They do, Brazilians teams do at least, and yet nobody cares about it. Does anyone in Brazil care? I mean, 6 of the last 10 winners are RMad or Barca. Does anybody in Spain care? I mean, seriously, the last final was less than a month ago. Without google power, would anyone know the score, the winner, the venue, the losing finalist? Who else was involved? If I was lying about when the games took place? In one sense, this is really good news for the game. The CWC is yet another cynical FIFA attempt to create a money spinner, and as they have with the Confed Cup, fans have largely said "meh." Tourneys that matter should be at least a little organic. This is just sewing bits together and assuming the lightning will come animate the mess. That said, there are fans who would who want this sort of thing. It would have been great for the tourney had Al-Ain or Kashima had beaten Real. FIFA probably has wet dreams about an MLS side winning the thing.
Before FIFA took over it was the clash between Europe and South America Champions Cup winners. Wasnot always the Euros winning then. It however is true that in it's current form nobody in especially Europe, but probably also in South America cares about it. If it wasnot mentioned here I wouldnot have a clue it had been played and Real were the winners.
UEFA has won 6 in a row and 11 of 15 overall. It's reaching a point where UEFA is dominating it like LMX dominates CCL, and the gap is growing. With CCL, you can at least point to evidence that MLS is closing on LMX.
IMO that's because the gap between UEFA and CONMEBOL is growing. You need some suspense or rivalry for it to work, and right now there is neither.
I root for Concacaf teams. I think about the ranking of all the teams, not just the winner. I root for Concacaf's teams in the World Cup and one team each in the Confederations Cup and CWC knowing that they have a tiny chance of winning. The UEFA Champions League would be much shorter if you only included clubs who had a chance to win, but it isn't and shouldn't be that way.
I read through most of the thread and have a few thoughts: I am more bullish on MLS than a bit of people on here. Not that it will catch up to the EPL or anything, but it is showing steady growth. MLS on TV has shown slow and steady improvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Soccer_on_television Herculez Gomez indicates strong growth in ESPN deportes (La audiencia de la MLS en ESPN @ESPNDeportes Deportes aumentó 75% ... ¡75%! Algunos dirán que es por las llegadas de Carlos Vela, Zlatan o Wayne Rooney.La realidad es que se debe a las narraciones de @RichardGol_espn y su servilleta 😎 #MLSxESPN https://t.co/LlnFQWvCWk— herculez gomez (@herculezg) February 28, 2019 ) which mirrors to an extent what is seen in Unimas/Univision. According to wikipedia, from 2014-2018 MLS on TV averaged roughly 9% growth per year. That's really pretty good. If that trend continues, a typical MLS match would have roughly 400k viewers by 2020. Who knows what cable looks like then, but 400k viewers are enough where can start showing lots more MLS matches some during the week, both weekend days) and networks would really be happy with that. If ESPN continues to hemorrhage viewers (and FS1) this means less than it would 10 years ago, but it speaks well to where the league is going. While the TV revenue isn't insignificant, I believe it is currently significantly less than the deal that MLS has with adidas. http://www.espn.com/soccer/major-le...partnership-that-will-run-through-2024-season which is $117 million/year. I am not sure why this wasn't a bigger deal, but adidas doesn't throw $117 million a year at something unless they have done a lot of research and really believe it is worth that, so not only is the money good, but it indicates that in the corporate world, with their piles of consumer data, people are bullish on MLS. And, again, this is almost $5 million per year per team. So from my vantage point, the league is slowly getting more popular, whether or not the current broadcast climate leads to larger TV revenues, but if I am in charge of MLS (which, sadly, I am not), I think "what can we realistically do to make the league better and/or make more money?". It was brought up that Zlatan seems to have helped LAG, but Rooney, despite playing well, has not had the same effect with DC United (at least based on attendance). I don't think that signing big named stars is a realistic strategy to rise all boats in a 24-30 team league, and so I am interested in what can be done and scaled league wide. If you compare attendances from 2001-2018 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Soccer_attendance) it is clear that in market growth is pretty minimal, except for a few cases like SKC. The salary cap in 2001 was approximately $1.7 million, whereas in 2019 a team could spend over $8 million without adding a single DP. Quality increased dramatically, and it doesn't really seem to have an effect on attendance. Some markets are good markets, and some markets are not great, and it is honestly hard to predict what city falls into what boat. MLS has certainly gotten better at figuring out how to maximize attendance in new markets, as the new teams do better, but I don't see a plausible path for turning most teams into ATL. That being said, there has been slow, steady increases and if it continues for the next decade it would add dollars