What is the future of the beautiful game? – Football Weekly Extra podcast

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Hello and welcome to the Guardian Football Weekly.

Today, a special on the future of football after the European Court of Justice sided with the Super League over UEFA.

What does that actually mean?

A Super League perhaps?

How will it work?

Will top clubs ever leave their domestic leagues?

And will the money ever run out?

Will players eventually have to play every day?

Will the climate crisis change everything?

We'll discuss the effect of nation-state ownership and multi-club ownership and look at the implications down the pyramid.

And can fans do anything?

And is it all bad?

Attendances are strong, the women's game is growing.

And are we just old or at least middle-aged fans yelling at clouds?

Progress is progress.

It just isn't the football we fell in love with when we were 10 years old.

You've asked some some excellent questions.

We'll try and answer them on the Guardian Football Weekly.

On today's panel, Barney Ronnie, welcome.

Hi, everyone.

Philippe O'Claire, bonjour savat.

Savabi, Max.

Bonjour.

And from the Price of Football podcast, Kieran Maguire.

Hi, Kieran.

Morning, Max.

Red Jabby says, nice, a sci-fi fantasy special.

Matty says, will there be a limit on players from outside of our solar system in 21-24's interplanetary super league?

Well, look, we'll start with what the European Court of Justice ruled about the Super League, saying that FIFA and UEFA rules on prior approval of interclub football competitions, such as the Super League, are contrary to EU law.

Basically means they sided with the Super League over UEFA, right?

And that is a good place to jump off from us to ask the question that Greg has, which is, how will football look in five years' time?

You can pick five or 10 or 15

or whenever you like, Barney, but what will football football look like do you think?

Well it will look much like it does now but also massively different which is the usual process of this thing.

I mean on that that ruling in the in the European court it's important to keep it in its own within its own terms.

The EU is

really interested in the market and in a kind of freedom which relates to trade and the ability to work and to set up businesses and for money to move around.

So they use words like abuse and things like that, which sound terrible.

Nobody was abused here.

They're talking about an abuse of total market freedom.

So what the ruling said was that in this case, and in, I guess, in other cases, where FIFA and UEFA issue dikats forbidding members to do things without proper process, that is against EU law and EU principles.

I mean, what they basically ruled is that what we know, that FIFA and UEFA are autocratic, non-transparent, weirdly run

ruling bodies of their industries.

They didn't rule that a

European Super League is necessarily

lawful and desirable and what EU law wants.

They ruled that UEFA in particular had behaved inconsistent with the principles of European law in the way it acted in response to this proposal.

They're not the same thing as saying a European super leader.

Sorry, this is incredibly boring, but it's true.

The European super leader.

No, I agree.

It is both boring and true.

I was bored, but felt it was necessary.

It's just the truth is boring, unfortunately.

So they're saying that

a transparent and proportionate framework must be set up to explore things like this so that they might be possible in the future.

What they're saying is you've got to behave properly and look at this properly.

All that's been decided is you can't act irrationally, which we kind of knew anyway.

On the other hand, I think something interesting might happen in the next few years.

Clearly, this hasn't gone away.

And in spring 2025,

we may get the Manchester City Premier League ruling.

There may then be an appeal, depending on what happens.

And you wonder in 2026 how loyal clubs will feel towards the Premier League or towards domestic football, towards existing structures, how loyal certain groups of fans will feel and how it would go down if another kind of, hey, don't let these elites tell you what to do, sort of Trumpian, more Trumpian super league was proposed.

It's going to happen.

There will be some kind of super league.

It's entirely inevitable.

It's in keeping with everything else in the world.

The Premier League is already a super league.

We already have one.

Other people want to be part of that.

And I'll stop talking now.

Kieran, do you go with that?

There will be a Super League?

So what I'm imagining is, what will my fixture list look like?

When the fixture computer says, here are the games?

Are Man City no longer playing Premier League football?

Is that midweek?

What's happening?

