A year on, and it looks like this change to La Liga kick-off times will actually happen, following an offseason that has revealed just how parlous Spanish finances are, Barcelona’s debt and Mallorca’s financial troubles only the most obvious examples. It’s now apparent La Liga executives see a shift to suit Asian television audiences as critical not just for revenue growth at Real Madrid and Barcelona, but for the whole league — even if it’s at the expense of Spanish tradition.

I would argue that there are root problems in La Liga’s foundations behind these levels of debt that need to be addressed with as much urgency as reaching out to a new market, but at least La Liga is starting to realise that a two-club league is not the way forward, as World Football Insider reports.

“We are trying to change gear the way the Spanish league is promoted, not only the league but the players and also the sport of football,” Francisco Roca, La Liga’s chief executive, told Soccerex delegates today.

“I say changing gears because so far most of the promotion of the Spanish league has been driven by the individual efforts of FC Barcelona and Real Madrid.

“This has been extremely successful for us because those are the two elite teams of the Spanish league, but it’s not enough.

“They will obviously continue to do their individual efforts to do their tours every pre-season but we think that as a competition we are mature enough to be able to promote not only our two elite teams but also the other teams of the Spanish league, especially the first division.”

Famously, unlike the Premier League, television rights in Spain are sold individually by clubs, with the income for Barcelona and Real Madrid dwarfing all other clubs: Real Madrid and Barcelona have deals worth about €150 million  a season, while the likes of Valencia and Sevilla earn around €30 million a year, at best. Ultimately, as great as that is for Barcelona and Real Madrid in the short term, in the long run it makes for a weaker league and a less appealing global “product” (ugh). The Premier League and Manchester United have demonstrated the ancillary benefit of being seen as the biggest and best club in the biggest and best league, at least as collective marketing power has driven that perception.

If any informed Spanish observer knows, I’d be curious to learn if overseas television revenue is also sold individually by clubs in La Liga, or whether it’s sold collectively and shared equally: if it is the latter as I suspect it is, it would appear this drive to the Asian market may be one way to financially compensate for that huge domestic imbalance in revenue, that only hurts smaller clubs and drives madcap spending by the big two. Because while there has been discussion of selling La Liga rights collectively in the domestic Spanish market too, such is Barcelona’s debt and reliance on their individual television deal that seems very unlikely to change right now.

Elsewhere, in discussion of that imbalance and the drive to the Asian market, La Liga CEO Francisco Roca said, according to SportBusiness, that “this is not about short-term. The real benefits are in the medium and long-term. As a league we have to promote our clubs and we have to recognise that promoting the league is not just about Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.”

Ye-Ye Legend, Alfredo di Stefano

The obvious big story out of this week was Jose Mourinho’s transfer to Real Madrid immediately following Inter Milan’s Champions League win.  Not one for subtlety, perhaps the most memorable image was that of Mourinho exiting his car to weepily embrace defender Marco Materazzi, presumably on his way to a similarly weepy exit interview with Massimo Moratti.

In the midst of all the tears and poorly-guarded transfer details, the Times‘ Oliver Kay cleverly reminded his followers what Real Madrid general manager Jorge Valdano said about “the Special One’s” managerial approach with Chelsea back in 2007:

Real Madrid’s Valdano “Mourinho/Benitez don’t believe in the talent of players or ability to improvise to win matches” (2007)

Valdano: “If football goes the way Chelsea/LFC are taking it, goodbye to expression of cleverness/talent we’ve enjoyed for 100 yrs” (2007)

Kay intended for Valdano to eat his three year-old words (“I found Valdano’s comments re Mourinho/Benitez disrespectful at the time. Interesting that Real have “sold out” though”), but he inadvertently underlined a massive change in the European footballing landscape.

This past season was supposed to be all about Real Madrid.  While spending millions upon millions of Euros on securing the talents of Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka, and Karim Benzema in the summer of 2009 may have seemed preposterous in light of the success of the last generation of Galacticos, it followed a Madrista script that was written back in the mid 1950s: players are king at Real.

This was the ethos of the Yé-yé team that dominated the European Cup in the early days of the competition in the late 1950s, and it’s summed up best by Francisco Gento on the documentary, the History of Football, speaking of how Madrid beat AC Milan’s defense in the 1958 European Cup in Brussels: “we were Madrid, we broke down all systems.”  No one remembers the names of the managers from that period; all that remains is Santiago Bernebeu’s collection of individual talents who worked together to overcome top-down tactical rigidity.  This approach has marked Real Madrid’s player policy under president Florentino Perez.

