“Game’s gone.” It’s a thing that soccer fans say anytime their sport lurches even more toward the service of money (not an infrequent occurrence) or, alternately, in reaction to the way some of the sport’s physicality has been tamped down more than old-schoolers would prefer.
While fans of both American and European football don’t tend to enjoy having their respective sports compared to each other, it’s a bit surprising that this saying hasn’t caught on among college football fans. For the past 30 years, these respective sports have seen their trajectories follow each other closely, both in terms of making their games safer for the athletes who play them (to the grumbling of said old-schoolers) and, more importantly, in the way that the money involved in each sport has exploded.
The European Super League both came to fruition and failed a year ago this week. The experiment was a failure in execution, but it was also a warning. Soccer has seen increased concentration of money at the top of the pyramid through the years, but the attempt to form the Super League represented a different level of possible consolidation entirely. It failed after massive fan backlash, but the way it came about, and the idea it represented, could easily take root in college football — if it hasn’t already.
A brief history of what brought European soccer to the Super League brink
In the late 1980s, as college football was experiencing a television boom in the days following NCAA v. Board of Regents, some of soccer’s power brokers were searching for something similar. AC Milan owner Silvio Berlusconi, a cable impresario and the future Italian prime minister, was aghast at how the European Cup — the annual tournament of club champions from throughout the continent — featured a random draw and risked some of the continent’s biggest names getting eliminated before things really got going.
Indeed, in 1987 Diego Maradona and Italian champion Napoli were eliminated in the first round by Spanish giant Real Madrid. Other first-round matches: Cyprus’ Omonia Nicosia versus Ireland’s Shamrock Rovers and Switzerland’s Neuchatel Xamax versus Finland’s Kuusysi. Giants, those four clubs are not.
The randomness had a romantic appeal for some and offered smaller clubs opportunities to make huge runs, but there’s no question that having a few more matches with Maradona would have helped the TV numbers. Berlusconi and others expressed a desire for a super league of big-name teams, either as a replacement for the European Cup or a complement to it. Reading the tea leaves, UEFA, Europe’s governing soccer body, soon changed the cup format, first introducing a group stage to assure big names played multiple matches in the newly branded “Champions League,” then eventually allowing the most successful leagues to bring multiple teams to the party.
Before long, playing in the Champions League became a major recruitment draw for players deciding which team to join, and talent coalesced toward a select few programs. (Conveniently, those were the clubs that could also pay the highest salaries, in part because of how lucrative the Champions League quickly became.) Success reinforced success in a way similar to what we’ve seen with the College Football Playoff.
Meanwhile, English football was undergoing its own transformation. Spurred by ambitious clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester United, England’s top division broke apart from the country’s Football League (which ran the top four divisions of the sport) to form the Premier League in 1992-93. It would arrange its own television deals and set its own rules separate from the less ambitious (and less wealthy) clubs further down the pecking order. It attempted to brand itself as soccer’s NFL, and the gambit has worked increasingly well. England still offered promotion and relegation like every other footballing country in Europe, but television revenue boomed.
Around the same time, college football was beginning to follow the television money as well. In 1991, Notre Dame left the College Football Association. The CFA had formed as a way to negotiate television contracts for most of major college football — the Big Ten and Pac-10 aside — but Notre Dame, as an independent, signed an exclusive deal with NBC. The newly expanded SEC left a few years later, the CFA collapsed and it was every conference for itself from that point forward. The SEC had already proved the financial draw of conference championship games (in 2021, every FBS conference has one), and the introduction of the Bowl Alliance in 1995 and the Bowl Championship Series in 1998 helped push the sport toward more of a playoff-style national title race.
As successful as the Champions League has been in Europe, rumors of a supposed “Super League” never really went away. Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, for one, never stopped pushing the idea. And in the aftermath of the COVID epidemic, with clubs experiencing dramatic financial losses, the environment was ripe.
Among major soccer clubs, there are plenty of true believers in the power of sports’ version of trickle-down economics — for the sport to truly prosper, the biggest brands must be as rich and successful as possible, and their billions will magically make everyone else more financially healthy too. “It’s a format to prevent football, which is losing interest, from dying,” Perez said about the Super League. (There is no real evidence that European football is losing interest.) Leicester City’s incredible underdog run to the 2016 Premier League title? A bad thing in the eyes of many owners and power brokers.
