The European Super League should make all sports pause for thought
The proposed European Super League for football might have stalled at its inception but it is unlikely to be the last we hear of the idea, in this or any other sport. Elite breakouts will become increasingly common for those sports that fail to tackle the inherent contradiction in richly rewarding success while expecting meaningful competition to persist. Unchecked, this could spell doom for sport.
In the early 20th century, Lizzie Magie invented a board game designed to show a way in which competitive engagements could become unfair. Without constraints, success would produce only more success until a point was reached where, one by one, opponents were put out of business. She called this The Landlord’s Game but it evolved into what we now know as Monopoly.
Competitive sports have on the whole recognised this lesson. There has been an understanding that it benefits all if the competition is between more-or-less evenly matched opponents. Sporting contests are often arranged into divisions of roughly similar ability where outcomes retain a degree of uncertainty. Sensible arrangements such as these became strained in the commercial era, however. Television made sport mass-marketable and the competition is not just over success on the field but, more importantly, for financial dominance. Magie’s game showed what happens when you reward success too much. The game becomes skewed in favour of the rich. If you’ve played Monopoly, you’ve seen how it goes.
Since the advent of the Premier League in English football, the rewards have resulted in some clubs being considerably richer than others, able to buy better players and coaches and attract them with higher salaries. Fans have long realised this. What chance does Sheffield United have over the course of a season in comparison to Liverpool and Manchester City? Poorer teams might be able to win a one-off game against anyone but in the long run the richer clubs will finish on top. They become even wealthier as a result, with the reward of a lucrative Champions League spot, and then next season there is an even bigger financial inequality to address.
The idea of a European Super League breakaway came out of the insatiable logic of unconstrained capitalism: that you should always select the option that will result in the greatest net income. It was rightly condemned by sporting and non-sporting organisations, fans and the other clubs who had not been invited. There is no doubt, however, that such ideas will continue to resurface in football and other sports too. In 2019, a breakaway swimming competition began, outside of the governing body’s jurisdiction, with competitors attracted by the huge prize monies on offer.
The conundrum that sport must solve is how to reward success without making the next competitive encounter too unequal. Unless they do so, sporting culture will evolve like a multi-dimensional Monopoly game, where there are fewer and fewer meaningful matches, more and more predictable results, and the elite becomes ever smaller, monopolizing the riches. That is acceptable within a finite, time-limited board game, where we want there to be a decisive winner. But we want sports to be ongoing and this is a problem with team sports where a club can replace old and warn out players with fresh, new and better ones. We do not want a situation where Manchester United, for instance, wins football since we wish the sport to persist indefinitely. Even Manchester United shouldn’t want this kind of win since it means there would be no more games left for them to play.
The game is the thing: an activity that we would normally do for the fun and interest of playing, with nothing significant resting on the outcome. Sport can be understood as a codified and institutionalized form of game-playing. The further addition of a financial element has produced an existential threat to sport, undermining the fairness within competition that attracted us in the first place. The threat is biggest for the most commercially involved sports, which are now those most in danger of eating themselves alive.
Stephen Mumford, Durham University, is the author of numerous titles including Metaphysics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012) and Causation: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013 with Rani Lill Anjum) and the forthcoming A Philosopher Looks at Sport (May 2021).