Or have the Big Six disappeared or Big Seven or however many bigs there are now?

And it's kind of a weird Premier League Championship hybrid that is the Premier League.

So we're no longer interested in it.

Answer those questions if you can.

I think what we will see is increased pressure for a reduced Premier League, that the bigger clubs in particular don't want to be playing the likes of Burnley, Sheffield United, Brighton, Ballas.

We're fully aware of that.

And that form part of Project Big Picture, the reduction ideally to 16 teams, potentially 18.

I think there will be continued pressure from that, and there will be continued resistance from those teams.

With regards to European football, I agree entirely with what Barney has said.

The aim of...

Sorry, Kieran, I can't tell you what relief that is.

I'm just going to relax now for the next 40 minutes.

Sorry, carry on.

The aim of owners and prospective owners is to have a concentration of money, power, and decision-making in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

And I think that's reflective of a much broader issue in society today.

We do have polarization of wealth.

The A22 proposals, which amazingly came out nearly as quickly as Saudi Arabia's proposal to host the 2034 World Cup following FIFA's announcement are just an attempt to create as closed a shop as you can have with regards to football.

Nobody wants Leicester City to win the Premier League again, as far as

the wealthy clubs are concerned.

And if they do, they would be penalised by going into the third tier of the new competition.

And they would have so little money from that competition that they'd never be able to win the Premier League in the first place.

So

we will have

the A22 will be used as a bargaining chip, I think, by the bigger clubs to extract further and further concessions from UEFA, as we've seen over the course of the last decade or so.

So it will be more of the same.

The rich will become richer, the middle classes will become further detached, and we'll just have to accept their lot.

Al says, why not get some balance on the show and have someone pro Super League?

Do those people exist, Philippe, outside of

me?

Your hand is,

do you approve?

Yeah, here you are, Philippe, representing the Super League.

No, no, I've done this kind of war gaming stuff in the past.

I remember doing it with Nick Harris.

I had to pretend I was the new communications director of the Qatari Football Federation.

It was fantastic.

I absolutely loved it.

Oh, I wish.

I wish.

I would tend to agree with

Barney and Kieran, actually.

I think we're going to have more of the same in many ways, but

everything

becoming a bit of a caricature.

If you see, like

the line drawing of football,

the brush that's going to be used to do that is going to become thicker and thicker and thicker.

And I totally agree with the idea.

I don't think there will be a super league.

There will be a super league de facto, which will be the Champions League, which is already changing, as we know, from next season onwards with the extra games.

And this will continue to evolve because, in fact, what the ruling from the European Court of Justice has done is given clubs a means to go back to the old argument they kept using with UEFI in the past, which is, guys, if you do not give us more money, more opportunities to make money, we're going to secede and do something.

So they can go back.

They don't even have to say we're part of A22 or Super League project.

They can go to UEFA and say, guys, this is totally unacceptable.

If you carry on like that, we're going to have to set up our own thing.

Perhaps the Super League guys were right in the beginning.

And the other thing we're going to see is a rebalancing.

And maybe that's a bit dystopian what I'm saying, but with the Club World Cup, the new

format, which I think will have an absolutely huge impact on world football, I wouldn't be surprised if a Saudi club was world champion in 2029.

And so a rebalancing of power, financial power,

to the Saudi League.

I really believe that.

and which is going to be to attract not just the Ronaldos and the Neymars of this world, but far better players or far younger players, sorry,

and be able to compete in a competition that's almost designed to suit them.

Because as you might know,

in the next

new and not necessarily improved club World Cup, which will have 32 clubs from 2025 onwards, the number of places which I reserve for the Asian Confederation is such that I wouldn't be surprised if there were three Saudi clubs competing in it.

Three.

That's a lot.

And I expect them to dominate Asian football and I expect Saudi football actually to become Saudi club football to become a real competitor.

So that is the one thing that for me is a little bit open-ended.

How far this is going to go.

Am I being completely paranoid?

Probably.

