"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.