In his book Thinking Fast & Slow, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and economist Daniel Kahneman says that there are two main paths to thinking about any event;
The first is emotional and hasty, that arises at the moment of our awareness of this event, and is often devoid of logic, and the second is slow and long-term, which can reach correct conclusions or close to the truth, if its owner possesses the sufficient degree of detachment.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an American philosopher of Lebanese origin, agrees with Kahneman in the same context.
In his book "The Black Swan", Taleb says that dismantling any complex event requires a long time and deep thinking, and that the worst thing that can be done when exposed to a huge incident, such as the Super League proposal, for example, is to hasten to form theories and conclusions without much. Enough of slowing down.
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The reason is simple, which is that these hasty ideas are never theories, but rather fictional stories far from reality through which we link events to each other to make it easier for us to understand and remember them, and to feel that what is happening around us is logical and accountable, and this process is driven by an unconscious bias of ourselves, which makes us exaggerate in Appreciating our intelligence, and preparing our minds to be able to understand things so quickly and with minimal effort.
This is exactly what happened once the Super League proposal collapsed within 48 hours of its launch;
Our minds began to link several scenes we saw successively and weave stories that gathered them in a logical context.
One of the editors of The Athletic magazine spoke about the Chelsea fan’s demonstrations before their team’s match against Brighton, which ended, paradoxically, in a goalless draw, and in the midst of burning emotion, this was enough for many to see it as proof of the absurdity of the Super League in the first place.
What Super League are you talking about when you couldn't beat Brighton at home?
(3)
The Kop is set to be bare for Saturday's visit of Newcastle as #LFC fans' groups demand the removal of all their flags and banners in protest at FSG's Super League sign up.
Will be a powerful image.
The backlash continues.
Full story: https://t.co/ydPvp5ACPy
- James Pearce (@JamesPearceLFC) April 19, 2021
See what happened now?
This is exactly what Kahneman and Talib talked about;
Using superficial data to quickly formulate theories consistent with our convictions in an emotional moment that is difficult to contemplate in the first place.
Linking the demonstrations and the general state of rejection that dominated social media platforms, governments, local federations, and even coaches and players to the failure of the proposal in the end.
This is the first erroneous conclusion in this anecdote, what actually happened is that the proposal was not born or completed until it failed.
The Super League proposal was born dead, without a real vision, and without serious attempts to read the scene or anticipate the difficulties that would meet it.
The masses have actually won, but they have triumphed over nothing.
We know that view seems too pessimistic, but try to think about it for a moment after the storm has subsided and everything is back to normal. Let us assume that no one objected to the proposal, was there a real plan to finance it? The answer is no. All these clubs owned was a $ 2.5 billion loan from US bank JP Morgan & Chase. A loan facilitated by Ed Woodward's relations by virtue of his previous job at the bank prior to joining the Blazers at Manchester United, which is also a loan whose installments were to be paid out of the expected broadcasting revenues of these clubs in the coming years. (3)
Please put under "predicted" a line, because that is the second surprise;
No one has even submitted a proposal to compete for the broadcast contract for this tournament, and contrary to what was expected, the idea of gathering "the continent's largest clubs" in one tournament did not attract any of the big advertisers or broadcasters officials, nor did we witness a struggle over the rights to the Super League matches as a catch, but rather Some press reports have confirmed that clubs like Liverpool have received threats from current sponsors to terminate contracts if they continue to support the proposal.
(4)
When a company like Amazon Prime and Facebook denies any connection to the project and any intention to obtain the rights to its matches, there is really reason to doubt, and when these companies claim that they did not do so because they “respect football fans around the world,” this confirms the suspicion.
Simply because it previously sought to obtain the rights to broadcast the Premier League via the Internet, and did not take into account the objections of many at the time.
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The reason for all these objections was simple. The creation of a new tournament that brings together "the largest clubs on the continent" means that many of the current sponsorship and broadcasting contracts will lose a large part of their value; When there is a Super League guaranteeing matches between Bayern Munich, Paris and Real Madrid every week, he will not watch a City match against Burnley or Barcelona against Granada, and no one will see the sponsors' ads on their shirts, accordingly. Briefly; Creating a Super League means declaring war on existing Super League sponsors, or forcing them to cancel existing contracts and enter into new ones that take into account the tournament's purported global appeal.
Of course, these sponsors and advertisers would not risk betting on a tournament that no one knows how to finance, and at this point precisely at this point the circle closed and the war ended before it began.
Add to all of the above the fact that we never knew how to distribute broadcast revenue, if any, in the Super League.
If it were to be distributed fairly and evenly, that would have been the biggest joke football has produced in decades.
This is exactly what clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United have objected to exactly one year ago, and submitted the "big picture" project to amend it, and it failed in turn.
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Even "Project Big Picture" didn't crumble this quickly.
- Raphael Honigstein💙 (@honigstein) April 20, 2021
Pause for a moment and imagine it please; These are clubs that refuse to let Burnley, West Brom and Fulham receive the same amount of broadcast money, even though these clubs do not pose any real threat to their positions or their permanent ability to compete, neither in the short nor in the long term. Would the same clubs try to give the same opportunity to much stronger clubs like Arsenal, Tottenham, AC Milan and Inter? Or will it be more fierce in discrimination against it?
