@dipset said in Sports?:
I guess from my perspective is that I only have so much time to watch sports. I already watch NHL, NBA, and F1 this spring/summer with some MLB sprinkled in between, so when I do want to take a dive into Champions, Serie A, Premiere, etc, I'd prefer the experience is streamlined and as elite as possible. I personally have found the amount of matches that take place to be overwhelming in the first place with many of them being clear W's for the bigger franchise.
Yeah makes sense, and that's what the Champions League is already supposed to be: the top competition with the top teams. It just so happens that the top teams may vary from one season to the next, and that's what those big clubs don't like.
And it's true that the big clubs win most of the time, but like I said not always, and that's what makes it cool. Also the Super League's argument of having "only big matches between big teams" to foster viewer interest is flawed: if every match is a big match, then no match is a big match. It's the rarity of these encounters that makes them special, the fact that "it's the first time these two teams play each other since 2010!" or whatever.
I also was somewhat aware of their tiering system in football, but my assumption is that the mega corporations were already abusing the disparity within their own leagues. I mean, I see it in every sports league, especially F1 where the bottom teams have absolutely no chance at winning whatsoever, but even leagues like MLB have massive disparity between big market franchises and smaller ones. So I was operating under the assumption that the power is already imbalanced and this new Super League is no different than what already exists.
Not sure how each league functions but couldn't the even out the playing field through things like spending/salary caps, expansion drafts, and other things like that or does it already exist?
Oh yeah you're absolutely right about that, there is already a huge disparity, the current system is far from perfect. Salary caps and the like would be great, the difficulty is to implement this in every country at the same time, otherwise you'll end up with even bigger disparities. And salary caps are illegal in the EU (or at least certain countries) as far as I know, so I don't think that can happen.
Taxes and charges also operate very differently from one country to the next, in France for example they are way higher than in other European countries, which means that in order to pay the same salary to a player, it costs the club way way more, so they struggle to compete. The English Premier League sold its TV rights for exponentially more money than other leagues have, which means even the lowest English PL club is way richer than the top French club (barring PSG, they're on another planet altogether). And so on.
So a lot needs to be fixed, and I don't know if it can. But this Super League thing would be taking things too far. In a way, the fact that people are reacting so strongly against it despite the situation already not being fair shows how much worse it would make it haha.
And what do you know, I wake up to the news that clubs are withdrawing from the Super League already, it's already dead, yay, the peasants win! The chairman of Manchester United has resigned over it, maybe more to follow.
One more question- my friend says a lot of these mega clubs are really annoyed with how Champions League is being run, but he hasn't been following why they are annoyed. Would you happen to know? Because with that info, maybe this Super League is something they threw at the wall to disrupt UEFA and show their displeasure, but do not expect it to stick.
That's also true, but I don't know the specifics. It's definitely for similar reasons, the big clubs want even more money and even less possibilities of missing out, I think that's why they're are revamping its format in 2024.
