IT’S widely accepted that many European leagues have been cast into the shadows by the growth of the big, heavily-marketed competitions like the Premier League, Champions League, Bundesliga and La Liga. With the modern game very much driven by television and huge revenues from that source, it is hard for leagues such as the Eredivisie, Belgian Pro League, Greek Super League and Austrian Bundesliga to capture the support of fans who want to watch the best footballers playing in highly-charged atmospheres in iconic stadiums. The media focuses intensely on the top leagues and creates a self-perpetuating market by telling people football today is the best it has ever been.
As far as the latest generation is concerned, football has never been greater and the far-off days of the 1970s and 1980s were rubbish. What has certainly changed is the way the game is packaged and promoted, it’s all glitz and glamour, noisy and clichéd, dramatic and theatric. Is it better today? We can never judge that, but there are thousands of people out there making sure the customer is constantly told “you’ve never had it so good”. Or expensive.
So how does a lesser competition live alongside with the juggernaught leagues? With the new age of corporate football has come the globalisation of major clubs; there are no boundaries for football’s giants and no restrictions. They talk of footprints, global reach and monetising markets as if they were investment bankers. For clubs to grow they have to look beyond their traditional audience, no longer is it about the 40,000 in the stadium, it is about spreading the message to Asia, America and Africa as well as Europe. Leagues across Europe have had to find ways to keep their local populations stimulated and entertained.
For some leagues with a giant club or two sitting in a relatively small pond, the size and market appeal can be leveraged to provide the rest of the league with some big pay days and opportunities to unseat Goliath. This applies to Portugal (Benfica, Porto and Sporting), the Netherlands (Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven) and Scotland (Celtic and Rangers). These three leagues are not considered to be elite, but Portugal and the Netherlands are just below the so-called “big five”. The importance of the dominant clubs cannot be underestimated – they are effectively cash cows for the rest of their leagues.
The five blue riband leagues are big enough to operate within a conventional league format, in other words, each club plays each other twice, the very essence of league competition. For smaller and less prominent leagues, the regular type of season has been tampered with on many occasions. Some argue the old model is stale and maybe predictable. Actually, most European football leagues are fairly predictable with very few surprises; across Europe’s top 25 leagues, the average number of league champions in the past decade is 3.3 and in some leagues, the figure is lower.
A two-phase competition has been adopted by a number of leagues, perhaps to introduce more games among the top sides while also giving teams from the bottom end a chance of avoiding relegation. They are trying to add some uncertainty. But while this might add a little competitiveness, it also seems to dilute the importance of the first phase, especially if points totals are halved for the finale. But not everyone feels it works – Belgium, who have used the two-stage format for some time, have decided to revert to a classic 18-team structure.
However, almost half of Europe seems eager to inject an element of hazard into their league programme. The Champions League, of course, has long had a misleading name because ultimately, the serious – and most captivating – content is the knockout stage of the competition. The two-stage league is not a knockout but it is a round-robin that almost makes every fixture a form of play-off. While some may find this perfectly acceptable, in some countries, it makes the product more complicated. Football’s beauty is its simplicity and a league could not be easier to fathom out.
It is not obvious if the fans prefer such a concept, but it is noticeable that often the crowds for early-stage matches are significantly lower than the business end of the campaign. In the top leagues, crowds seem to be consistent through the fixture list.
The spirit of league football about the triumph of consistency. In a league that uses the first stage as a preliminary competition for a more focused climax, a team finishing top in phase one can find itself ending up below first place in the final analysis. This may make for good TV and create some cliff-hangers, but is it really league football?
Game of the People was founded in 2012 and is ranked among the 100 best football websites by various sources. The site consistently wins awards for its work, across a broad range of subjects. [View all posts by Neil Fredrik Jensen](https://gameofthepeople.com/author/georgefjord/)