It also sparked Valdano’s “shit on a stick” remarks back in 2007, which underlined his belief that talented players are still capable of winning games in the modern European game with cleverness, ingenuity, creativity.  This was the ethos that led to a Madrid first team packed with wildly expensive footballing talent with the skilled but hardly world-beating Manuel Pelligrini at the helm.  And it failed; Real didn’t win La Liga, and they yet again went out of the competition they first made famous, missing out on a Champions League final on their home ground. Real’s decision to acquire Mourinho is an admission of defeat.  Player power is over; Mourinho’s Real Madrid signing caps the Age of the Manager.

Yet Valdano was wrong in 2007 to ascribe blame for the modern lack of individual creativity in football on Mourinho; he is a symbol (a fascinating one at that) how talented soccer players are molded in Europe in the 21st century.  Hoovered up into academies or youth reserve teams at younger and younger ages, promising players aren’t given the space to improvise.  They aren’t given the authority to make on-field decisions that will guide the team as a whole.  They learn one or two on-field positions and are therefore incapable of variation.  They play precisely to the manager’s wishes, or they are shunted off for good.   Mourinho’s father-like embrace of Matrix on his exit from Inter Milan sums up the paternalistic philosophy of the modern manager.

This approach is also reflected in Mourinho’s remarks before the European Cup final last weekend that the Champions League is now bigger than the World Cup.  This is a view increasingly held by journalists and managers alike, who reason that the motley collection of individually talented players thrown together every two years could not possibly be as good as the Europe’s big clubs, precisely because they have much less time playing under the national team manager.

Which is why the team to watch in the World Cup in South Africa will be Diego Maradona’s Argentina.  Here is a manager with no discernible tactical approach but with a squad packed with some of the best players in the world, including Barcelona’s “Playstation player,” Lionel Messi.  Maradona’s sincere belief in the talent of his squad—and his consistent lack of any and all managerial direction or authority—makes perfect sense considering his own individual footballing genius.  Here is man who epitomizes Valdano’s football philosophy, using cleverness and ingenuity to give Argentina the World Cup in 1986.  Their success in 2010 could be Player Power’s last stand.  It will be fascinating to watch in any case.

It’s interesting that many still talk about 1986 as the last great FIFA tournament.  It would too broad to blame the deterioration of the world’s most popular sporting tournament on the rise of the manager and the racehorse-breeding mentality of youth team coaches, but the two are probably not unrelated.  Mourinho might be right: the Champions League could be the better competition, and the managers more than players are now the “Special Ones.”   That other football philosopher, Eduardo Galeano, put it best:

In the old days there was the trainer and nobody paid him much heed.  He died without a word when the game stopped being a game and professional soccer required a technocracy to keep people in line.  Then the manager was born.  His mission: to prevent improvisation, restrict freedom and maximize the productivity of the players, who were now obliged to become disciplined athletes.

The International Federation of Football History and Statistics (IFFHS), well-known for their club world rankings, have announced that Real Madrid are the club of the century (from 1901-2001 — yeah, one of those definitions of a century).

The IFFHS website proudly proclaims that this has been determined “on a realistic basis without imaginary values and subjective influences”, which seems an awfully dull and surely actually dubious way to make such a determination.

This can be seen in the curious criteria used for the rankings, as the title of the announcement is a little misleading — what they are judging is solely performance in continental competition from the start of the European Cup (now Champions League) in the 1950s.  As the site explains, the ranking is determined “exclusively on the base of individual match results of the continental club competitions” because “the national competitions are merely a prerequisite to qualify for the continental club competitions.”

That’s a curious formulation given national competitions were not “merely a pre-requisite” for continental competition in more than half the “century” under consideration — since continental competition didn’t really exist. The exclusion of the Mitropa Cup’s results from 1927-1940 in the rankings, despite the tournament’s importance, is sensible as much of the continent did not participate in it and thus — as the site explains — a “club like Arsenal FC of London could not have the opportunity to demonstrate its strength in a competition.” But by the same logic, it seems odd to extend the period under review before the launch of the European Cup in the 1950s in the first place.

All the same, the rankings are of interest as a time capsule of the first ~50 years of continental European competion, with no fewer than 7 different countries represented in the top 10. You won’t be surprised that this is quite a contrast to the current top 10 European clubs as in the IFFHS ranking, with only 4 countries represented.