The Super League was announced in April 2022. It collapsed days later amid epic fan backlash, potential UEFA sanctions and a lack of genuine commitment from the English clubs involved. The English clubs backed out first, and most others followed, leaving Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus — clubs particularly desperate to figure out ways to match the Premier League from a revenue standpoint — to spend the last year insisting to anyone who would listen that plans are simply on hiatus.
The destructive effects of FOMO
“It was never our intention to cause such distress, however when the invitation to join the Super League came … we did not want to be left behind to ensure we protected Arsenal and its future.” — The Arsenal board, April 2021
“The possible participation of Chelsea and City has been described by sources as more out of a desire not to be left behind, than a fervent desire to lead the charge.” — The Athletic, April 2021
“I just want us to be prepared … I don’t want Florida State to be left behind. I consider us part of the ACC, but … we’ve got to be prepared no matter what the options are.” — Florida State president John Thrasher to the Tallahassee Democrat, July 2021
College football’s black hole of leadership was made intensely clear during the run-up to the 2020 COVID season. With no one guiding the sport toward a specific outcome, each major conference moved in a slightly different direction. The Big Ten and Pac-12 initially canceled their fall seasons, likely assuming that everyone else would follow, but only smaller conferences such as the MAC and Mountain West did so. The SEC moved forward with a conference-only schedule, while the ACC and Big 12 ended up adopting nearly conference-only slates. The conferences that had initially canceled ended up jumping back in with pared-down schedules and began playing midseason. Eventual national champion Alabama played 13 games; runner-up Ohio State played only eight.
UEFA is European football’s version of the NCAA, an organization that sanctions the Champions League and other tournaments, represents the continent’s football leagues and boasts a little bit of sanctioning power. It ended up having just enough influence to help dictate the Super League’s failure. French superclub Paris Saint-Germain turned down Super League advances, in part because its CEO is on UEFA’s executive committee. Combined with the absence of any German club — Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund both reportedly turned down advances in solidarity with their own league — that meant the Super League roster wasn’t entirely comprehensive. Plus, UEFA’s ability to threaten sanctions immediately tested the English clubs’ resolve.
The NCAA has neither the ability nor the wherewithal to make such threats and certainly won’t when its updated constitution has been completed. And lord knows that none of college football’s blue bloods would stay out of any future “super league”-style plans in the name of conference solidarity. Oklahoma and Texas are leaving century-long conference mates for the SEC, after all, and it’s safe to say that Ohio State would not pass on membership in an exclusive club because of some sworn brotherhood with Illinois.
When too many people have a hand in a sport’s leadership, it’s equivalent to no one leading it at all. And when that’s the case, everyone begins to act in their own short-term interest — and the desire to avoid getting left behind — instead of in the interest of a league or a sport as a whole. Whatever happens to the alignment of college sports in the future, the “fear of missing out” will be the primary driver of decision-making.
Pay for play: the driving force for whatever comes next
For those who have spent years or even decades fighting for the rights of college athletes to benefit financially from their involvement in the behemoth that is college sports, the name, image and likeness battle was always only the first front. NIL is set up to benefit only a certain layer of athletes and leaves unsettled the issue of schools making tens of millions of dollars from athletes’ work while not putting said athletes on the payroll. Even Supreme Court justices on both sides of the political aisle have openly expressed skepticism about the NCAA’s fight to cap compensation for athletes in the name of preserving “amateurism.”
With salaries for head coaches becoming even more uncapped in recent months and years — buyouts too! — even while the financial effects of the pandemic were being felt nationwide, it’s safe to say that the fight against the NCAA’s aged definition of amateurism is not going to end anytime soon. And progress made in the court system suggests a path for how this fight will eventually be settled.
In other words, it’s quite conceivable that in the not-too-distant future — five years from now? 10? — a conference or a group of conferences will announce that they are going to begin paying their athletes salaries, potentially breaking apart from schools that are either unwilling or unable to do so. This could take many shapes, but that’s how a college football “super league” likely would happen: Someone like SEC commissioner Greg Sankey announces, “We’re going to pay our athletes $X0,000 (or $X00,000) a year — plus a bonus of $X,000 if certain academic requirements are met. We’re going to declare the champion of our conference the national champion, and anyone able and willing to join us can do so,” and off we go. (This could have massive implications for how Olympic sports at given schools operate — or don’t operate — but we’ll save that conversation for another time.)
