UEFA, Governance, and the Control of Club Competition in ...

Hecht, all else is trivial, as the ‘spell’ has been cast. Undoubtedly, the ‘spell’ is related to televisionand the continual exposure of the elite clubs, which become famous and familiar beyond localityand into the global domain. Certain small clubs will have their seasons of success but it is inevitablethat the big clubs, even if they are unsuccessful for long periods will ultimately remain thedominant forces in European football. A decline in competitive balance is so small as to be largelymeaningless. As Hecht Lucari suggests, the subsidising of smaller clubs has never truly succeededin achieving any kind of worthwhile competitive balance. If that is the case, then why bothermaintaining it?I cannot understand that propensity of not dealing with reality. We are always wishful. Welike the small guys to become big because of his merit. That is human, I share into thataspiration, of course. What I am arguing is not if I would like that. I am saying, ‘hello guys,hello, this is not happening in the world that you are defending so tenaciously. It is really nothappening’ (Rodolfo Hecht Lucari, personal interview, 15 th February, 2005).In devising a structure of competition, what is the primary motivation? Is the purpose of a league ameans by which big clubs keep small clubs alive? It is almost certainly not. At the same time,however, a league needs to have healthy teams in order to remain competitive. But whatever themerits of collectivity and redistribution, in reality certain clubs have a caché, a stature, and a valuethat cannot be eroded, and that has superseded the ability to achieve equality of competition withinthe contemporary environment of European football. According to Hecht:If you were a martian you would be blessed with sight, you would see this is a joke. It doesn’tmake sense. It’s like having, in the same boxing competition, three super heavyweights andthen you start having featherweights, and it’s as if it is funny. The featherweight dies, and Ilike, but why? You don’t get a hard on, you don’t wait for the event. It’s just another event(Rodolfo Hecht Lucari, personal interview, 15 th February, 2005).For Hecht the national leagues constitute little more than a series of mismatches to which the onlyanswer is to utilise the market to form a competition of heavyweights: ‘In my world, paradise isthere. In this world it is hell forever’ (Rodolfo Hecht Lucari, personal interview, 15 th February,2005). It is difficult to argue with the view that the national leagues lack any genuine depth ofcompetition, and that this isn’t going to change. The question therefore becomes what could andshould be done about it?The most frequently posited development is a restructuring of competition with focusconcentrating largely on a European super league. According to Hoehn and Szymanski: ‘theinterlocking nature of European competition has created an unbalanced system and a stand alonesuper league is likely to sustain a more balance competition’ (1999: 206). The growth in the powerof the clubs, alongside the liberalising influence of the European Union has been consistentlyinvoked to demonstrate the ‘inevitability’ of such a development. As grossly overstated bySzymanski and Kuypers: ‘Everyone agrees that a European Super League is inevitable’ (Szymanskiand Kuypers, 2000: 302). Claims regarding the imminence of such a league have varied. McArdle,writing in 2000, for example, argued that a European league was no longer than ten years away(McArdle, 2000). More conservative estimates have suggested twenty years ahead (King, 2003).Either way, there is a view amongst many that ‘European football as we know it may soon be athing of the past’ and that the development of the single market has left one of the last ‘majorremaining segmentations of national markets in Europe’ under threat (Hoehn and Szymanski, 1999:205).Yet the constant refrain of ‘inevitability’ does not necessarily make it so. Despite thesepredictions, analysts have been largely reluctant to question, let alone answer, what such a ‘superleague’ might look like, how it might be structured, and under whose auspices it might be45