[alessioalex]

Sooner or later the ESL will happen. Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL. They want to watch the top teams competing together.

The disparity between the Premier League teams and the other leagues is huge already. ESL was meant to shorten that gap.

[alichapman]

I think this is akin to children wishing everyday was their birthday. Watching Juventus vs Man City for the 6th time in one year would get boring very quickly.

The reasons the later rounds in the champions league are so great is because the teams so rarely play each other, and also there's the outside chance that a team like Ajax will surprise you and beat one of the giants.

I agree that the ESL has only been postponed, but when it arrives I don't think it will be here to stay.

[ummonk]

You're wrong. A lot of people want to see underdogs in the UCL. (And the new UCL format should provide a good mix of both underdog matches and matches between top teams)

As to the likelihoods of this happening, the premature and hamfisted attempt to roll it out, together with the severe backlash, will make it very difficult to try again any time in the next decade or two at least.

[MisterBastahrd]

No they don't.

They want to see an underdog BEAT a global power. Which means that the average game is a bitter disappointment. Gone long enough, the ESL would have presented a gigantic competitive advantage for its own teams when vying for star talent. And they're still likely to do it in the future anyway. They just needed a longer runway.

If the Premier League can't have its "tradition" without Man U and Man City, then it isn't tradition that they care about in the first place.

[username90]

Seeing a good team beat a bad team is fun. I've watched soccer where everyone knew "our" team would win, the question was if it would win small like 4-0 or big like 10-0. Watching sports isn't just about the suspense over who will win, there is so much more to it than that.

And it is hard to appreciate how good a team is without seeing them play against worse teams. Similarly from the bad teams side it is fun seeing them just make a single goal against a good team, you don't have to win.

[MisterBastahrd]

A great team proves themselves by beating great competition, not bad competition. Anyone can throttle a punching dummy. I don't know why people sit there and pretend like if you put the 12 squads together in their own league that the games would all be evenly matched. That's never the case. It's much more interesting for most people for a game to be close than to watch a blowout with an overmatched opponent.

[lmm]

> Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL.

They absolutely do. It keeps the big teams honest, and it keeps the dream alive for the tiny clubs. A game between two top teams can be great, but it's not everything.

[frereubu]

There are other ways of shortening that gap without creating such a disconnection between teams and their respective leagues, such as salary caps, 51% fan ownership and proper financial regulations that aren't as much of a joke as FFP.

Besides which, the genesis of ESL has nothing to do with which teams play each other. It's because the bigger teams have dug themselves deep financial holes - to be fair to them partially due to the lack of things like a salary cap - that they want to get out of.

As others have said you're completely wrong in saying that "people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL". I'm not saying that nobody does, but they're a very different kind of fan than the people who buy season tickets.

[hewrin10]

The reason top team clashes are so anticipated is because it happens rarely, if it happened every season it loses its attraction.

[MisterBastahrd]

Not hardly.

Some American sports teams clash every year and the buildup each year is still huge. We're talking powers in their respective sports that have played each other for almost 100 consecutive seasons, even at the collegiate level. Texas vs. Oklahoma, Auburn vs. Alabama, Ohio State vs. Michigan... even when the teams are doing less than stellar, there's still a gigantic buildup and anticipation for these games because of the rivalries involved. Being on the same level and having that familiarity makes the games more fun to watch and it makes the teams more competitive with each other.

[ssdspoimdsjvv]

It's more about what's at stake. Nobody cares about the Lakers playing the Clippers in game 35 of the regular season, it's all about the playoffs, i.e. when they're playing for the championship.

[matsemann]

There are still important matches between pairs of top teams every year as it is now. ManU plays Liverpool 2+ times. Madrid vs Barca probably 4 times or so. But with ESL, every match would be between the dirty dozen. Then it loses its charm.

[MisterBastahrd]

Yes, every matchup would be with teams that have accumulated a ton of elite talent and know each other well enough that they will have to compete harder if they want to win. I will never understand European purists and their desire to watch a lesser product for tradition's sake. When Louisiana State University plays The University of Alabama in a game of American Football on the first weekend in November every single year, the worst that they've ever done in TV ratings is the same as Liverpool vs. Man City's record viewership. This is a game of two elite amateur teams, mind you, that happen to be in the same division in the same conference (I guess you could call it a regional league).

[Dma54rhs]

As you said it's tradition which people value here and football teams are not seen as products, they are your like cultural centers, what often defines your community.

[MisterBastahrd]

Tradition is cheap. It's especially funny to see fans of lesser EPL teams up in arms given that the EPL itself is just a smaller iteration of the ESL. Nobody watching the EPL today wants to go back to the old way of doing things. The same thing would happen with the ESL.

[hewrin10]

Do you have any sources to back this up?

[probably_wrong]

I think your analysis describes the casual viewer more than the fan. Sure, the Lazio fan may watch Barcelona vs Manchester if their team didn't make it and they want to know how the season ends. But I'm suspicious that they would pay to watch a league in which they have no personal investment.

I heard many fans praising soccer because "anything can happen" and "even a small team can beat a big one". While I don't know whether this is true, I think any move away from this core idea will not sit well with the fans. And good luck getting the casual viewers to pay enough to offset the difference.

[edaemon]

> The disparity between the Premier League teams and the other leagues is huge already.

In the last 25 years, only 5 were won by EPL teams. La Liga has 11. Serie A and the Bundesliga have 4 each.

[joefarish]

In terms of TV money, there is a big revenue disparity:

https://www.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/mw8jqp/tv_money_dis...

[Tomte]

> Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL.

Maybe not every day, but that is exactly the motivation for the Cups (FA Cup, DFB-Pokal etc.): you have small clubs you rarely hear about play against the giants.

And sometimes (surprisingly often actually), the small clubs win. Not the whole cup. But they win once. Or twice, and it's great drama and a lot of fun.

[akie]

I want smaller teams and leagues to actually compete for the big prizes again, like they were able to in the 90s and 80s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Cup_and_UEFA_...)

The hegemony of big money in football needs to be broken.

[nindalf]

> The disparity between the Premier League teams and the other leagues is huge already

It wasn’t the case earlier. Between 2008 and 2012, English clubs did extremely well. That time can come again. Even right now, 2 of the 4 European semi-finalists are English teams, one of whom isn’t even doing that well in the domestic league. That does not strike me as a struggling league.

The real advantage that Barcelona, Real Madrid and others have is the lopsided way they allocate domestic broadcasting revenue. The English league splits it equally, for most part. This leads to an extremely competitive domestic league. In Spain, the big 3 clubs gobble the lions share of the TV revenue, leading to boring, easy games for them and more money to spend on players compared to the English. In the long run, the English strategy is superior - it leads to a more interesting League that draws more viewers.

[erfgh]

What are you talking about? Since the Premier League was created in 1993 four teams (Man Utd, Chelsea, Man City, Arsenal) have won 25 of the 28 titles.

[riffraff]

I think you interpreted GP in the opposite way: the Premier League is _ahead_ of other leagues, as it has way more money and has acted as a drag for talent for many years.

[hasjekyll]

> Let's face it, people don't want to watch a tiny team from nowhere vs a giant in UCL

The ESL encourages what you say people don't want. As founders can't be relegated they play every year even if they currently have a bad squad. The current UCL ensures the top teams in Europe the previous season compete.

[DocTomoe]

Interestingly, the fans were some of the harshest critics of this attempt. Personally, and I don't watch much football, the tale of a town-level team winning against a national champion (and that happens every once in a while) makes the sport better rather than worse.