Can it go that far?

I think so.

But we're going to see a greater concentration of wealth, greater concentration of talent.

Believe it or not, probably greater interest from

people who are not like us and

to whom this idea of football is not necessarily a bad thing,

you know?

Showtime.

Yeah, but Barney, is the club.

I wonder if the Club World Cup had been going for like 100 years, I think I'd probably like it.

So, like, intrinsically, I sort of, you know, if Liverpool played Boca Juniors and it was like they had a great history, I'd be like, oh, well, this is exciting.

Yeah, I don't mind it as an idea.

This is probably the voice that is required in this someone who

isn't immediately

appalled by these current suggestions because

football does change.

Somebody on when you put that question out on Twitter was saying, oh, are we supposed to all say the same?

It's supposed to be when you were a kid.

But it's not the same.

You know, football changes all the time.

Champions League is an entirely different competition to what it was even when it started becoming the Champions League.

The Euros and the World Cup have changed and they're pretty good.

The Premier League is a relatively new idea.

It does change all the time.

The game itself has changed.

The way it's played within the rules has changed you only need to watch footage from when some sort of grand or much loved player sort of passes away or whatever to realize how much football has changed what a different game it is and that's a top-down curatorship making it into a tv product which is um what is required that's why it's so successful but type cut

if you're um 16 years old um and you watch most of your football on TV and it's just this great thing that keeps appearing on your stream and you love discussing it with online communities and all that kind of stuff is a great idea and people just want more product.

This will be really good product.

This will be teams.

I mean, part of the resistance to it is a lack of established narrative.

And part of that comes from the media.

We love narrative.

We love stories we understand.

We love to go back to derbies and things like that.

New teams playing each other.

probably seems quite exciting in a new format different time of year and the the voice that's missing in this podcast is someone saying well what's the problem why shouldn't we remake things if this there's a demand for this uh why not do it i suppose the counter to that is that uh is there a demand for it football seems to be doing pretty well the demand is from those in power uh there's not a great groundswell of grassroots uh people out in the streets demanding a club world cup how can you deny us this um it's a demand from the games administrators and those you who stand to make political capital and money from it.

So that's the demand there.

And the other problem is it's also a kind of close competition.

You're obviously creating something which is just going to be closer to rollable where six very well-known teams compete against each other and enrich each other even more every year.

It depends what you we all become socialists when it comes to football and a Club World Cup is the absolute opposite of that.

It's basically saying every everything the only things that are going to exist are going to be Coke, Pepsi, BMW and Google.

We revolt against that because we love the idea of sporting stories still, something in us.

The things that they're good about, collective ownership and opportunity for everyone are good things and sport seems to express them.

But that may be something that we take for granted.

A club or world could be World Cup could be excellent if there was a chance for every single club in the world to play in it, but that will not happen, can't happen, and it will end up just being the same product plastered across your tv screen every single year in the way we've seen happen in cricket which is a cautionary tale for football we're confusing two things i think here one of them is change which is organic uh follows naturally from what has happened before and the other is a transformation which is imposed from the top which is what we are seeing happening now um like when professionalism comes into the game it's because there are more people playing the game there are more people coming to the to the grounds there's more interest and so forth professionalism is quite normal then you organize professionalism, then internationalization, globalization.

All of this is actually organic and still part of the same idea of football.

And together, by the way, preserving the pyramidal idea, structure of the game and the ideas of relegation and promotion and all these things that we are very attached to.

What we're talking about here with the Club World Cup is completely different.

It's a different frame which is imposed

on the game, which is imposed for reasons which have got nothing to do with sporting interest, nothing to do with sporting demand.

I would even question whether it's going to be so successful, economically speaking, and for TVs.

I will question it because I don't have a proof that it will necessarily be a competition that is going to take the world by storm.

Well, I can say it is directly, it is

something that's been hatched by FIFA and which is directly

targeting UEFA and its Champions League.

That's all there is to it.

And

it's part of the power play.