And despite the quibbles above, it is hard to argue that Real Madrid don’t deserve the top spot, whatever the criteria.

Click below for the full-size version.

2009-10 La Liga Map -- Click for full-size

Big Story

It’s that “crisis” word again.  Following the Sweeper’s report last Friday on the SPL’s growing financial troubles, the Argentinian Football Association has announced it is canceling the league season’s August 14th season opener across all divisions due to unpaid club debts totaling USD$182 million.  The culprit seems to be irresponsible spending and bad accounting on behalf of Argentina’s club directors, hardly a new development in South American let alone European club football.  What is interesting is the AFA’s strategy to save the league season: seeking to end its current $69 million television rights contract with Torneos y Competencias (TyC) so it can get a $154 million dollar deal with government-run Canal 7.

As in Europe, securing a generous TV rights package can mean the difference between success and insolvency in South America.  However in Argentina there is a hefty political element as well: TyC is owned by the same group that publishes the Clarin newspaper, which has been critical of the Argentinian president, Cristina Fernandez.  TyC is unsurprisingly opposed to the AFA’s desire to kibosh a deal it won in good faith simply to pay for the expensive whims of Argentina’s club directors. Needless to say, the dispute means it is unlikely that the AFA’s debt crisis will end any time soon.

While measures of the sort the AFA is imposing aren’t yet a realistic possibility in Europe, Argentina does provide a revealing worst-case scenario of what can happen when clubs spend without a care for spiralling debts.  Europe’s footballing leadership should take careful note.

North America

• Real Madrid‘s 5-1 win in a friendly against Toronto FC at BMO Field on Friday certainly sparked some surreal moments, like the Gol TV’s colour commentator remarking after Gabe Gala’s miraculous goal, “Danny Dichio there just rolls Metzelder.”  Colin Smith bucks the trend among negative TFC supporters and gives a positive spin to the proceedings.
• Meanwhile, MLS commisioner Don Garber used the friendly as an opportunity to tell Montreal soccer fans they will have to wait beyond 2011 to see their city play in the league.  The news comes as disappointment for Montreal Impact fans clinging to Garber’s earlier statements in an interview with Forbes as proof he might act sooner, but he at least reiterated negotiations with Impact owner Joey Saputo are still ongoing.
• DC United couldn’t beat Real Madrid either, losing at 3-0 at FedEx Field, but at least they managed to garner an hilarious lede sentence from ESPN.com.
• Landon Donovan scores a lovely goal against the New England revolution, embraces David Beckham, slowly turns heads toward former laughingstock LA Galaxy.  Grant Wahl be damned.

Europe

• The Offside finds a real life refereeing dilemma in the Norwegian Cup semi-final worthy of the Guardian’s You Are the Ref: if the ref doesn’t blow the whistle, is it okay to score on an injured keeper?
• Newcastle‘s ownership negotiations ar at a critical juncture.  The Guardian reports if Barry Moat’s buyout proposal falls through, Mike Ashley will appoint former Villa skipper David O’Leary manager.  If the deal goes through, Alan Shearer will stay.  Out of the kettle, into the fire?
• Twohundredpercent reports on the BBC‘s first attempt at the “The League Football Show.”  Can Football League coverage help boost the Beeb’s sagging reputation as a trusted footballing authority?  Yes and no.
• Sport is a TV Show gives us a visual taste of Getafe‘s unique campaign to get more supporters through the turnstiles, as first reported by FourFourTwo.
  
• Oh yes, Manchester United lose to Chelsea in the Community Shield, Sir Alex Ferguson blames poor officiating, world rotates 360 degrees.

For the club, of course, they make money and — increasingly — are used to “raise brand awareness” around the world. Well, whatever. The bigger issue comes when the cash cows start interfering with competitive play, and Real Madrid’s schedule of friendlies this summer demonstrates that perfectly.

It’s hardly shocking news that the world’s biggest clubs are touring the world chasing every last dollar, to the potential detriment of competitive advantage by draining their players energy and taking games away from local supporters to satisfy the global fan’s desire to consume their team in the flesh. Real Madrid are hopping around the world to squeeze every last return they can on their Ronaldo investment, to nobody’s surprise, and it’s a path well-worn by others.

