€-Moneyball; High and Low Finance Football

@PuckVanHeel - Against my better judgement I am leaving this post up but I may change my mind. You are skirting the edge here by citing unproven conspiracy theories about the origin of Black Lives Matter. I do not like your post. I can assure you that #Black Lives Matter is real here in the US and that there is no involvement of Russian, Chinese or Islamic money involved. If there are members of this forum who object to the post PM me and I will take appropriate action.

 

I am not going to engage in a political discussion about US/China relations which have absolutely nothing to do with Black Lives Matter. If you think this is a big deal, that's fine but from my perspective it has the significance of spitting in the ocean.

You have made your point and let's not have any more politics on this particular thread. If you want to start a separate thread, go ahead but be warned, I don't want mindless conspiracy theories.

 

This is NY Times columnist, Rory Smith's email today. How to save the Europa League. I was not aware of the Heerenveen story about the old Cup Winners Cup.

How to Save the Europa League




Lucas Ocampos’s late winner for Sevilla was one of several highlights in the Europa League quarterfinals.Pool photo by Friedemann Vogel




By Rory Smith


You could have been enjoying this newsletter yesterday. If you like it, sign up to get it directly, every Friday, at nytimes.com/rory.

In the end, what killed the Cup Winners’ Cup was that common culprit: just a little too much of a good thing. For three decades, Europe’s three major club competitions dovetailed perfectly. Each had its night: the UEFA Cup on Tuesday, the European Cup on Wednesday, the Cup Winners’ Cup on Thursday.


And each had its role. The European Cup was the pinnacle, the tournament where the continent’s best came face-to-face. If anything, the UEFA Cup was the greater slog: home to the up-and-comers, the next big things, the proving ground for greatness. The Cup Winners’ Cup, though, was where the fun was.

What defined the Cup Winners’ Cup, more than anything, was its sheer randomness. Unlike its peers, it was not a reward for consistent excellence over the course of the previous season. It was not populated by Europe’s traditional powers. It did not lend itself to the establishment of dynasties.


Instead — because you had to win a domestic cup to get in it, and domestic cups have long been little more than an afterthought in most countries — its ranks were swelled, to some extent, by the unexpected or the overachieving or the downright lucky. Its contenders changed almost every year. And because there was only one entrant per nation, and because it was played in a straight knockout format, it was small enough and short enough that quality did not always tell.

And so it became the competition in which Alex Ferguson and Ronaldo and Marco van Basten forged their early reputations, announcing their talents to the world. But it was also the competition in which Dinamo Tbilisi once faced Carl Zeiss Jena, of East Germany, in a final held in front of fewer than 10,000 people.



Ronaldo led Barcelona to the Cup Winners’ Cup title in 1987, his only season at the club.Action Images/Action Images, via Reuters


It was the competition of Nayim from the halfway line, of Chelsea playing in an actual snowbank north of the Arctic Circle, of Newport County coming within touching distance of a major semifinal, of the greatest moments for K.V. Mechelen and F.C. Magdeburg and Slovan Bratislava, of teams from Hungary and Poland and Austria falling at the last hurdle. It was the competition in which almost anything could happen.

Eventually, its downfall came from the same source as its glory. Over the course of the 1990s, as the European Cup morphed into the Champions League and the UEFA Cup started to expand, the Cup Winners’ Cup became just a little too random.

A cursory glance at accounts of its demise suggests that a quite unfair proportion of the blame was laid at the door of S.C. Heerenveen, an otherwise unassuming Dutch club that has essentially been found guilty in absentia of delivering the fatal blow.


Heerenveen entered the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1998 on the grounds that it had reached the semifinals of the Dutch Cup the year before, and the two finalists, Ajax and PSV Eindhoven, had already qualified for the Champions League.

The team’s performance was hardly laughable — it reached the second round, and lost narrowly there to the Croatian side Varteks — but its presence seemed to undermine the very point of the competition. A tournament for cup winners is one thing. A tournament for cup semifinalists is quite another.