to MLS coffers. But I don't see any reason to believe that a salary cap of $20 million or $30 million would suddenly double attendances (or attendance revenues). Some team would always win and fans will be happy, and some teams will lose and fans will be upset. The losing teams will be better, but they will still fire the coach and be in last place. I think we forget how much MLS has changed in a variety of ways and to some extent this points towards the future. Between the 2014 season and the 2015 season MLS went through a CBA negotiation and in 2014 the MLS salary cap was 2.95 million. It is currently 2.7x that (accounting for the xAM), so the growth has been rapid. Do I expect it to be 2.7x $8.2 million in five years? No (this would be $22 million). But this has gone a significant way in closing the gap with LigaMX. At the same time, Clint Dempsey retired from the Sounders and was essentially replaced by Raul Ruidiaz. David Villa retired from NYCFC and was replaced by... Alexandru Mitrita. And Giovinco left Toronto and they are going after Alejandro Pozuelo. These are all perfectly fine moves, but there is a very clear difference in who left and who got replaced. The league is "maturing" as people always said it should. There isn't some latent Alejandro Puzuelo fan base in Toronto that they are hoping to excite, they are bringing him in 100% because of his playing ability. As a league, are there untapped revenue sources that the entire league could access by virtue of changing some rules? I believe the answer is yes. Simply put: MLS is ideally situated to becoming a selling league, for a variety of reasons. The first is that the facilities in MLS are on par or better with peer leagues (i.e. not EPL), and the US/Canada are very desirable places to live for many people from all over the world. The vast majority of people who aren't from Ukraine/Russia/Turkey would rather live in the US/CA than those places (not that there is anything wrong with them). MLS has historically had embarrassingly little transfer revenue, but it does seem that this is likely to change. The success of americans in germany (including those who skipped MLS) has surely been noted, and in the past year Steffen/Davies/Almiron/Adams have been quite significant transfers. Sure, ATL is a big club, but the other players were from Columbus, Vancouver and NYRB, and they aren't clubs that splash huge amounts of money. It seems Acosta at DCU could also have gone for 7 figures, and so this isn't something which is limited to the Torontos of the world. It could just be that this offseason was different, but Rossi at LAFC and some Houston players could also go for a lot. Alvarez looked really impressive at 16 years old, as well. Currently teams can spend $8.2 million in salary budget/xAM, and the quality has increased a bit. Once this gets up to $10-12 million there really aren't a lot of leagues whose typical team will be better than an MLS team. And if you look at "peer" leagues... Japan is 17% foreign, Ukraine has two teams, and then the rest don't have foreign players worth more than $1 million, the brazilian league is 9% foreign, the argentinian league is 14% foreign, the chinese super league is 14% foreign. If the UK leaves the EU what does that mean for europeans going to the Championship? The Dutch league, Liga Nos, a few traditional selling leagues make significant incomes through buying and selling players. And when you compare the leagues, the middle tier of MLS teams are already more valuable than mid tier Liga Nos teams and on par with Eredivisie teams (the top end of both leagues is well above MLS, especially for the Eredivisie). Since MLS doesn't have relegation, there is less pressure on not finishing in last place, and thus teams can make more long-term decisions about personnel (play your kids!). Furthermore, this should help with parity because promising youngre players are often sold before reaching their full potential, so someone like Alphonso Davies was a solid MLS player, but his biggest impact was the money his transfer provided vancouver. It's much different than buying Raul Ruidiaz, who is a finished product. How could MLS help grow to a selling league? They need to open up transfers, especially with young players. MLS clearly sees this, as there were rumors from Paul Tenorio that MLS would give each team $3 million for a "Young Transfer Fund" that had to be spent by 2022 (but history suggests most teams should spend it ASAP). https://theathletic.com/359370/2018...oney-to-purchase-young-international-players/ This didn't get implemented, but Tenorio is a really good reporter and has great sources, so this is something they were discussing. The YTF would give each team $3 million to spend on a player under 20. Moe generally, the problem with transfer fees is that they quickly take up a DP spot, so any move towards becoming a selling league would need to get around this. I look forward to seeing how the next CBA deals with this, but the two main goals would be to incentivize (or stop disincentivizing) teams to buy young, and then incentivize them to sell. The latter part is easy and can be controlled through turning sale profits into allocation money (and you could even say that YTF purchased players have a larger share of their sale proceeds available for allocation money). For the former, $3 million over a few years isn't going to change much, but what