How America ruined soccer

The whole sorry story is a testament to the problems of modern European football, but also to what makes it unique. The saga also helps explain the almost immediate furious reaction to yesterday’s declaration by 12 of the continent’s richest clubs that they will form a breakaway European Super League modeled on the American National Football League, one in which teams do not rise and fall between leagues, regardless of their fortunes on the field. Reynolds’s vision was predicated on the nature of European football—which is rooted in geography, and history, and hierarchy. The fundamental truth of European football is that any club from any country can, in theory, keep winning its matches and end up in the top leagues, playing against the biggest teams in the world. For this to be possible, however, the opposite must also be the case: If the biggest teams lose enough games, they can fall down the pyramid of leagues and end up playing the likes of Darlington in front of a few thousand fans. The new European Super League is an attempt to break free of this structure entirely. In this new competition, at least 12 clubs—including Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Barcelona—will form a new league that they cannot be kicked out of, no matter how badly they perform. They will play one another and share a new and large pool of revenues, separate from the national leagues of the countries where they were born and raised.