Midweek trips to teams like Shaktar Donetsk, and for them to western Europe, can make the Europa League a season-long slog.Pool photo by Wolfgang Rattay


As more and more of Europe’s best teams entered the Champions League or the UEFA Cup, it was decided that the field in the Cup Winners’ Cup had become too weak. Too many of its entrants were not just unexpected, they were unworthy. UEFA decreed that it would be discontinued; the 1998-99 tournament would be its last edition, and Lazio would be its final champion.

Ultimately, the event had lost its meaning. It had become just too random, and European soccer — in the era of the Champions League — has come to loath randomness. What people want, it has convinced itself, is the mundanity of excellence: the very best teams in Europe, no more than a dozen or so of them, facing one another in various combinations every spring, home and away, just to minimize the risk that the best team might not win.


That is where the glamour is. That is where the appeal is. And that, most crucially, is where the money is. Every development in European soccer over the last 20 years has been made with that single aim in mind: to ensure that the very best teams play each other as often as possible and that they do not have to waste time playing no-marks and minnows.

Variety has been decreed the enemy, and we have been conditioned to accept that as an incontrovertible truth: that sport is about finding out who is best, rather than just seeing who wins. The fact that this is in the interests of the big clubs, the established powers, is — of course — completely coincidental.


It was not a surprise, then, that UEFA was clear that this year’s Continental tournaments — designed to ensure that both the Champions League (for men and women) and Europa League can be played to a conclusion despite the pandemic, and planned with military precision — would be one-off affairs.

No matter how appealing the idea of a condensed, World Cup-style competition might be, European soccer’s governing body did not want anyone to think this was the way forward. Making the quarterfinals and semifinals just one game — rather than two legs — would effectively be sacrificing some of the most valuable television real estate in sport. It would mean clubs would lose two lucrative match days. It was a no go. The Champions League works perfectly fine just as it (normally) is, thank you very much.


That is broadly true, of the Champions League, at least. But it is not true at all of the Europa League, now teetering on the brink of irrelevance, just as the Cup Winners’ Cup was two decades ago. The value of the Europa League’s television rights pale in comparison to those on offer in the Champions League. Its prestige has waned. It sits as somewhere between a consolation and a burden.



This year’s knockout format has raised the stakes of each Europa League game, and is worth preserving if only to make it a more tense, more valuable television event.Pool photo by Friedemann Vogel


And now UEFA might just have happened upon a way to reinvigorate it. Certainly, watching last week’s quarterfinals — Inter Milan’s breathless 2-1 win against Bayer Leverkusen, Manchester United’s tense and taut progression against Copenhagen, Sevilla’s last-gasp victory against Wolves, and Shakhtar Donestk’s brutal destruction of Basel — it felt as if this format ought to be the future of the Europa League.

It works because it solves all of the problems that have plagued the tournament for years. By cutting the number of games, it makes the tournament less of a grind. By condensing it into a week or so and holding it on neutral turf, it makes it an event. By staging it at the end of the season, it creates breathing room earlier in the campaign. By giving it an identity beyond its current one as a shadow version of the Champions League, it becomes more marketable as a product and more valuable as television content.


But it works, too, because it brings a degree of randomness back to European competition. Home and away ties reduce the chance of upsets; they are designed so that quality wins out, and the role of fortune is mitigated. One-and-done matches would do the opposite, ramping up the jeopardy, the tension. It would accentuate the role of luck.

It would make the Europa League a spectacle in and of itself, something different and bespoke and unique, not just a watered-down version of the Champions League. Most of all, it might make it fun: the one thing that, in European soccer’s tradition, Thursday nights always used to offer.

 

French football is in big trouble as their TV deal has collapsed! This is right ahead of the January transfer window. I wonder how many clubs are now insolvent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/15/sports/soccer/LFP-mediapro-telefoot-ligue-1.html