With this competition, they want to have the same, to exert the same kind of power on the club game as they do on the national team's game.

And that's all there is to it.

So we're not talking about the change, which is motivated by what is happening within the game itself.

We're talking about something which is imposed.

without any consultation, any transparency, any accountability again.

So yes, in one hand, we can say, oh, football has always changed, evolved with the times, yes, but this is different.

The organism, something, an external, a foreign body has been injected into,

a virus has been injected into the body of football, and this virus is called FIFA.

And the Club World Cup is one of the symptoms of the disease that is ravaging this body that we love so much, Max.

If you take a look at FIFA accounts, and I suspect I'm the only person in this conversation that does that on a regular basis, you will see that FIFA loses money three years out of every four, and it is incredibly envious of UEFA.

UEFA has the Champions League, which generates money every year.

It has the Euros, which makes money every four years.

It has the Nations League, which isn't big unless England get to the final.

It's one of those competitions.

The Club World Cup is a great idea.

The best of the best.

And it's taking place once every four years.

So therefore, in theory, it could become like the National World Cup.

it could become like the olympics it become like the winter the winter olympics and so on but there is that nagging thought that the only reason that fifa have decided to expand it to this extent is because it it sees it as a money-making opportunity it i agree entirely with with the others in the sense that fifa is an autocratic regime um as as somebody that had to be an expert witness in a court case against fifa uh last year um they're a funny bunch it has to be said um and and there's lots of them and when there's only one of you so it's it's driven by money it will mean that potentially um if it's a success in its in its expanded form there will be more money to distribute to the individual football associations who vote for janny infantino to be president did you yell you can't handle the truth kieran

not quite no no

shame on you anyway that'll do for part one part two we ask will the money run out

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Welcome to part two of the Guardian Football Weekly.

Daniel says: everyone talks about the Super League being the problem.

Why aren't people highlighting that the overspending on transfers and wages is what's driven the formation of the Super League?

Debt can rise over 100 million.

We're talking about life-changing amounts of money for one player.

When is the trend on players costing this much going to come back down, and when a club's going to realize it's not sustainable to just keep pouring money in at those levels?

Kieran, I guess that's probably one for you.

The amount of money that is spent on transfers as a percentage of the money that is generated by the game has increased from 33% to 35% since the Premier League was formed in 1992.

So there hasn't actually been

all of the focus is on the spending.

Again, I will bore people with numbers here.

Since the Premier League started, its revenue has increased by 2,600% at a time when prices have increased by 94%.

It has been a spectacularly successful organization.

You've then got to say, well, it's got all of this extra money coming in.

What's it going to do with it?

Well, first of all, you've got an awful lot of clubs that say, well, we want to be a part of that.

So therefore, we've got overspending in the championship to try to get into this money-making vehicle.

Once you get there, you've got an encouragement and an incentive to overspend because you don't want to go back to the championship.

And at the top end, we've just been talking about the Champions League and Super League and so on.

The financial rewards of getting into the top four or top five potentially from next season

are so great that you've got an incentive to overspend there.

So this is simply a function of business.

If there are huge rewards, then people will spend large amounts of money to achieve those rewards.

It's a bit like playing the lottery,

but instead of having a one in 140 million chance of winning, if you're a club in the championship, you've got a one in eight chance at the start of each season of getting an extra £100 million.

Well, how much would you pay for that lottery ticket?

And it's driven by money, as all things are.

But the overspending actually isn't as significantly different to where we were at the start of the Premier League.

Barney,

in the WhatsApp group, you sort of said that nation-state ownership is a massive part of this, and we all know it is.

I just wonder if you think that will, there'll be more nations that want to buy football clubs, that that will increase, or these nations might get bored of football and go somewhere else, and that will have a dramatic effect on them.

I don't think anyone's going to get bored of football just yet.

I mean, football,

you know, David Goldblatt wrote that what I found probably very stupid, a very eye-opening sentence, that football has become the popular culture.

