European Super League holdouts gear up for a reboot

Buongiorno from Milan, where I am making a quick stop on an autumn swing through Europe for some meetings. It’s the last, short window to visit the continent before the US sport schedule really heats up: with college and pro football already ongoing, baseball playoffs are about to get under way, and the National Basketball Association season kicks off later this month.

True to form, the NBA pre-season alone already has tongues wagging. Everyone is talking about Victor Wembanyama, the 18-year old French hoops sensation who scored 37 points in his first exhibition game on US soil this week. Speculation is now rife that NBA teams could “tank” their seasons for the chance of landing the 7’4’‘ once-in-a-generation power forward in the 2023 draft. And in a league already replete with international stars, a young beacon for France ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics could make him an icon.

This week, we examine two facets of global football, beginning with signs of life in the zombie that is the European Super League, followed by a dispatch on fallout from a catastrophic investigation into abuse in the US women’s professional game. Do read on — Sara Germano, US sports business correspondent

Perez and Agnelli look to make friends and influence people

If you’ve seen the Figo Affair on Netflix, you’ll know that Florentino Perez is not to be underestimated. In the documentary, which tells the story of the most controversial football transfer in history, the Real Madrid president is shown to be someone who can pull off the impossible. And if you haven’t seen it — you really should.

Perez, the chief architect of the European Super League project, has been out on manoeuvres. Last Sunday he gave a speech to the Real Madrid AGM, in which he railed against Uefa, accusing the governing body of offering too much European club football of questionable quality (a subject we dive deeper into here). The result is a sport that is “sick”, he said, and losing fans.

Perez drew comparisons with other sports, suggesting that football needs to focus more on pitting elite teams against each other (which was the core premise of the ESL). Imagine Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer facing each other just two or three times in the past two decades? Well that, Perez believes, is what Uefa’s approach amounts to.

“Young people demand a quality product that, unfortunately, football presently does not offer, because the current competitions, as they are designed today, do not attract spectators’ interest, except in the final stages,” he said.

This was not just a long moan, it was also the start of what looks like a charm offensive. Perez invited the world of football to come together to formulate a new plan to stop the rot. All options are on the table, no ideas dismissed. Perhaps a new multi-tier European league with promotion, relegation and dozens of members could be the basis of an ESL reboot. The important thing, he says, is to start talking.

So what is going on? Perez appears to be courting allies for a fresh assault on Uefa. At the moment, Perez stands with just Barcelona and Juventus in the trio of pariahs hell-bent on tearing down the current system. Sure enough, Juventus chief executive Andrea Agnelli followed up on Thursday. In a letter to members, he echoed Perez’s comments, and said the club wanted to start a dialogue about reforming the European game.

Opposition to the trio looks as entrenched as ever. La Liga chief Javier Tebas said Perez was speaking from a position of “ignorance” and was threatening to “kill” the rest of football.

We can expect more posturing over the coming days and weeks. A recommendation is due in December from the European Court of Justice on whether Uefa operates a monopoly on pan-European football competitions. A full ruling is expected sometime early next year.

Depending on the outcome, the governing body could be pushed to relinquish some of its powers. The ESL holdouts are positioning in case that happens.

It was to be a pinnacle meeting in women’s football last night: the reigning European champions, the Lionesses, hosting the current World Cup champions, the US, for a friendly match at Wembley. Tickets sold out for the highly anticipated clash in 24 hours.

The fixture alone might be a shining example of the growth of the women’s game, were it not for a report released this week commissioned by US Soccer detailing extensive and systemic abuse in the domestic professional league, the National Women’s Soccer League.

Conducted by former deputy attorney-general Sally Yates and consisting of more than 200 interviews, the independent investigation found expansive accounts of verbal and emotional abuse, as well as sexual misconduct, within women’s football at all levels.

