When a proposed European Super League collapsed in the face of a huge backlash in 2021, soccer fans breathed a collective sigh of relief. But within a couple of years the game’s elite European competition, the Champions League, was restructured in a manner seemingly designed to appease those club owners who had been pushing for a breakaway league.
The new tournament format, introduced this season, involves an unwieldy 36-team league table and a playoff system; the aim is to increase the number of group-stage fixtures between big hitters from western Europe’s major leagues, thus maximising their broadcast revenues. It’s now harder than ever for teams from smaller footballing nations to progress beyond the group stages.
As Miguel Delaney observes in States of Play, the gradual erosion of the Champions League’s competitiveness is a stark indictment of soccer’s ever increasing wealth disparities. The famous European Cup trophy was lifted by clubs from Romania and Yugoslavia in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the 2000s it was not unheard of for teams from Portugal or the Netherlands to reach the competition’s latter stages, but these days it’s almost entirely dominated by a handful of clubs from England, Spain, Italy and Germany.
Indeed, the English league’s broadcast revenues are so vast that even low-ranking Premier League teams can outspend most European heavyweights on transfers and player wages. Delaney puts it succinctly: “The federation responsible for the health of European football has ... overseen a situation where most of the continent is a club football wasteland.”
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Enter, into this already bleak landscape, three oil-rich Middle Eastern nations: Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose takeovers of European clubs – respectively Paris St German (PSG), Newcastle United and Manchester City – have birthed a neologism so current that the spellchecker flags it as a typo.
Delaney defines sportswashing as “the centrally planned political use of sport to normalise autocratic states, for the purpose of perpetuating their authoritarian structures without the need for reform”; it is more about “geopolitical positioning and image projection” than pure profit. Though ostensibly operating as independent companies, these owners are able to draw on sovereign wealth funds of entire nations. The traditional ruling class of European football, industrial capitalists such as Florentino Pérez (Real Madrid) and the late Silvio Berlusconi (AC Milan), seem like paupers by comparison.
It’s not been all plain sailing for football’s new would-be elite. Despite investing billions in transfers – most notably the 2017 signing of the Brazilian superstar Neymar for a world transfer record €222 million – PSG’s Qatari owners have yet to win the Champions League; their profligate mismanagement has made them something of a laughing stock within the game. Manchester City’s owners, the Abu Dhabi United Group, seem to have done a much better job, making more measured and astute decisions in the transfer market.
Under Pep Guardiola’s tutelage, City have won four of the past five Premier League titles and in 2023 became the first state-linked side to win the Champions League. They are arguably the finest club side in world football since Guardiola’s legendary Barcelona team of 2008-12, but a shadow hangs over their achievements in the form of 115 charges relating to alleged breaches of Premier League financial regulations.
The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was a particular low point for anyone concerned with ethics in soccer. Since Qatar had no real football tradition, it had to construct an entire stadium infrastructure from scratch in order to host the tournament, and it did so using a brutally exploitative system of indentured migrant labour. For this reason – let alone the country’s poor record on human rights, and the dubious circumstances in which it was awarded the tournament in the first place – Delaney suggests the Qatar World Cup has “a dismal claim to be the most problematic tournament in history”; it simply “could not have taken place without considerable human suffering”.
Not that Qatar’s rulers will mind – the vision of Argentina’s Lionel Messi lifting the golden trophy while clad in a traditional bisht, at the end of a final widely regarded as the best in the competition’s history, was a dream outcome for them.
States of Play is an admirably thorough survey of these depressing developments. Its core thesis – that soccer’s Faustian bargain with big moneyed interests is undermining both its sporting competitiveness and its moral integrity – is persuasively argued. Fan ownership models in Germany and Sweden offer an appealing alternative vision.
But as Delaney notes, football’s governing institutions are weak. Stringent regulation is required; realistically, this can only come through state-led reforms. Until that happens, the opaque workings of private arbitration systems are the only recourse. The hearing into Manchester City’s alleged improprieties wraps up later this month, with a verdict expected early in the new year. There is talk of unprecedentedly severe punishments if the club is found guilty. Watch this space.
Houman Barekat is a critic
