SUPERLEAGUE OR Senseless talk

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A few days have passed since everything and the opposite of everything has happened, since howls and meows have been raised from improvised pulpits, now with the game almost over (because it is not over yet) it is perhaps possible to have a clearer outline of the events.

Filling one’s mouth with the word “sport” and “sporting merit” is perhaps too much for the planet of soccer, which from Blatter and Platini onwards has been increasingly oriented towards profit and business, allowing investment funds, American, Chinese, Arab and Russian holdings to enter the football planet, some with the intention of guaranteeing important economic returns for their shareholders, others to conquer important markets, others to seek political openings, others simply to recycle the product of not exactly transparent wealth. It is evident that patrons of the arts no longer exist. Today, people such as Viola, Ferlaino, Moratti, Rozzi, Berlusconi himself, and many others, would be looked upon with compassion, owners of clubs who invested their passion in the clubs in order to realize their narcissistic ambitions without having real economic returns.

In this context, no longer passionate or patrons, but simply business structures, the various properties have as their primary objective the profits, collapsed dramatically due to the health crisis and lack of innovative capacity of the associations that boast the monopoly of the organization of events and that like all monopolists have profited, used and abused their customers (football clubs) with demagogic and hypocritical policies, tending to attract the sympathies of the consumer through the organization of country fairs (Nation League, UEFA Cup, Grandfather’s Cup) in which matches between Germany and San Marino, between Real Madrid and Apoel of Nicosia can be expected to have nothing spectacular and since today soccer is above all the entertainment industry, it is necessary to attract the interest of end users through major events that can be well organized by a confederation of football and not by a cooperative country chaired by the squire of the country (UEFA). We owe it to the country squire on duty, dazzled by petrodollars, if the next World Championships will be held in Qatar in 2022 at Christmas time, (to avoid the 50 degrees in the shade of June). In addition, it is hard to see how, in a free market Europe, the organization of sporting events can be legitimately prevented by bodies outside UEFA which, in a free market regime, cannot have a monopoly on the sponsorship of sporting events, nor prevent clubs from being entrepreneurs, in accordance with European economic norms. We can’t help but smile at the FIGC’s threat to exclude from the championships the clubs promoting the super league that, coincidentally, are Juve, Milan and Inter, which alone are worth 50% of the entire Serie A.

At the end of the story, I wonder if in a world of professional soccer organized by joint stock companies, where the corporate purpose is economic, and where 80% of companies suffer from over-indebtedness, Serie A football clubs can seriously give up the economic contribution in terms of turnover of Milan, Juventus and Inter, or rather their protests do not resemble the barking of a pack of dogs prevented from reaching a bone.

Some well-thinking people will object that in this way the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but they forget that we live in a capitalist society.

In rugby the super league has existed for years (Top 14), as well as in Basketball and no howling has ever risen to the sky. It is normal that the national federations and UEFA do everything possible to prevent the birth of a new competing enterprise (the super league) that would have a negative impact on their turnover, but companies (source: soccer and finance) that were in debt on June 30th last year, such as Inter for 245 million, Juve for 385 million, Milan for 103 million and Roma for 300 million, will not give up their initiative so easily, especially if this will be, as it seems, a source of wealth. No, the game is not over, we will see some good things.