“Abuse in the NWSL is rooted in a deeper culture in women’s soccer, beginning in youth leagues, that normalises verbally abusive coaching and blurs boundaries between coaches and players”, the report found. Authorities in the sport “not only repeatedly failed to respond appropriately when confronted with player reports and evidence of abuse, they also failed to institute basic measures to prevent and address it”.

The fallout from the report’s findings has been swift and is escalating: the Portland Thorns club fired two senior executives, and team owner Merritt Paulson (son of former US Treasury Secretary Hank) said he would step away from day-to-day operations. Chicago Red Stars owner Arnim Whistler also stepped down from NWSL governance duties, and the team board voted to remove him as chair.

Abuse scandals are, unfortunately, not unheard of in sport. But the extent of the damage within the NWSL, the most competitive professional league in women’s football, could present a threat to its viability. Previous iterations of women’s pro football in the US have collapsed amid disorganisation and mismanagement; the NWSL itself is just 10 years old.

More concerning is the extent to which the haste in establishing the NWSL — aiming to capitalise on the robust popularity of the US women’s 2012 Olympic gold — may be correlated to the failure to stem abuse. The Yates report found that the US Soccer federation “conducted limited financial due diligence on the new league’s prospective owners and did not put in place the infrastructure or planning necessary to support the league over the long haul”.

Other stakeholders failed to mitigate claims of abuse, directly because of underfunding. The independent non-profit watchdog entrusted by several US sports to investigate claims of abuse, SafeSport, “employs roughly thirty investigators to cover eleven million athletes”, the Yates report found — only 8 per cent of cases referred to SafeSport during a one-year period reached formal resolution.

For the most part, NWSL league and team sponsors have yet to withhold their support, though the Yates report is just the first of two expected investigations; the NWSL and its players’ association have commissioned an independent report of their own that is still forthcoming.

So far, players are not satisfied. Ahead of Friday’s friendly in London, US national team captain and Thorns defender Becky Sauerbrunn said she wasn’t confident the current establishment could change. “I don’t know if the right people are in place to do what is needed”, she said.

An Invitation

There is less than a month to go before our Business of Sport Summit in New York on October 24. Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry and Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris will be among those there to share their insights. As a Scoreboard subscriber, you can claim your free digital pass using the promo code Premium22 and purchase access to our VIP in-person discussions and drinks reception. Register for your pass today.

Highlights

• Lars Windhorst said he would terminate his involvement with German football’s Hertha Berlin, after the financier was revealed in an FT report to have hired corporate spies to force out the club’s president.

• The Indian Premier League‘s Rajasthan Royals say they are prepared to be lossmaking for “many years” on its international ventures, defending its expansion in response to criticism that Twenty20 tournaments are weakening the international game.

• Elliott Management suddenly found itself in control of Serie A‘s once-great-but-ailing AC Milan in 2018. After a series of management and sporting changes on-and-off the pitch, the hedge fund was able to revive the club’s fortunes, a saga richly detailed in our latest FT Scoreboard film.

• LIV Golf is on the hunt for a US broadcast partner to carry its events. But the Saudi-backed project has so far struggled to find one, despite being the home for plenty of the game’s top talent.

• Yet more drama from the world of chess. A report out this week suggested that Hans Niemann, the 19-year old who recently beat the game’s top player, had cheated in more than 100 online matches.

Final Out

The Major League Baseball regular season concluded this week in dramatic fashion as New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge scored his 62nd home run of the year in the penultimate game. The feat is an American League record, beating fellow Yankee Roger Maris’s 1961 record of 61 home runs in a season. Within baseball, there is a debate as to whether Judge’s AL record is a more authentic feat, achieved outside the steroid era in which Barry Bonds set the all-time, all-division mark of 73 homers. The bantering continues, but for the moment, savour the call — and the rival Texas Rangers home crowd response — as Judge made history here.

SIXTY-TWO! BASEBALL HISTORY! @TheJudge44 is the American League home run King! pic.twitter.com/QKrcuOvZMU

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) October 5, 2022