if MLS gave teams $2 million a year and then let them spend up to another $2 million a year on transfer fees for players 20 and under without having it count against the cap? They could bring in 1 $4 million transfer and not have the player be a DP per year. Or 2 $2 million transfers, etc. Then a team can bank up to $1 million in allocation money for money made on the sale on top of transfer fees and keep the rest (for YTF players). This isn't big enough money where it would seriously imperil parity, which I believe is good, but it should also lead to a bunch of revamped scouting departments scouring the world for 1-2 young players every year. Once the salary budgets get up to $10-15 million + per team (which definitely seems plausible by 2025), realistically the typical match should be high enough quality that good players can step into a top 4 league, without missing a beat. How much money could the league realistically make? Based upon stats I saw before from LigaNos and Eredivisie, if the league overall had about half the net transfer revenue they did, it could be about $2 million per team per year. If in a decade a team buys 20 players at $2 million each, they sell one for $20 million, two for $10 million, four for $ 5 million, and then a few more for $2-3 million, then that would be about $ 3 million a year in net transfer revenue. I believe it was in soccernomics the authors talked about how fans really get excited by transfers. Atlanta fans got to talk for a while about how much Almiron was worth, and then the drama went back and forth about whether or not he would get sold, and then you move on. But having lots of transfer drama (both in and out) creates excitement for the team, and is a way to increase fan interest, aside from making more money. At the same time, it increases european fan interest because they can see hot new prospects who are rumored to be transfer targets of their team. Will this solve all of MLS's problems? No. But it is something that they actually have control over. The US/Canada and MLS has a lot of advantages going for it, and these can be monetized by getting better integrated within the world football market.
Don't forget that MLS is the owners. They get to spend what they agree to spend. It's not yet one of those leagues where handful of clubs get to dictate terms to the hoi polloi.
This is definitely true, but they are already toying with the idea of spending money specifically on young players. In the long run transitioning to a "selling league" could easily net extra revenue, so the money would be recovered within a few yeas as the Diego Rossi's of the world are sold for a profit.
I would think most clubs have their average attendance over half of capacity, so even if their attendance is poor by MLS standards, it can't double unless they go to a new or different stadium.
This doesn't deal with MLS, but Europe. Still, the points remain the same. The arguments against are the same. The arguments in favor are the same. Of particular interest, IMO, the UEFA official who calls the notion of a Euro Super League impossible, only to be corrected by the Barca officialwho suggests it might be in a terms of a new CL, but notes that "change is coming" and the journalist who makes a very valid point that quite a bit of what we in the past have called science fiction is now part of everyday life. As this piece notes, some change is coming, it will be drastic, and it may not be something we can even picture right now.
The one thing the proponents of some form of superleague constantly forget is the fact that the model they aspire is in one country with one association (baseball, basketball, nfl, nhl) with one domstic law. They face different countries, different tax laws, different national laws and one union keen on protecting it's soccer heritage. The wet dream is for Barcelona etc. to stay in their domestic leagues (without them the clubs are dead) and make a closed CL (aka Superleague). That model would fast come in conflict with EU laws, especially anti cartel laws. Super leagues are only viable in one country big enough to be a continent on its own, like the USA, China and India. What the SL clowns donot understand is the political reaction from countries within the EU that will make life very difficult for those clubs. To operate across borders they will need cooperation of the countries regarding taxes etc. For instance security is a hot topic given fan violence and terrorist threats. To make life for those clubs very hard the bill for that as a non national interest can beput on their table or if not accepted the matches will not be allowed. Somewhere it is said in the video that certain clubs are owned by states and these can tell we do what we like with what we payed for. To give a hint, Trvmp tries to tell the EU what we should do for his benefit and he gets in fact the middle finger from us. If anybody thinks the EU or any of the countries in it are going to bend over for some sandhopper with oil money in possession of a football club....that truck that hit you was the EU.
Another point is how is Bayern to operate in it as they by regulation are thrown out of the German league. And how is the SL to increase interest as the CL is decreasing in interest in Europe because of its predictability= no surprises (apart from the Ajax uppercut). A SL is a super predictable league, even worse than the current CL.
