As an industry that accounts for 21 billion euros annually, football has evolved enormously, whilst remaining rooted in a capitalist rationale. This is shown by the constant change that competition structure has undergone to make the game ever more economically advantageous for the most powerful contemporary football clubs. The history of the Champions League itself is a good example: when in 1955 the French newspaper L'Equipe conceived the notion of the former European Cup, this project was born without the approval of UEFA, which was only one year old at the time.
This being the case, we might question whether a slow but continuous process of Americanisation of the competition-spectacle model exists in Europe, in which the maximisation of profit is the primary goal of the participants. The various reforms that the format of the European Cup, known as the Champions League since 1993, has undergone, follow this logic. As Holt (, p. 35) states, the clubs were "increasingly dissatisfied by the level of income accrued by UEFA through the Champions League, and also the manner in which it was distributed". In the United States, based on a system of closed competitions, drafts are organised, salary limits are imposed and the commercialisation of audio-visual and advertising rights is centralised, taking advantage of the strength of the cartel with the aim of favouring a competitive balance.
This is the wider context within which the debate surrounding the creation (or not) of a European Super League of football has been contextualised. Indeed, since 1988, a number of proposals have been put forward, driven primarily by large media groups: Mediaset in 1988, Media Partners in 1998 and News Corporation in 2012. Shortly after the conglomerate founded by Rupert Murdoch articulated its own proposal, Badia reflected that the "the pressure exerted by the large media groups for the big European clubs to leave their domestic league and concentrate on a European Super League has become more present than ever and is gaining ever greater purpose, more based on the notion that the model of such a Super League would provide the participants and owners with significant negotiating capacity to increase their ordinary income (broadcasting, marketing and matchday)" (, p. 22).
Investment funds and banks have also been behind the European Super League project. Holt (, p. 35) explains how JP Morgan was involved in the Media Partners' attempt to create a Super League in 1998 with an investment of 1.2 million pounds. In this vein, in 2020 reports published by the Financial Times that CVC Capital Partners could have been interested in financing a global club super league project were joined, according to Sky News, by an initial proposal with JP Morgan as the main financial partner. The first visible targets were two English clubs: Liverpool and Manchester United. In recent years, two other clubs, Juventus and Real Madrid, have also been particularly active in promoting this new competition. JP Morgan had negotiated financing the promotion group with between 5 and 6 billion euros in order to start the new competition.
The launch of the Super League has thus been on the table of the big European football clubs for years, which have been a permanent pressure group to get UEFA to change the structure of the Champions League, to create greater competitive balance and from which they could receive more income for their participation. In the 2019-2020 season, the winner of the Champions League won around 111 million euros : out of the 2.04 billion euros that UEFA had to distribute among the participants. In relation to the proposal for the new competition, which was to be funded by JP Morgan, the Spanish newspaper Marca suggested that the winner could end up earning some 1 billion euros, a figure that would be impossible for UEFA to match, even with the arrival of new sponsors such as Barclays.
On the night of April 19, 2021, hours before the UEFA executive committee approved the new pyramid of its club competitions from season 2024-25, the break was completed. Twelve clubs, led by the President of Real Madrid, Florentino Perez, took the step and announced this new Super League: AC Milan, Arsenal FC, Atletico de Madrid, Chelsea, FC Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur. These big clubs opted for a championship model where there was more competitiveness between the participating teams and an even more commercial approach. This involved implementing a semi-closed competition, which relativised the maximisation of the result, in which there would be fifteen permanent participants and five more that varied depending on their performance in the previous seasons, similar to the way in which the basketball Euro-League already functions, which began in the season 2000-01 and is controlled by the private company Euro-league Basketball, with headquarters in Barcelona. This competition would have to coexist with national leagues.
However, two days later, the big six English clubs publicly distanced themselves from the project, citing the public and political pressure unleashed when it became public, at the same time that the prestigious economic news agency Bloomberg reported on a possible new $6 billion funding package for UEFA from the British investment firm Centricus Asset Management. One week later, Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Juventus were left alone to defend, to different degrees, the project. While this may fail, the underlying debate will continue since the structural problems of European football (the economic and competitive imbalance) remain unresolved.
Although the Super League project is recent, it has already attracted academic attention. Just a few months after the failure of the project, different authors began publishing editorials or short commentaries in prominent journals highlighting the research perspectives that it has opened. Furthermore, in tandem with the Super League project, a PhD dissertation was published highlighting the need to revise the competitive structure of European competitions in order to improve the competitive balance between the clubs.
The most common justification among academics for the football Super League is based on the analysis that some researchers, especially from the field of sports economics, have made of the economic and competitive imbalance that exists between the clubs of the major European football leagues.
Jordi Badia also makes an interesting contribution from the communication sciences with the following summary (, p. 4): "The position of these authors has oscillated between those that believe that the current situation of combining the UCL with the domestic leagues is optimal, and those that consider that the richest clubs should compete exclusively in a European Super League of American format". Badia aligns himself with the latter, because he understands that those who defend the combination of the European and domestic competitions fail to take into account an essential factor: "The decisive weight that the competitive balance of the championships has on the clubs' economic viability" (, p. 4).
On the one hand, this author concludes that as soon as these clubs take part in the UCL, the revaluation of [their] intangibles becomes as, or more, important than the immediate revenue that the continental competition generates. On the other hand, this fact adds to the growing sporting difference between the main European clubs and the other participants in domestic competitions. According to Badia, who conducted a longitudinal analysis of results between 1996 and 97 to 2020-21 seasons, after the Bosman ruling and the rise of satellite televisions (Pay-TV) between 1994 and 1995, the economic inequality among the clubs is a progressive and unstoppable trend. Hence, economic inequality increases the difference in sport performance among clubs. "This difference in sport performance affects the competitiveness of the domestic leagues. It is only a matter of time, therefore, that this loss of competitiveness ends up affecting the interest of the spectators and, consequently, the commercial value of both, domestic leagues and their clubs, decreases" (, p. 163).
Based on competitive balance theory, FIFA is the first to endorse the fusion of competitions in emerging markets: the possible African Super League, the merger of the leagues of Mexico and the US or of Belgium and the Netherlands. Furthermore, "continental Super Leagues, if organised by club consortiums and not by confederations, would provide the perfect feeder tournaments for its own flagship competition, which it could then brand, promote and sell as "The Best", short-circuiting the existing continental cups (slow-killing them, in fact), and thereby weakening the economic and political power of confederations, two of which [Gianni] Infantino's FIFA perceives as a threat to its desire of total dominance, South American CONMEBOL and European UEFA". With regards to the European football competitions, things change when a new championship that escapes the control of UEFA is proposed globally in Europe, which is considered the cradle of modern football.