distorting it, are: American capitalism, seeking return on investment; and Middle Eastern sportswashing, pursuing political aims.
In a different way to golf, football’s old world is still figuring out how to adapt to all this. The game’s institutions don’t actually have the same power they used to, but then they don’t view all this in the same way, either.
It is historically ironic, given how such interests used to be perceived, that the effect of American capitalism is seen as more “organic” for the sport. You only have to look at how La Liga has entered into a deal with a private equity group like CVC, while competition president Javier Tebas so frequently lambasts the influence of state-owned clubs.
An important caveat there, mind, comes from the words of FairSquare’s Nicholas McGeehan about Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabian owners: capitalist investors “aren’t bombing Yemen”.
Whereas football has meanwhile had to react to Middle Eastern interest, it has proactively courted the US as the biggest growth market in the world.
Hence the super clubs returning to American cities this summer. Hence those same clubs and the federations falling over themselves for US media interest. It is a potential audience of over 300m people, after all, among whom football is only growing in fevered popularity.