It's crowded out everything else.

So if you want to have a presence and a voice

and a kind of propaganda tool, it's football.

So I don't see ambitious nation states eagerly promoting alternative export economies as likely to get bored with football just yet.

I don't know what could you do.

You could buy Taylor Swift, I suppose.

You could nationalize her in some way and use her to promote your message.

But it's easier to buy a football club because

football clubs are active all the time and they have a well, they also come with a very biddable bunch of sort of online supporters who will pump your message out there for you.

The British government should buy a football club.

I mean, this is the thing that always strikes me.

If the UK government bought Galatasserai and decided to make its away kit, the England kit, and to use Galatasserai to promote various messages about you're sponsored by the Post office, by

Nash, network rail on the t-shirts, stuff about travelling, kind of the British tourist industry, and our taxpayers' money being pumped into this thing by these kind of

maybe possibly inflated sponsorship deals.

We would say, what on earth are you doing?

This is insane.

Stop spending my money on trying to wash your image as a post-colonial power and make out that it's all beef eaters and

Paddington.

Actually, Paddington could work quite well in that as well.

It's all Club Mascot.

But if that was what the British government did, we would protest in the streets and say, this is ridiculous.

Stop doing it.

You're destroying the Turkish League and its integrity.

But for some reason, it's okay for other governments to do that because

everybody loves to see

an unelected royal family billionaire attacking the overclass and breaking down those barriers to power, which have for so long been um it has for so long been denied to them so no i don't think it's going to stop happening at all i think it's a massive tension at the heart of the game and it's a really big story this is everybody wants to own football that's the the future of football it's about ownership and control and um it comes out in tiny little things like referees going to moonlight in states where they're then refereeing a team owned by that state the next day, which are not implying corruption, but it doesn't look great, does it?

And it's a real problem.

The sport just dissolves as soon as these things are owned by countries because foreign policy is not fair.

Foreign policy is not nice.

Foreign policy doesn't stick to the rules.

Why would an arm of your foreign policy give a damn about the rules written by some guy called Nigel in a building somewhere in London about how sports leagues should be run?

That's not how it works.

The British government does terrible things.

The American government does terrible things all the time in its foreign policy because the ends justify the means.

So why would nation states obey the kind of accountancy rules of some overseas sports league if it's not in the interests of their country?

I wouldn't expect them to do that, and they shouldn't be owning football clubs if you want your football league to be a nice place where things work.

Philippe, your hand is raised.

So, I'm going to ask you a question, but you can make your point as well, which is, are there other nation-states that want to buy football?

You know, have all the states got the clubs, or are there other ones?

There aren't many others.

You can look at

nation-states which are

investing in other sports, like you look in cycling, you've got Team Israel, you've got Baron Victorious.

I don't think that either of those nations,

especially in the current circumstances, is going to move into football anytime soon.

But what you're going to see is you're going to see more and more clubs becoming to states, which is not quite the same thing.

And by the way, when we say that, I think we all, the elephant in the room is, of course, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates in Manchester City.

We know the argument that the club doesn't belong to UAE.

It is the private property of Sheikh Mansoul.

But then when you start realizing who Sheikh Mansour is and actually and the multiple links between the club and various organizations, companies and so forth based in the UAE, you have got perhaps a little bit more of a realistic point of view on who they are.

And for the sake of the argument,

we'll say they are an Emirati club.

And the City Football Club, City Football Group, excuse me, is a template of what other nation states might want to do.

And in fact, the Qataris have tried, not quite with the same gusto and success as the Emirates have done to create a galaxy of clubs which they own or control.

But the City Football Club, City Football Group,

is by any stretch, I mean by any standards, an extraordinary success.

Financially, economically, in terms of propaganda, whatever you know, they've just added Bahia, I think, in Brazil to their stable of clubs.

They've got clubs in

Japan, in India,

in Spain, in Australia, everywhere.

