11 Better Ways to do a Super League

If we’re going to replace the Champions League, we need to get creative.

“A European Championship for clubs is inevitable. The new format for the Champions League is a step in the right direction. But it is only a step.”
—Silvio Berlusconi, 1991

Okay, fine, the big clubs’ power play to establish a permanent oligopoly over the game could’ve gone better. Maybe one lesson here is if you’re trying to launch a multibillion-dollar sports league you should put a little more effort into it than the time it takes to throw up a few lines of html on GoDaddy and send an insane rich old guy to say insane rich old guy things on a late-night Spanish talk show. Another one might be to please, for the love of god, stop referring to fans as “key external stakeholders.” And come on, fellas, are you sure you want to invite Tottenham next time?

Because that’s the thing, there will definitely be a next time. These people have been trying to make a Super League happen longer than most of us have been alive. All that stopped them this go round, besides mindblowing laziness and incompetence every step of the way, was getting a little too greedy with the whole “no competition allowed” thing.

Don’t worry, rich dudes, space space space is here to help! From the reassuringly familiar (the new Champions League format does sound awfully like the Super League we all hated, right?) to the, um, outside-the-box, here are 11 new styles of competition to try on for size.

The Swiss Model

Thirty-six clubs form a single group, or “league stage,” in which each plays five home and five away games against opponents determined by a seeding system. The top 8 teams advance, while the next 16 teams compete in a two-legged playoff to determine who gets to participate in the final knockout round of 16. Wait, what? Yeah, I don’t know. Note that though the introduction of wild card games between the league and the playoffs may resemble certain American sports, the Swiss model is distinguished by its superior selection of hard cheeses. Qualification will follow the existing system except for the addition of four coefficient-based spots to ensure optimal levels of Arsenal memes at all times. If this sounds “anti-competitive” or “specifically designed to make Stan Kroenke money even though his team sucks,” please remember that Stan Kroenke married rich and it would frankly be rude for other rich people to do money things without him.

The Liechtensteiner Model

Like the Swiss Model but with a billionaire prince. Trust me, he’ll fit right in.

The Suburban Rec League Model

The main drawback to the Swiss Model is that it’s still theoretically possible to drop out of the tournament simply by being bad at soccer. This was not an issue in the leagues I grew up in. If you lost in the first round, you entered the losers’ bracket. If you lost after that, you played a consolation game. If you kept losing, you got a trophy and a pizza party at a place with weird-smelling carpets and those hard red plastic cups for unlimited soda refills. Gonzalo Higuaín is requesting a return to Juventus as we speak.

The Bingo Model

To increase their chances of winning, participants may purchase and play multiple cards at once, which starts to cramp elbow space at the table but is probably good brain calisthenics. Dietrich Mateschitz loves this one.

The Stock Market Model

Appreciating that one game of chance with a tenuous link to fundamentals is as good as another, this model replaces notoriously noisy soccer results with the more delicate instrument of the markets. Owners compare the value of their portfolios before and after the game, and the one that got more obscenely rich in the last couple hours wins. (Out of respect for soccer’s culture and traditions, petroleum futures will obviously count too.) Fans worried about changing the Champions League will be reassured to learn that the same teams still come out on top.

The All-Star Skills Challenge Model

But sport isn’t about finance, the objection goes, it’s about the love of the game. (Any American who says stuff like this out loud is definitely the kind who uses the British “sport” and pronounces it “fuh-nance.”) Buddy, have I got a format for you. Let’s not let title hopes rise and fall on the arbitrary cruelty of a 90+3’ handball. Let’s settle this like proper football men, paying homage to our roots by restoring the game to its purest form, the 2001 MLS/Pepsi All-Star Skills Challenge. Last year’s finalists will claim an early edge as Alphonso Davies and Kylian Mbappé dominate the Fastest Man competition. In the next round, Real Madrid will earn its customary spot in the semis when Toni Kroos recreates his Supercopa corner kick against Valencia for the Gol Olímpico challenge. But don’t count out Atlético Madrid, who can get back in this when Jan Oblak hurls balls at another keeper’s net from 20 yards during Goalie Wars. I hate to get sentimental, folks, but this is why they call it the beautiful game.

The FiveThirtyEight Model

All that running around looks exhausting. Why not skip the games and let the Soccer Power Index tell you who’s better? As an added bonus, Nate Silver now has takes on how European soccer should work, just like we’ve all been asking for.

The Horoscope Model

True story, I once went on a terrible date with a Brooklyn magazine editor who started looking for the door the minute I tried to talk about what I was working on with American Soccer Analysis (which, yeah, okay, fair enough). Anyway, the way I found out she had been listening after all was when she quoted a tweet that asked “What’s astrology for men?” with the answer “sports analytics” and got 50k likes. The takeaway here is that this sport has been patriarchal for too long and we should ditch the FiveThirtyEight Model for one based on the ancient art of celestial divination, which would be roughly as good at predicting elimination soccer tournaments.

The Lax Antitrust Enforcement Model

Combining the best of the Bingo Model and the Stock Market Model, this one replaces the vagaries of a knockout stage with the fast-paced fun of corporate M&A. Can’t beat ‘em? Buy ‘em! The number of remaining competitors will dwindle naturally as clubs with celebrity minority owners are snapped up by SPACs with slightly more famous celebrity minority owners, until the final comes down to some hedge fund against a private equity firm, just like the Champions League we know and love.

The Clout Model

“It is not just a chosen few,” Florentino Pérez explained of the Super League proposal. “The 15 club founder members are those who have earned it.” But if Spurs “earned it” and Ajax and Porto didn’t, we know what this is really about. You don’t hire Mourinho in this day and age to win, you hire him to star in “All or Nothing” for the gifs and then replace him with an interim coach who looks like a ballboy to attract those elusive 16-to-24-year-olds. Everyone knows the currency of the future isn’t silverware. It’s not even currency. It’s that thing forward-looking employers are always trying to pay people in, exposure. The winner under this model is the team that goes out there and trends their hardest for 90 minutes, with bonus points if a brand slides into their DMs to pay for a sponsored follow-up tweet.

The Original Model

Sooner or later, these kids with their short attention spans and their socialism will make the sport as we know it obsolete. Superclubs will supernova, whole leagues and federations will blink out of existence, the game itself will pass from our collective cultural memory, and one day some scion of industry will inherit a dusty equipment room full of inflated balls whose purpose he can’t quite guess. Maybe he’ll fish one out and offer it to his son to say sorry for sending him to Eton. The kid will kick it around the quad till he makes a few friends. They’ll invent a sort of contest around rushing it from one end of the yard to the other. Rich kids at other schools will want in. As the new trend catches on, students will form an association to jot down some rules everyone can agree on. One day, perhaps, a ball may bounce into the street and a passing sailor, whose job security has really picked up ever since the climate apocalypse led to a ban on air travel, will mindlessly dribble it up the ramp onto his ship to give his crewmates a way to kill time together. It’s a long voyage to Buenos Aires. ❧

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Further reading:

• Brian Phillips, The European Super League Pyramid Scheme (The Ringer)
• Henry Bushnell, Soccer's Super League plan is repulsive. But a version of it could be great (Yahoo)
• David Goldblatt, The greed of the European Super League has been decades in the making (The Guardian)
• Keir Radnedge, The Revolution Will be Televised: The Future According to Silvio Berlusconi, 1991 (In Bed With Maradona)

Image: Clara Peeters, Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds, and Pretzels