What a College Football Super League might look like
Talk to just about any college football coach in the country for a certain amount of time, and you’ll pretty quickly hear some version of “I definitely think we’re moving toward a super league.” It’s a common topic of gossip, and it’s not particularly new — we saw countless “We’re going to end up with four 16-team superconferences!” predictions in the early 2010s following a round of conference realignment — though soccer certainly gave us a new name to call this idea moving forward.
Coaxing super league specifics out of a coach or anyone else, however, is a pretty difficult exercise. No one really knows how this might work. So let’s tease out some possibilities, going from most to least extreme.
The Super SEC. This was a pretty popular idea in the weeks following the announcement of Oklahoma’s and Texas’ impending move, and it’s the Sankey-related idea mentioned above. The SEC declares itself a salary-paying institution, and a collection of the nation’s other big-name programs comes aboard: perhaps Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, Nebraska, Michigan State, Wisconsin and/or Iowa from the Big Ten; Clemson, Florida State, Miami and maybe Virginia Tech from the ACC; Notre Dame, of course; USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington from the Pac-12. The teams are fungible, of course — and for all we know, it might not include every SEC program — and this perhaps becomes a football-only institution. But voila, we have a 32-team Super Southeastern Conference.
The Power Three. The Athletic’s Andy Staples addressed this one recently. Among the current crop of power conferences, the SEC and Big Ten are quickly distancing themselves from a revenue standpoint and are easily the conferences most well-positioned to add a payroll for athletes soon. But plenty of other schools would be willing to buy their way in and form an alliance of sorts that exists as basically a third league to join the other two. Even if some strange “conference” that consists of USC, Clemson and other parties in between doesn’t generate as much revenue as the SEC and Big Ten, it would certainly create enough to allow these teams to compete at the sport’s new highest level.
The Power 5. Maybe we’re thinking too hard about what the term “super league” might mean. Maybe a move toward athlete compensation ends up simply becoming the basis for the long-rumored divorce between what are generally referred to as the Power 5 conferences (the SEC, Big Ten, ACC, Pac-12 and Big 12) and the rest of FBS. Including Notre Dame and future Big 12 members BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF, this would produce a new subdivision of 70 teams.
A culled FBS. In 1978, the NCAA’s recently created Division I was separated into two subdivisions — 1-A (now FBS) and 1-AA (now FCS) — based on school size and revenue, attendance requirements, scholarship capabilities and so on. From a bloated roster of more than 140 teams in the late 1970s, the size of what was now the sport’s top subdivision had shrunk to 105 teams by the late 1980s after conferences such as the Missouri Valley and Southern Conference had moved down a level. The roster slowly began to grow again in the following decades, and when Jacksonville State and Sam Houston join Conference USA next year, FBS will be back up to 133 teams. Perhaps a movement toward salaried athletes would simply create an extra requirement for FBS membership, and a few conferences would drop to FCS (or whatever we are calling FCS by that point), resulting in a top subdivision of only 80-90 paying teams.
I’m a card-carrying sports socialist — I cheer for underdogs and parity wherever possible, I was rooting hard for Leicester City in 2015-16, and the chaotic 2007 college football season was easily my favorite of all time. I have also long supported college athletes finally being given the financial benefits they should have been getting all along.
I know many others out there boast that same pair of traits, and it has been clear for a while that this is a conflicting pair of goals and wishes. As has been proved in soccer, the more you push for athletes to be paid what they’re really worth, the quicker you’re going to find out that only certain teams are willing and able to do that. (Soccer has also given us plenty of examples of programs that were extremely willing but proved far from able and ran aground because of it.)
A more player-friendly college football universe would almost certainly make a Super League of some sort a requirement. What might that look like? When might it take shape? It’s impossible to know just yet. But for as much change as the sport has seen in the past couple of years in particular, it’s all but assured that quite a bit more is coming. Game’s gone, eh?