I do think that the Qataris and especially the Saudis are going to follow the same route because this is another route which football is following, which is one which is paved with a number of bad intentions, which is the path of multi-club ownership and the fact that a club is now, it would be more and more unusual to see a club that is basically a standalone club like we understand them to be.

like a community club with a history and so forth.

It would become much more common to see those clubs being part of a group, an organization, a galaxy.

And this is where I expect not more nation states moving in because they

don't necessarily have the impetus, they don't necessarily have the cash either, but they will own more and more of football directly and indirectly.

And I guess, Kieran, that means that

clubs who are desperately trying to keep up with them have to try and get money in from, you know, occasionally you see someone's done a

deal, a sponsorship deal with a betting company that is a front and you know they've got a picture of someone's face that when you someone really checks out who it is it's you know someone who's just like runs a small b and b and chelt them and it has nothing to do with any of this sort of thing i mean like there is a desperation to get money from anywhere right so people cut corners yes blind blinded by the check um is

is the is the word i normally use we see this more and more often um Football is the cheapest way of gaining global influence in terms of any industry in the world.

If you take a look at Microsoft acquiring Activision in the gaming industry, that cost Microsoft $70 billion.

Well,

PIF acquired Newcastle United for 305 million.

Yeah, that's what one 200th

of the price.

And

the amount of attention.

So if you want to get fame, notoriety, kudos, um if you want to get a message across buy a football club because it's it's it's far cheaper than buying a newspaper because newspapers lose money um and don't have that big an audience you you can weaponize the fan base to support you um because it is my football club right or wrong as far as the fan base is concerned but my only concern is that if i if i was a dodgy nation state I wouldn't want anybody to know about all of the abuses that I'm doing domestically and internationally.

And I, because we don't know what's happening in certainly in

some of the old Russian republics and so on, but they never come across our radar.

There's huge things taking place there, which are absolutely appalling.

But because they're not involved with football, we don't.

So,

if you want to sports wash, it's actually counterproductive because the very fact that there will always be discussions with regards to those regimes on the back of them acquiring a football club becomes counterintuitive and counterproductive.

I don't think it is.

I mean, I just think the word sports washing is a really bad word, and we shouldn't use it.

I mean, it's not a bad word.

It was coined for a reason

by Amnesty, I think,

to describe this process, to say, well, what's happening here?

We need a phrase to describe it.

But washing sounds quite sort of gentle, doesn't it?

It sounds like a nice thing.

It sounds like you actually care to be seen as clean.

And I don't think that's necessarily the case.

I don't think my outrage counts for anything at all.

I don't think a tweet storm of pointing out various contradictions.

Oh look, they said in the New York court that they're an arm of the state so they can't do discovery.

Ha, we've caught them in a contradiction.

Actually it turns out the BIF is related.

Nobody cares.

If you look at Qatar, this was one of the arguments around the Qatar World Cup that is this actually doing them any good?

There's never been so much publicity

about the labor relations in Qatar and nobody's ever been so cross with Qatar as they are now.

But I think it's easy to get lost in your own bubble here.

The basic fact is that the World Cup

don't care, it's just didn't became clearer more and more clear as we got closer to the tournament, as relations became ever more uncompromising.

I kind of respected the straight talking in many ways, a lot more than the flannel before that, of like essentially this is what we're going to do.

And if you have a problem with it, that's your problem.

The World Cup was a huge, huge success for Qatar in so many ways.

Most obviously,

in the basic thing, I think,

going back more than a decade ago, the question was asked,

why are you doing this?

Why are you bringing this on yourself?

Why are you going through this?

Why stage your World Cup?

And you kind of just have to look at the map.

And the response was, we don't want to be another Kuwait.

I mean, a part of that World Cup was simply raising the profile and simply saying you're not going to march over the border and take our resources.

We are now, we have a whole new built city where the the world's international rich live that we wouldn't have had and wouldn't have been able to get people to live in if it weren't for the fact that we had this World Cup.

