by nottsblue » Wed Apr 21, 2021 10:37 am
The immediate aftermath will be damage limitation, more so for the American owners as they are the true drivers of this. You only have to go back to their “rescue” package they proposed not so long ago.
But this will also be viewed as a learning curve.
What did they get wrong?
How can it be better proposed NEXT time?
What will get the public behind it?
Make no mistake, the main goal of this project was to make more money for the owners. Not the clubs. This will not go away in the short term. If at first you don’t succeed etc. The Covid-19 pandemic has lasted longer and affected the finances of a lot of these clubs much more than they would have planned and budgeted for and this was an opportunity to I dare say bring forward these plans to alleviate their financial concerns. Wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out this was scheduled for a couple of years in the future once the World Cup was done to enable PSG to be a part of it with no conflict of interest and it was brought forward due to the parlous state of the finances.
On a completely different tangent, this also may well have been a different strategy to FFP. That was essentially brought in to limit the spending of clubs outside of the G14. Ourselves and PSG blew that out of the water and clubs like Leicester and Atalanta and Leipzig have emerged also in the last few years to threaten the top 4 league placing season for CL qualification from respective European leagues. The fact that the ESL was going to accommodate 20 clubs, 15 founder and 5 annually, based on some algorithm of league performance means the old G14 have accepted that we and PSG aren’t going away as we are too well established. Add to mix the emergence of other teams aforementioned and they realised the game was up with the system that was in place. A bigger more lucrative competition was needed than the CL. The idea of a derivative of the ESL has been around for decades. I remember as a kid watching Saint and Greavsie in the 80s with Greaves in particular suggesting it would happen sooner rather than later especially with the advent of cheap flights and easy access to Europe. I guess the reformatting of the old European club competitions in the early 1990s served its purpose with the advent of the group stages to enable a guaranteed number of fixtures. This worked perfectly for a couple of decades. Look at Arsenal. Their goal since the early 2000s was not to challenge for the PL title but rather to ensure qualification for the CL. The Wenger Trophy as it laughingly became known as. Now the likes of the rags who had in the first two decades of the PL won 13 of them and finished runners up another 4/5 times, see it as their prime objective. Same was to be said for the dippers. Take away the previous 2 years and in how many seasons of the 30 since the won the league in 1990 did they truly challenge for the league title? 4 or 5 at a push. And this from a club who like rags had dominated the domestic game for the previous two decades.
The old top4 has in the last few years been expanded, admitted by Sky and other media, to a top 6. And throw in the emergence of Leicester to threaten the top4 CL qualification and further diminish the chances of CL qualification for the established larger clubs, is it any wonder the owners of these clubs are very very worried about their financial position. Therefore they need to do something to increase their revenues or at the very least increase the chances of their revenues. FFP had failed them and indeed was now hampering them as they were bound by the very restrictions they had put in place to limit spending by emerging clubs.
That something needed to be an expanded European club competition. UEFA it seems weren’t willing or were able to come up with a plan to GUARANTEE increased chances of revenue for the old G14. So the idea of ESL was revisited and revised with an increased number of clubs, 20, to enable their GUARANTEED participation and thus revenues. It has failed for now. But the reasons behind it are still very much at the forefront of the owners minds.
Every game that passes with no fans and match day revenue, every season with sponsorship money getting ever more marginalised, every year TV money decreasing and owners get more desperate. Spuds have spent huge sums on a new stadium as have Arsenal recently. The Nou Camp is in desperate need of renovation as is the swamp. The dippers have spent big and continue to need to spend on Anfield. Madrid are currently redeveloping the Bernabeu. Wages continue to increase so if costs are rising yet income is falling that spells disaster.
So, this simply is not going to disappear and the statements by a couple of the clubs allude to this. Let’s see what the next set of proposals entail
