Yes, the snippets coming out from Juventus didn’t sound like they were regretting anything, and that they strongly believe that the ESL was in their best interests (and for football as a whole, but I am cynical about that point)
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I think the Spanish and Italian teams are basically bankrupt without the significant and instant cash injection. Juve are even in a more precarious position as they might not even get in the champions league.
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From various tweets and posts from football journalists and reporters, yes that’s basically it in a nutshell.
- Barcelona are 1bn in debt (pounds or maybe euros)
- Real Madrid could not afford a single big name signing last year, and are consistently being bailed out by the government
- AC Milan and Internazionale still lease their stadium from the city council
- Internazionale sought emergency funding in February
- Juventus have to come up with 100m (pounds or euros) by the end of June.
- several of those 6 English clubs claimed financial support and furlough during the pandemic, and sacked (non-playing) staff . Arsenal even fired Gunnersaurus!
So this immediate influx of cash for them is hardly to build them up, but to help them stay afloat. What football, like in most businesses, needs is not for a new league to prop failing ventures who have overspent up, but for those failing ventures to fold. Should have happened with more of the banks and venture capital firms in the late 2000s, and should happen with at one of these clubs now.
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I suspect that fans get sentimental about “my club” the same way veterans get sentimental about “my regiment” – and as military forces shrink there are often some very odd contortions to try to preserve the favoured cap badges.
There is so much money still in that sport and they were allowed to come back to playing rather soon I remember and my dad has been watching games on TV all the time so there is money being made. I do not understand this at all. How can these clubs be broke? Overspending on transfers? Isn’t that rather a stupid thing to do?
I talked to my dad about it but since no German clubs had actually signed up, he wasn’t interested much and said it was going to fold–which a day later it did. He also said that several of the involved clubs belong to some rich person who uses them as personal play things and naturally just want to squeeze out more money.
As an aside: the local club here has had a prolonged outbreak among players for reasons that I assume include “shitty testing” and “irresponsible behavior”.
A lot less than they did a year ago. The pandemic has hit two or three years after the market has gone ballistic in some prices. 3 years ago or so, PSG snatched Neymar for a price that was unthinkable for anybody three years before when he got signed from Brazil. There was a price clause on his contract of over 200M euros, and soon after that prices drove up.
When many clubs were adjusting to this and renegotiating TV rights, plus adjusting of contracts for players to avoid them leaving to other markets like the British, the pandemic hit, and a club like FC Barcelona lost overnight a main asset of 90.000 plus seats in their stadium that they were not selling tickets for. If you put on top that the economy was hit hard and their other sources of income through merchandising have gone flat, soon megaclubs like that start to lose money. There are still games, but income has gone drastically low. Even adjusting contracts is not saving them.
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The only people I feel bad for are the fans.
Those huge transfer sums… are just unimaginable amounts of money being payed for a player playing for some other club than before. It had to implode sometime.
I really don’t know anything about football except that my mobile tells me if Dortmund wins their games so I know to gauge my dad’s mood 
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Funny enough, FC Barcelona is still owned by the season ticket holders (soci in Catalan).
Before the pandemic hit, it was clear that this spike in prices (driven by the British TV contracts and income of millionaires owning clubs, mainly) was sort of doomed. But they were hit at one of the worse times they could have. Hence why they are trying to be inventive. Or fold.
It is heinous how much money clubs in Spain owe to the government and they keep renegotiating/delaying their debts, plus how much money local councils and governments invest into smaller clubs.
I have lost a lot of touch with footie since I moved to NZ, and in a way, I prefer it. I’m more into Rugby Union now, where quantities of money are still reasonable.
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A season ticket for West Ham would cost £320-£1,200 depending on where you sit, looks like mostly around £600. So that’s £40 million before the TV rights…
Football’s arms race has always been there - whether driven by the clubs or the players - but it really got into overdrive in the UK in the early 1990s at the start of the Premier League. The more financially attractive the sport got, the bigger the investors that came into it, leading to the stage where to be competitive at the European level your club needs to be owned or bankrolled by a multibillionaire, finance firm or state - and in case cases two or three of those! Bayern Munich may be the exception to the rule but the financial side is so far away from where it was even 20 years ago that I can’t see an easy path back.
England is a classic example. Okay, so we want to reign in those top six clubs - but the “next” six are also owned by mulitmillionaires so equally they won’t take well to a push to allow their fans a 50% stake in the club as per the German model. I’m sure those “next” six would have been equally tempted as Arsenal or Tottenham were if they were invited into the ESL. Yes the other 14 clubs might happily want to punish those 6 who attempted to breakaway, but are also aware of setting a precident that may harm themselves in future years should they reach that level of financing.
I’m not sure what sort of punishments could or should be in place either - although one thing that might positively affect the English game all round is to impose a ban on incoming international transfers for say 2 years for those six clubs. They can still sell their players to international clubs and still buy and sell domestically (i.e, acquire other English or maybe UK players) but can’t buy players from other leagues. This might trickle more money down the English pyramid yet not harm the players or fans as much as a ban from European competitions or points deductions would do.
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Yeah, the West Ham site also has a “we are taking a stand against this ESL thing” news item… easy for you to say, you weren’t asked.
One of the things I felt did some harm was the EU ruling stating that players from anywhere in the EU should be allowed to play for any club – spiritually I’m much more in tune with “if you don’t actually come from the club’s area you shouldn’t be playing for it”, though of course even before that there were lots of transfers around the UK.
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The old “King Herod Cup” approach!
My suggestion about an international transfer ban is much easier to impose on the English clubs now that the UK is out of the EU and the Bosman/“freedom of movement/travel/work” conditions are no longer guaranteed. Far more difficult for the Spanish or Italian bodies to impose such a position on thier clubs.
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