Celtic manager Tony Mowbray recently complained about his club’s pre-season fixture list, which includes a gruelling trip to Australia followed by the “Wembley Cup” shortly before they begin their Champions League campign this month. “Let’s not disguise it — this is a tough trip,” he said. “For physical preparation, I wouldn’t, personally, have taken it on, but I understand why. Manchester United do it every year, going to Asia or America to sell their brand. The bottom line is that Celtic is a global football club that does have a lot of supporters in parts of the world. I don’t sit here and stamp my feet and get upset about it.”

Global branding is of course the imperative for Celtic, Real Madrid and Manchester United in their pre-season scheduling. When David Gill responded to criticism that Manchester United were putting themselves in danger by ignoring Foreign Office advice to play a lucrative friendly in Jakarta just cancelled after the bombing there today, he was clear about their priorities. “We are very disappointed to have to cancel because Indonesia is an important market for us,” he said.

Friendlies have played an important role in the development of football worldwide. The tours of British teams in organised football’s early decades demonstrated the sport to locals just learning the game around the world, leaving lasting legacies in names, colours and styles of play in many unusual places. But now, even countries with established leagues are rolling over to support the globe-trotting of the likes of Real Madrid, shunting aside actual competitive games to roll out the red carpet — or even an entire new grass pitch.

When Real Madrid signed up to visit Toronto FC on August 7th, the Canadian ownership group MLSE announced it was pulling out all the stops: a temporary grass field will be installed to satisfy the Spaniards wishes to avoid playing on FieldTurf and the team rescheduled an MLS match set for August 9th against Red Bull New York, moving it up to June 13th.

Many Toronto fans were livid about the changes and the blatant cash grab at the expense of the regular season competition (not least because the Madrid friendly would not be one of the bonus games in their season ticket package). As Toronto FC blogger Ben Knight put it, the sudden move “not only scrambled summer weekend plans for 16,000 season ticket holders on cruelly short notice, it also left the club with only one MLS home game in each of July, August and September.”

How are supporters ever supposed to take the Major League Soccer regular season seriously when it’s clear the leadership of teams and the league has other priorities?

One could argue that this is Real Madrid, after all, and the league needs the high-profile games and the income to survive (though MLSE aren’t exactly paupers). But it’s not even the decision itself, it’s the lack of compunction about rescheduling the competitive match to accommodate a friendly that stings.

In Ireland, Real Madrid are playing another high-profile friendly this week against Shamrock Rovers. Preparations for the match have led to the postponement of an Irish league fixture, but Shamrock’s chairman Jonathan Roche does at least have the decency to express regret that the friendly is interfering with competitive play:

“We’re very disappointed in hindsight. If we’d known this was going to happen we wouldn’t have agreed to play Real Madrid,” Roche said. “It was mooted last Friday, and since then the FAI has tried its utmost to sort things out, but the council insisted that the game couldn’t go ahead on safety grounds. It’s an alarm bell to us, and presumably the FAI, that something like this could happen.

“This could have an effect on our friendlies going forward. There is no reason why the Sligo game couldn’t go on, but clearly we can’t allow friendly games to be interfering with out league campaign,” Roche concluded.

It’s frightening for the future of MLS that it’s unthinkable MLSE or Don Garber would say a similar thing; in the long-term, having a league everyone takes seriously as a sacrosanct priority is far more important than the occasional cash grab against Real Madrid. MLS should be careful not to get too friendly too often.

Soon, though, the thrill of playing Liverpool or Milan wore off in the virtual world. I don’t even remember what the game was called anymore; Championship Manager (now Football Manager) was a far more addictive long-term game, simply because one could take a small club from the bottom of European football to the summit, just as the Run of Play recently demonstrated with their brilliantly amusing series on Pro Vercelli’s rise to become European champions.

In real life, the excitement of Europe’s top teams taking on each other has gradually gotten less exciting as well with every passing season of the drawn-out Champions League, with more-or-less the same teams playing each other every season, particularly in the past few years.

As you’ll have heard, Real Madrid’s President Florentino Perez said last week that he wants to extend this monotony to ensure no big club (like Milan this year) misses out on the big time: “What we need to work out with UEFA is a European Super League that guarantees all the top teams play each other all the time. That is something that does not happen in the current Champions League.”  Perez is apparently willing to abandon UEFA to get his wish if they object and set-up a break-away “closed-shop” league.