An official in one of the Super League clubs told "The Athletic", without revealing his identity, that he agreed to join the League because he feared that he would "fall behind the big clubs on the continent," but actually "does not see a realistic way in which those 12 clubs can coexist." Together in peace. "
This is a tournament without real funding, without a plan to broadcast its matches in the first place, and without a real means of coexistence between its clubs, and the masses did not win against a greedy plan to control football, but rather a failed proposal whose owners did not spend an hour thinking about it or planning it, and it would not succeed In any case.
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"My intentions were good, I just went along with it, had no idea this would turn out that way".
The post Super-League contrition sounds a lot like some of the Trump rioters after their failed Capitol coup.
- Raphael Honigstein💙 (@honigstein) April 21, 2021
The thing, all of it, is that the tale of the greedy rich who wanted to take over the world and the fighting fans stood up for them and saved football, is a very compelling tale that is difficult to resist.
A tale of those stories that we form in emotional moments without much thought, while the truth is far from that in reality.
This was not a greedy plan to increase profits or control football. Any sane person, no matter how stupid he may be, knows that borrowing $ 2.5 billion without real planning how to return it will not increase profits, but rather the opposite.
In fact, the Super League was nothing but a desperate attempt by a handful of officials to save themselves from the consequences of their wrongful decisions and administrative failures.
This explains his exit with such hysterical, emotional and primitive nature;
It was just an attempt to stay.
What about the plan to take over the world then?
This is the frightening thing;
The plan to take over the world had already been completed before the launch of the Super League.
In a terrifying report by Miguel Delini, the chief editor of The Independent, published nearly a year ago, a set of facts were told to you that the control of these clubs on world football has reached an unprecedented degree in the history of the game, to a degree that widened the gaps between them and the rest of the clubs to a degree that cannot be comprehended. The foot is in a position that cannot be undone or reversed.
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You were all warned #SuperLeague pic.twitter.com/pgoJSBFtwg
- NUFC 360 (@ NUFC360) April 22, 2021
In the decade preceding the release of the report, that is, since approximately 2010, European football witnessed the first hat-trick in the history of Italy, and the second in the history of Spain, knowing that the first was in 2009 and the two were for the same team, in addition to the first and second hat-trick in the history of Germany, and the first hat-trick. Local in the history of England, and three local trios in 4 years for Paris Saint-Germain in France, and patrols whose champions managed to collect 100 points in England, Spain and Italy, and unbeaten leagues in Italy, Portugal, Scotland and seven other European leagues, not to mention the fact that 13 tournaments out of 54 in The European continent is currently witnessing the longest successive streak of title wins in their respective history.
The 2018-2019 season was also the first season in the history of the five major leagues that saw all the champions retain their title, and in the same season, there were 67 Premier League matches in which one side got 70% of possession or more, which is frightening if we know that 15 years ago There was only one match with that description. On the level of players' salaries, for example, in the first official season of the Premier League with his new name 1992-1993, the wages of the top teams were 2.85 times those of the bottom. Now that number has increased to 4.7 times, and in Spain it is more than 17 times, and 20 times in medium leagues such as Switzerland. (8)
The top six in England are now paying the equivalent of half of the total wages in the entire league, while the number of clubs that have managed to occupy the top four in the Premier League has decreased from 15 clubs in the 1970s and 13 during the 1990s to only 7 in the last decade. (8) Add to this the fact that the percentage of games won by the Big Four in the Premier League with three or more goals now represents almost a fifth of their matches, which is double the percentage achieved in the 1990s, for example. Something similar happened in Spain with Real Madrid and Barcelona, where the percentage increased from 20% during the 1990s to 38% during the current decade, almost doubling as well. (8)
From these numbers we have what can fill in volumes, and the bottom line is that the Super League was already in place prior to the launch of the proposal;
There is a group of clubs in which wealth was concentrated in a way that made its competition impossible, and entered football in an endless capitalist sequence that increases the wealth of the rich and imposes more poverty on the poor, and by extension, it increases the technical and tactical gaps in the field between the two parties.
Barcelona President Joan Laporta has maintained his support for a European Super League this afternoon saying it is “absolutely necessary.”
- Sky Sports News (@SkySportsNews) April 22, 2021
The most severe irony is that this is exactly what Florentino Perez complained about in his degenerate television interview hours before the championship collapsed over his head;
The differences with the rest of the clubs have become so huge that the confrontations with them have become boring, and no one wants to watch them, as if Peres and his ilk were not one of the reasons for this situation in the first place, and they did not take advantage of every moment of transformation, every negotiation session, and every new law or broadcast contract to widen this gap, as if they did not They are the reason why football has reached its current state.
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The real Super League is what has already existed for years, and it is the one who transformed the local leagues into boring and meaningless competitions monopolized by one or two teams at the most, which transformed the Champions League itself into a rare surprise competition that witnesses unprecedented degrees of monopoly due to the accumulation of wealth and influence and its concentration in Specific clubs.