And we're now, the World Cup is about security and about global prominence.

It wasn't about

people from Islington on Twitter caring about what happens in the human rights sphere, which appears to be a distinct sphere all its own that only some people care about.

So anyway, I'm just saying that I don't think many of these states particularly care about that side of things.

You were asking Max about the flow of dirty money, of money, rather.

Sorry, that.

What an interesting slip of the tongue here.

The flow of money in the game, is it going to stop?

No, it's not.

And very briefly, two things.

First of all, many people still think that football is undervalued, especially our American friends.

And I think I can see Kieran nodding.

And I think

I've never heard an American sports analyst saying anything like football is overvalued.

No, no, no, no.

They think there's an awful, awful lot more money to be made out of it.

And the other thing which we shouldn't forget is that I remember talking to

somebody from Interpol about football and the beauty of the game and so forth, the hidden beauties of the game.

And he said, you know, there are three, the best three ways to launder money on the planet are the contemporary art world,

the sports betting industry, and football.

It's not by chance that you see so many crooks and tarts, to quote Philip Larkin, joining the, you know, jumping aboard football, the football ship, and why there is so much money flowing in, which is money that honestly has got dubious origin, because it's a fantastic washing machine.

So, we can we will carry on seeing

people moving in, losing money, actually, by the way, but by losing money, they will have cleaned it.

And so that's another reason why the flow of money is not going to stop.

There are many other reasons, but it's one of them.

It's not exactly the most optimistic of views, but if you think that football is going to

go bankrupt, no, no, no, at least there's the good side of it.

Football is not going to go bankrupt.

Kieran, can you see a time when it's been mentioned before that Premier League games won't be in this country?

You know, we see like the, you know, isn't the Spanish Super Cup or whatever goes to Saudi Arabia?

Like, when's that going to happen?

Is that going to happen?

It will happen when the amount of money that's put in front of Premier League club owners is so much that any local loyalties they have instantly disappear.

18 out of 20 of the Premier League clubs are losing money on a day-to-day basis and they're reliant on either player sales or

owner generosity to dig them out of those particular holes.

We're now flatlining in terms of TV money.

It's difficult to get more money off fans attending matches because prices are pretty steep already and

to expand the grounds cost a lot more the sponsors aren't willing to pay more money so where where is where is the future money going to come from?

You either play more games or you play games elsewhere, or

you manage to get those games

abroad.

Now, there's two ways of doing it.

A, you can physically

do that, which I think would provoke a lot of resistance from fan bases.

So, I think owners would have to be very careful.

But

I was on a financing football panel recently.

And

have you attended ABBA Voyage?

Have you

had the 3D avatar experience of 1970?

Abba Voyage?

No, no, I haven't.

Well, it's coming to football.

Hologram,

a pitch where they're all running around, but they're not actually there.

That's right.

And you have one in New York and you have one in Mumbai and you have one in Melbourne and you have one in London.

And so if Chelsea are away to Manchester United,

20,000 Chelsea fans will turn up if you've got this purpose-built stadium.

And the technology is there.

And that's what these American owners...

This is why the Glazers don't want to sell out now, because they are convinced that in 10 years' time, we will have the soccer dome in London.

And you won't just be having one football match there at the weekend because of the way that the matches are stratified for TV.

You can have five back-to-back over the course of the weekend.

The Premier League's got a share of this, private equity has got a share of this.

And you are watching avatars of football players.

And you can get, what, 12,015, 20,000 people into the soccer dome

and the prices you pay.

If you go to this ABBA show,

it'll cost you 80 quid for a ticket, and everybody loves it.

Yeah, I mean, this is the first time where I really go, but it's not the same.

You know, like when I sound like the old man going, but you know, like there was contact there in London, but there was no contact there because they're two holograms.

This is, you know.

I mean, Max, you're so conservative.

You need to own it.

I mean, this is just the cartel clinging on desperately to the memories of your childhood.

I mean, did you see the recent esports world championship?

