Monday, April 19, 2021

European Super League

Yoda by elycefeliz from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

There's been a lull in politics recently, fortunately there's new entertainment from the football world. Not the matches, I never watch those, that's 90 minute snoozefest, but these's fun drama involving creation of European Super League.

It look like 15 clubs (12 publicly known, 3 weirdly still secret) announced that they're dumping existing UEFA league, and creating their own league.

As far as I can tell, the main motivations seems to be that:

  • it's under control of the big clubs, not the greedy and corrupt UEFA and FIFA and (somehow) Qatar
  • it will provide more predictable income streams to the big clubs, without risk of losing tens of millions due to a bad match or two and failing to qualify
  • it will just make a lot more money, as big clubs won't have to waste time playing weak clubs few people care to watch
Now the most interesting thing is predicting who's going to win, Super League or UEFA.

For this I checked UEFA's club rankings. Members of the new league are rated 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 26, and 53. So 10 out of top 15 clubs, plus two baffling additions.

To make sure this isn't some artifact of weird storing, I also checked 538's global rankings, and clubs in the Super League are ranked 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 28, 36. So again 10 of top 15, plus two baffling additions.

The low ranked outliers are not even the same - it's AC Milan and Tottenham by 538's ranking; and AC Milan and Inter Milan by UEFA's.

Interestingly 538's global ranking shows total dominance of European teams. The only non-European club in top 50 is a Brazilian one at 41.

So it looks like if Super League plans go ahead, it will likely completely dominate European and global football.

Greedy and corrupt UEFA and FIFA threatened every club and every player involved in the Super League with a ban from participating in everything else including the World Cup, to which the Super League responded in hilariously ballsy way that if that's so, they'll just create their own World Cup.

And according to rankings, Super League's World Cup will be far higher level event than one by what's left of UEFA and FIFA.

Of course supporters of smaller teams, as well as supporters of greedy and corrupt UEFA and FIFA, are really hating on this development, and trying to use all their corrupt politician friends like Boris Johnson to stop it. But right now I'd bet on the Super League winning.

And as a final aside, the very fact that Boris Johnson is on UEFA's side clearly shows that the Super League are the good guys here.

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