Speaking at the Leagues in Europe conference in Rotterdam, Holland, this morning, Thomas Hoehn, head of economics Europe, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said that clubs outside G14 had suffered because of the format and distribution of television revenues from the Champions League.
He claims results show that performance of small market clubs has deteriorated in recent years as already rich major market clubs have invested their bigger slice of the TV cake to snap up the world’s most talented players.
But Hoehn believes that a small G14-only European Super League would be doomed to failure because clubs would lose local rivalries and currently successful teams would not win often enough to satisfy fans. However, he believes that proposals for an Atlantic League bringing together large clubs from small television markets, for example Rangers and Celtic in Scotland and Ajax and Feyernoord in Holland, would deliver the benefits of large markets through a total market of 60 million viewers making it commercially attractive to broadcasters and commercial partners.
His own vision for the future of European club football is a hybrid system seeing 60 teams in regionally-based US style conferences with the championship decided through a series of play-offs in the style of the NFL and the NBA.
Earlier in the day, Simon Gardiner, SportBusiness International columnist and director of the International Sports Law Centre at Anglia Polytechnic University, warned of the need to protect against the ‘McDonaldisation’ of European sport, and being driven only by commercial imperatives.
