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There are a lot of inequities in football. We all know it. European football in particular. There’s a real divide between the haves and the have nots, and it makes it hard for any club not in the “in” crowd to ford the river. Take as a good example, the Champions Cup
There are multiple places where the Cup favors the major, big name teams. They make a ton of money from the viewers, the various revenue streams, and so forth And people are more interested in seeing two big name clubs duke it out, like Inter Milan and Chelsea, than a scrappy club like Slavia Prague vs Benfica or Porto. And the system is set out to reward the best teams and divisions with financial incentives, which is very different than the jaded and circuitous angles of sports in America.
First of all, your league gets more slots based on how many heavy hitters you have. No one wants a Champions League without Manchester United playing in it. Take the Spanish Liga as a good example. It has three major teams everyone wants in – the Madrids, and Barca. So you give it three automatic qualifying spots for the Group Stage of the Champions Cup, and then 4th spot for a playoff last leg, in case your big three are in 4th one year due to a team like Valencia hitting above them on the chart. You don’t want a surprise #3 ranking by Villarreal next year to drop Barca from the Champion’s League.
Then you are seeded in the Group Stage based on Coefficient, which is based on your continental history in the last five years. The better you have been historically, the better your seed. So if you do really well one year, and crack the Champions’s glass ceiling, you won’t get seeded based on how high up you hit, but dropped hard. Take us. We hit #2 in the Liga, and only Barca was above us. But we were seeded last, and put in a tough group with heavies like Juventus and Arsenal. We were punished for punching above our weight class .
That’s obviously a problem moving forward. You have serious cash incentives. In our Champions Cup winning run, we made…more than 200 mill. That’s a lot more cash that we have than others don’t. It creates obvious inequities in the system.
Everyone knows it. Perennial Champions Teams have so much more cash they can pay massive cash for their players. Even though we had a major injection of cash post-takeover, and were bringing in more transfer money than spending ,and bringing in the sweet sweet champions cup cash, we still ad the 5th largest payroll in the liga, at 1.75 mill a week. After resigning a deal at 135k a week, our best player, Ricardo, was making less than backups and rotation players make at Barca or R. Madrid. So you can understand why a player wants to move to these bigger clubs.
If a big name university, with a lot of cash, like Harvard, called me up on the phone and offered to bring me in to do the same job I;m doing now for 40k a year for 100k, I’d be ready to give my two weeks notice and leave. And if my boss blocked my move, I’d be pretty pissed off.
We all get it. The system is inequal.
So I built my club differently.
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