How sport in Europe is being ‘rigged’ by big business

Last Friday, Fifa’s ruling council met in Miami. There, they decided to introduce a new Club World Cup from 2021 – even though Europe’s clubs have said they will refuse to take part – while postponing a decision on whether to expand the 2022 World Cup from 32 teams to 48.

The previous day, World Rugby’s suits met in Dublin. They discussed whether to embrace a new Nations Championship, backed by sports marketing company Infront. The southern hemisphere nations support the plan, but many Six Nations countries do not. So two of the biggest sports, two promises of a new bounty of cash – and two very fine messes.

It is a snapshot of sport today: a world in which everything is in flux, as long as the price is right.

Resistance to change

For all the specific questions facing football and rugby, the continuities are more striking. In both cases, Europe’s old order is resistant to change. In football, the European Club Association, which represents the biggest European teams, has said they will not enter the reformed World Club Cup in 2021 – when it will expand from eight teams to 24 – seemingly fearing that it could undermine the Champions League.

Rugby’s European countries are rejecting a global vision, with several Six Nations members fearful of relegation. They are, in any case, also considering an alternative offer from American investment firm CVC, which is offering a reported £500m for a 30 per cent stake in the Six Nations and autumn internationals. To add to the fog, there is even reportedly a third offer, from sports marketing agency IMG, for investment in the Six Nations.

Here, there is a kind of symmetry. The original concept for football’s Club World Cup came last year from a consortium led by Japan’s SoftBank, with investors from Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates particularly prominent. Today, the very way in which sports are structured is being explicitly shaped by marketing companies and investment firms.

The US template

Sport is often tritely described as business. Yet the essence of sport – the impact of bad refereeing decisions or unforeseen injuries – is antithetical to the certainty beloved by businesses.
The solution to this contradiction from sport’s new investors is to try to make sport more like a conventional business. Here the template is US sports, which have always operated as closed leagues with no promotion and relegation. For owners, the best thing about such a structure is it creates a system in which they can make money regardless of what happens on the pitch. Failure can be rewarded.

“Promotion and relegation has been a mainstay of the European model for professional team sports but is the one component that makes it stand out as a risk to financiers, as any lending becomes heavily laden with risk,” says Rob Wilson, from Sheffield Hallam University. “Follow the logic out and you could say that this could well be the first way of moving towards lowering risk and therefore supporting teams to behave like ‘normal’ businesses.”

Since 1892, when it was introduced by the Football League, the idea of promotion and relegation has been central to Western sport. Now it is under attack.

The end of relegation?

This is a common thread linking many of the reforms being discussed. The leaked proposals for a European Super League last November included a stipulation that 11 “founding members” – including five English clubs – would be exempt from relegation for the first 20 years of the league, from 2021, defying the historic principles of European football. At a meeting yesterday in Nyon, Switzerland, the ECA discussed reforms to the Champions League in which, rather than by position in their national leagues, berths would be determined by a new system of promotion and relegation.

Using this language was a clever wheeze but also deeply disingenuous. The idea is that, if the biggest clubs endure a poor league season, they will still have an opportunity to remain in the Champions League; only four of the 32 Champions League sides could be relegated each year, a report in The Wall Street Journal suggested. So clubs would become less like traditional European sports teams, at the whim of results, and a little more like a US sports franchise. The big six Premier League clubs have already succeeded in getting a higher share of revenue in the new Premier League broadcasting deal, promising to entrench the elite still further.

Safeguarding the status quo

Once again, something similar can be seen in rugby. In recent years there has been persistent talk of relegation from the Premiership being abolished, which has intensified since CVC – them again – bought a 27 per cent stake in the league three months ago. The beauty of scrapping relegation is it means no chance of the wrong clubs – those with big histories and big crowds – getting relegated and being replaced by pesky upstarts. Much the same logic explains why the Six Nations sides loathe promotion and relegation – Georgia may be ranked above Italy, but their TV market is a lot smaller.

In 2016, the International Cricket Council tried to introduce two divisions in Test cricket – only to find that, rather like the Six Nations now, countries feared their status being determined by how they actually performed on the field.

It all adds up to the sense that, across sport, the deck is being rigged. Whether through awarding themselves a greater share of cash, decoupling the fundamental link between performance and who a team subsequently plays on the field – or both – today’s masters of sport want to safeguard their bottom lines from what actually happens on the pitch.