Almost two years ago, Jonathan Wilson wrote in The Guardian about the FA Cup final, which ended with Manchester City's eight-goal win over Watford.
Wilson's title was so expressive of the present moment: “City's crush on Watford by eight proves football is so bad”.
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Wilson says the gaps have grown so wide that City and Watford can no longer be considered playing the same game.
The game has returned to a very primitive form of entertainment similar to the Christian throwing parties for the lions in Roman times.
Football is no longer a struggle or competition, but rather an empty offer between super-rich clubs that have brought together teams closer to perfection, and others struggle over crumbs with no real hope of competition or advancement.
At the end of his article, Wilson concluded that perhaps the least bad solution would be to leave the likes of City, Real Madrid and Barcelona to set up the Super League they always wanted, simply because the situation is no longer tolerable to the rest.
Do not misunderstand us please, this does not mean that UEFA or FIFA or the local associations are on the right side of the matter, rather the opposite is true, they are partners in the same crime as much as the clubs and their officials, and perhaps more, because they are the ones who allowed them to penetrate in the first place, She is the one who created the tournaments from scratch and sought to increase the number of matches and give them all the advantages they asked for.
During the pandemic, UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin gave himself a £ 400,000 pay-rise, taking his salary to £ 1.9ma year.
Since taking over as President, he's increased his salary in every year.
The European Super League is shocking but let's not forget about UEFA and FIFA.🤮 pic.twitter.com/lYr3jNydmz
FutbolBible (@FutbolBible) April 22, 2021
In fact, there is no evidence for this except that Ceferin himself, the president of the European Union who declared war of words on the "dirty constitution," as he called it, had approved a package of changes that will begin in 2024, all of which are tailored to satisfy the same elite clubs. Changes include additional seats for the Champions League that make them more likely to join the tournament regardless of their decline in the ranking table, 4 additional matches guaranteed to bring them more money, a back door that may guarantee two additional seats if they fail though, and greater control over the way the tournament is marketed and broadcast. (4)
Add to all the above what Ceferin himself mentioned about a previous conversation between him and Andrea Agnelli, president of Juventus, in which he explained that he had succeeded in concluding a deal with the London Corporation "Centricus" to acquire 5 billion pounds of shares in the expected merger between the European Club Association and UEFA, And that these funds will be more than enough to compensate the adults' losses from the pandemic, and to restore the situation to its previous one as if nothing had happened.
(4)
Yes, the reality of the situation differs from what is suggested by its outlook entirely.
The demonstrations, the collapse of the project, and the resignations suggested to us that the masses had triumphed over the greedy bunch of stupid people, but in fact, what happened was that the clubs sacrificed a few faces to continue the idea, and in the end, they managed to get a bigger piece of the cake despite their betrayal of all that this game holds of Meaning or value.
With all the Super League stuff going on… can we please also speak about the new Champions League format?
More and more and more games, is no one thinking about us players?
The new UCL format is just the lesser of the two evils in comparison to the Super League…
- Ilkay Gündogan (@IlkayGuendogan) April 22, 2021
Do you know what the only difference the Super League proposal added?
The fans of the football have become more receptive to the reality created by the Super League clubs before this proposal, but rather to return to it and keep things as they were like a victory.
The broken reality that produces unprecedented records, unbeaten seasons, 100 points per season, triples, quarters and sixes, the reality that has transformed clubs such as Ajax, Porto, Benfica, Dortmund, Lyon and Valencia into mere collecting lines for talents for high net worth individuals, the reality that focused money, quality and stars in A bunch of squads across the length and breadth of the Continent became a victory!
The whole story is similar to what happened when Gaddafi started hitting his opponents with planes, at which point the rest realized how wonderful the tear gas canisters were, and how merciful the regular bullets were, and they thanked God because their regimes' reaction was not that ugly, even if the end result was death in both cases.
Super League clubs, like Gaddafi, were defending their presence and as they hit their fans with planes, everyone realized that scores like 8-0 were not that bad, and that 198 points in two seasons was something to live with.
The end result was that the football situation, which needed a huge revolution and adjustments to restore balance to the game, became a foregone conclusion, and even the Super League clubs got their satisfactory adjustments as well.
If this is not a victory then what is it?
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Sources:
The Book of Thinking Fast and Slowly by Daniel Kahneman - Amazon
The Black Swan Book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Amazon
Don't be fooled ... the Super League clubs risked everything and lost!
The Athletic
The day of the collapse of the Super League .. "How can we work with these people again ?!"
The Athletic
Facebook and Amazon Prime deny any plans to acquire the rights to broadcast the Super League - Reuters
Football fans are furious over Amazon announcing its first broadcast of Premier League matches - Football London
The Big Picture Project .. What is it and how does it work?
BBC
How modern football was broken forever?
Independent
Summary of Florentino Perez's TV interview with Managing Madrid
Manchester City's crush on Watford by eight in the FA Cup Final proves football is broken - Guardian