Full interview with Florentino Perez about the Super League
Perez (Real Madrid): "Football is going through a very tough situation, and the Super League will save the clubs financially. When there is no profit, the only way is to play more competitive games during the week.
40% of young people are not interested in football because there are too many low quality games. We have to adapt and football has to evolve. The Super League is not a closed league, every year 5 teams can join.
Players who play the Super League will NOT be banned from their national teams.
UEFA is a monopoly and it has to end. Football is on the verge of totally ending. We have to act, and act fast. The UEFA have a new UCL format for 2024 but in 2024 we, the clubs would have been dead already.
PSG have not been invited. We haven't even spoken to any German clubs. We are now 12 clubs, we want to become 15 clubs. The super league will not be cancelled.
The 15 founding clubs are the ones that matter the most in terms of entertainment. Teams like Napoli and Roma will have a chance to be in the competition one year or another let's see"
The champions league is losing interest. Will the super league ever lose interest? No, because games will be between big clubs.
VAR will be in the Super league, referees will also improve and they will be FFP (financial fair play). So much money has been lost, we can’t afford to lose anymore. We have been working on this project for 20 years and here we are. We owe it to all the fans of these clubs. We will improve football for all of them.
We have announced it now because we want to start with it next season. The clubs signed the agreement on 17th April. The contract is binding, nobody can leave, there aren’t any problems between any of the clubs, everything is signed and agreed but that's not a problem because everyone is in agreement.
I know what Lebron James is earning but not what the UEFA President is earning There is no transparency.
There will be a 55% salary cap and We might have to make the football matches shorter, if young people find them too long!
BIG CLUBS WILL GET A LOT OF MONEY, THEN WE WILL DISTRIBUTE IT TO EVERYONE. THERE COULD ALSO BE A SECOND DIVISION OF THE SUPER LEAGUE. “
My take on all of this is that firstly he's right that football has gone way downhill over the past decade, but in my view it's because of top teams playing uninspiring football. I don't mean in the case of CL group stage big team vs minnow matches, I mean that nearly everybody plays bland football on the pitch. I'm also not talking about teams set up to grind out results via hard work like Conte's Juve or what I've seen of Simeone's Atlético teams. I'm talking about a PSG with all this flashy, electric talent up front aimlessly pissing about for 85 minutes, and winning after 5 minutes of inspired play from two of players. Champions League quarters this year: PSG vs Bayern, Chelsea vs Porto, Liverpool vs Madrid, BVB vs Man City. Snooze-a-doodle-do, and then the most boring of each pair actually got through to the semis.
A major problem with football has been the concentration of talent in a few clubs who hire the best scouts and snap up all the world's best young talent, knowing fine well that they can't field more than 11 players at any one time. They then give these youngsters huge amounts of money based on their possible ceiling (meaning prematurely, and way too early in their careers), and most of them lose their hunger and don't realise their talent.
How will the Super League affect this concentration issue? Hard to say, it'd be easy to forecast that having the richest teams in a circlejerk will result in them getting richer, and the situation getting worse. On the other hand, if this is any kind of genuine effort to save football the financial side has to be completely revamped, and besides this salary cap thing Perez has mentioned I'd like to see a squad size limit - although of course that's implied in a salary cap scenario. Maybe the revamp of transfer protocol will be wider, and will do something to spread the talent back out again like it was in the 1990s - an era which I think most of us consider world football's last golden age.
Anyway while I don't believe for a second that these billionaire owners are doing this motivated by anything besides business, there is potential to this concept, but if they are reorganising football for the 21st century I hope they do it right. The idea that this move is killing the heart of football is naive: professional football has long since been living on its own planet. Equally naive is believing that the team owners are doing this on behalf of the fans. Let's be clear: they don't give a fuck about us. He's right though that FIFA and UEFA are rotten to the core. I'm interested to see how this pans out knowing that there's not really much at stake. Even our Juventus has been setting up tifo displays in English for years, decided to move away from a traditional club badge to turn us into 'a lifestyle brand', signed Ronaldo as a marketing move and last year we changed our actual strip because USA focus groups said black and white stripes reminded them of referees. The romantic dream of football is dead anyway, so if they can improve on an increasingly dull spectacle let's see what happens.
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