Would the rest of Europe’s elite be interested in following Perez’s dream?  It’s not surprising the Old Firm would back such a move, and it would presumably also suit a few other teams who dominate weaker domestic leagues. Writing in The Times, Matthew Syed argues every English owner has been just waiting for this opportunity as well:

The problem with the status quo — speaking commercially now, and God knows that club bosses see the world in such terms — is simple: Europe’s top teams play against each other too seldom. A Super League replacing the existing European and domestic fixtures would allow Europe’s best teams to play against each other twice a week, providing them with huge additional income.

Why else have American owners piled into the Premier League? Why else do they think they can drive up profits when the Premier League collective bargaining structure is squeezing maximum value from the television rights? Why else are they confident of increasing turnover when match-day and merchandising revenues seem to be maxed out?

Two words resolve an otherwise unresolvable conundrum: “biding” and “time”.

These owners have not said it in so many words, but is it credible that they have not considered the financial potential of a breakaway league operating on the model of the American conferences, where the likes of George Gillett Jr, Tom Hicks and Malcolm Glazer cut their teeth? Could they have failed to factor in the prospect of a group of top European clubs operating a closed shop protecting them not only from irksome competition but opening the door to market restrictions that could transform profitability?

By making it a closed-shop, Syed argues, clubs could finally implement an NFL-style salary cap and PROFIT.

It’s a simple idea, and we can be sure that it’s been studied and considered by the likes of Hicks and Glazer, and there’s no particular reason why non-American owners would be less interested in making more money as well.

Indeed, it was only earlier this year that the European Clubs Association seriously discussed the prospect of a Super League with three divisions and promotion and relegation between them. Given the fierce competition the top 20 European clubs would provide each other, it seems unclear if this would suit the likes of Perez — how could Real Madrid still claim to be the top team in the world if they were playing in the second division?

If not — if it were only a 20 club closed league — how could they implement a salary cap when the rest of the world would still have strong enough clubs and competition to compete financially?  Wouldn’t a billionaire just come along and pay superstars enough to draw them to the new Man City and away from Madrid in the Super League?

In all probability, Perez and the ECA are priming the pressure on UEFA by raising the prospect of an unlikely breakaway to force Platini to reverse course away from opening the Champions League to smaller clubs, as he’s done to some degree, and guarantee more ‘big club’ participation in the lucrative group stages. Maybe Platini will be asked to allow all former winners of the tournament automatic entry?  That would certainly suit Madrid and satisfy Perez. Maybe Scotland will be awarded two automatic places in the group stages instead of one? That would suit the Old Firm, and remove the need for them to back a break-away.

This is all very similar to a decade ago, when Milan led the calls for a breakaway European league as a scare tactic to force UEFA to give the big countries more places in the Champions League. It worked, just as the top English clubs threat to break-away and form their own elite competition twenty years ago forced the F.A. to approve the creation of the Premier League as a more profitable entity for the big clubs. Perez and the ECA are simply playing the same game of high stakes poker with Platini and UEFA to get more of the loot in European football guaranteed to them.

The danger to the principle of the sport is pretty obvious should a breakaway European Super League ever happen, and UEFA has to weigh the consequences if they end up playing a game of chicken with the clubs threatening a breakaway and lost. If it actually ever happened against UEFA’s wishes, it would tear apart world football; FIFA would have to ban players competing in such a renegade European league from international competition, putting the World Cup at risk.

Of course, UEFA knows the big clubs themselves would face intense pressure not to destroy world football for their own greed, and that players would have lucrative sponsorship contracts of their own at stake if they were banned from the World Cup — one imagines Nike and Adidas would hardly be happy if their biggest superstars were not on the biggest stage.

The question is who will blink first.

If UEFA caves and creates some kind of permanent Super League structure, it would all be as depressing for local supporters of big clubs as it would be a final defeat for the dreams of fans of smaller clubs. The still sporadic excitement for Manchester United fans when they take on Barcelona would become routine fixture list fodder. Travel expenses would skyrocket and every last penny drained from supporters to pay for the endeavour in higher ticket prices and new pay TV deals. Atmosphere at games would collapse with less travelling fans every week.

It’s pretty obvious that such a closed league and expanded European fixture list at the expense of the domestic calendar would destroy the entire principle of European football as based primarily on domestic football and  a pyramid to the top, even if this principle is only hanging by a thread on the coattails of Super club hegemony as it is.

If it happens,  I’m certainly not looking forward to the release of the European Super League video game.