The EU isn't so much a truck as a bumper car these days. Are there issues? Of course. But it's a mistake to think that what is now will be. Change is coming. I mean, a third of EU MPs are eurosceptics and while Brexit will peel some away, the neo-nationalist party wave hasn't crested yet. At the very least, they have much bigger issues than footie. UEFA. as is the case with all international and national sporting NGOs who profit off the value others add to their sports, are terrified that the curtain will be pulled back a bit. The game has grown because of the professional leagues, but mostly because of the massive clubs in those leagues and the money they bring in. You watched the piece. Did it sound as if Barca wants to stand pat? I know you don't live here, but do you really think the Deutsche Fussball will stand up to the Bmunchers? I know, there are existing rules, but these clubs have proven time and again that they move by their own set of rules. Given the total corrupt vessel that FIFA is now known to be, they are vulnerable. The BBC piece made a couple interesting points, but the overriding one is that the knives are out.
These are parties very much against globalisation...so what is the Sl? Very much in their anti globalisation park.
A couple of takeaways. First, I love the incorrect assumptions that some of those interviewed have of American sports, more precisely the point that American sports don't have room for the clubs that don't sell the jerseys. As if our leagues aren't comprised mostly of those types of teams. Secondly, it's also interesting that the non-English fans seemed to be more in favor of the Super League than the English. Third, if a Super League brings down UEFA and drags FIFA into the grave with it, I'm all for it.
Two countries in the case of MLB, NBA, and NHL. Also, if there's enough money to be made, countries/tax law/national law won't dissuade them. You don't see that stopping Google or any other multinational company. Really the only thing that stops this is the threat of fan or player revolt. There's a reason UEFA and FIFA are both nervous. That might happen. It's also possible that Bayern won't care if the benefits are worth the cost. Do you have a source for the decreasing interest? With respect to predictability, my guess is that any SL formation will come with increased level of parity mechanisms vs any European domestic league. It will end up looking more like a US league with a luxury tax, more equitable revenue sharing, etc. Not necessarily those mechanisms, but something that reduces risk for a Liverpool-like club that is big enough to make a 20-30 team SL cut, but not on the elite level of, say, Barca. No way the 2nd tier clubs make the jump without assurance that they aren't signing up just to be a full time minnow. Also, to be clear, I'm not cheerleading the formation of a SL in Europe. I just think it's probably going to happen.
Why would Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern and Juventus strive for parity, which means they have to give up a considerable amount of revenue compared to what they now have to get level with the rest of the clubs mentioned in the socalled Superleague.
https://www.blauw.com/en/blogs/hoe-populair-is-de-champions-league-nog Sponsors willnot be happy with a Superleague as it amplifies the CL outcome, mentioned in the report: "It is evident that this trend will continue if pay-per-view is introduced in more European countries. What’s more, for sponsors, this means that their target group is becoming increasingly restricted to true football fans."
The elites won't want parity, obviously, but IMO there aren't enough elites for a SL. They need some 2nd tier teams to jump with them. They'll probably have to make some concessions on the parity and/or revenue front to get enough teams on board. Also, all of this only works if everyone that jumps is going to make more money from it. That additional revenue comes from 1) likely getting more revenue from SL than domestic + CL provides today, and 2) cutting out the weaker domestic league teams.
An older article about it: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/f...Champions-League-is-a-bit-rubbish-anyway.html
That article seems pretty tongue-in-cheek, but if the CL really is struggling, that's all the more reason for the super clubs to be open to major changes.
The problem is that the SL is going to increase why people are turning away from the CL. Even the new set up of the CL is exactly a step in the wrong direction. It's ment to cement a constant present of certain clubs (=diminishing risk for them) but that's also exactly the reason why in Europe interest is dropping, the usual suspects and no refreshment. Ajax eliminated Real Madrid and all of a sudden twitter etc.exploded. Excitement, but that's not what Real etc. want. They just want a subscription to the last rounds, but that's such a bore fest for unattached fans that it shows in the numbers. The SL is nothing more than a gloryfied upgrade of the subscription of the usual suspects for mutual confrontations. If the light version (=the new CL) already is loosing interest in Europe, how can the break away clubs expect an even more predictable set of confrontations get more attention? The charm of cup confrontations is that it's a do or die event. If you turn it into a regular league set up, it loses the only charm it still has left. It's not for nothing the group stages are losing the most viewers as it in fact is an alien part in the former knock out competition.