I know you say the word esports and people just slump slump into a coma of indifference, but it's so popular.

There is so much money in it.

It's so advanced and AI is going to is totally transforming the way those games work now.

They have real, I mean, real,

they have a version of reality that's as real as anything else,

which is self-replicating.

You play a game and these are not programmed patterns.

It's learning from what you're doing.

And basically, it's as real as, it's probably more real than playing a game against, say, a jose mourinho team where it all seems very clunky and analogue and pre-programmed this is actually evolving and organic and full of self-expression and probably more entertaining um the the idea of avatars and holograms and cristiano ronaldo playing against pele um seems ridiculous to us but if you asked every single 13 year old on the planet what they'd rather see you'd probably well they'd probably say i'd rather watch uh something from lower down the pyramid what you're talking about less this is disgraceful disgraceful disgusting practice but they probably wouldn't I mean it's always dangerous to lump all young people together young people are not all the same person the only thing they share isn't there are young people who like playing chess and young people who like smoking crack they're a different interest for everybody they're not all the same also to be very wary of marketeers telling you that young people don't like long things or difficult things which they did very successfully in cricket

you know marketing people don't like long things that's the only thing that comes out of those studies.

I'll tell you one thing, Barney, as somebody who's been a chess player at a decent level, I would say, in terms of the consumption of illicit substances, I think chess players can good surface good game finally.

But is crack, is crack, is crack what you need to take to, you know, to beat Gary Kasparov?

That's the question.

Yeah, I don't think so, actually.

I don't think crack would be the one.

No, that wouldn't be the substance of choice.

Got to confess, not really sure what crack is.

So

we'll move on to part three back in a second.

Hi Pod fans of America, Max here.

Barry's here too.

Hello.

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Welcome to part three of the Guardian Football Weekly.

Players are playing too much, Philippe.

Are they going to end up playing every day in this this futuristic football world?

We know there'll be holograms, so it's easier.

Like Andreo Nana, apparently he's going to play two games in 24 hours.

Yes, like Roy Carroll, didn't he?

Is it Roy Carroll famously do that?

Yeah, well, that will be back to the good old days, Max, when they were not complaining about how many games they were playing.

They were playing Christmas Eve and Christmas and boxing there and all this, and they were not complaining about it.

I think this is probably

the thin end of the wedge when it comes to the evolution of the game, because

I I think there's got to be one moment where finally Fifth Pro, who has been saying for years and years and years, keeps saying we're playing too much.

Look at all the injuries, look at all the problems people are having, physical and also mental health problem linked to that.

Think as well of the environmental cost of what we're talking about here, which is absolutely colossal.

There's a moment when I think the players will have to say, no, sorry, we're down in tools.

We're down in tools.

We cannot play 60 or 70 games per year.

Not at the kind of tempo rhythm that is now the tempo and the rhythm of modern football.

And that might be, I think we're talking about reasons to hope.

What I'm hoping is that the people that football genuinely cannot do without, it can probably do without fans.

We could have holograms of fans, but it cannot do without players.

And there's a moment where the players say, well, enough is enough.

And also the financial rewards we're getting for that are not commensurate to the effort that is asked from us.

And I don't know what, you know, Karen and Barney, you've probably, like me, seen statement after statement after statement of FIFA pro every time there is a change in the calendar saying we cannot go any further.

There has been no consultation.

But the day might come when the players actually decide, the players' union decide, we can't have any more of that.

We're not playing.

We're striking.

And this might be, this is

one of my big hopes, actually, Max, that the change,

the proper change, is going to come from the players.

Because otherwise, yes, they're going to add to the list.

I mean, the 2025

club world cup when you think about it 38 games talking about english clubs here 38 games in the premier league season then you've got the expanded group phase with 10 games in the champions league then you've got the internationals then you'll get also let's not forget the um continental cups that like Asia and Africa that we have this this year.

Then we have the Champions League being played at the end of May.

Then we will have the Club World Cup with probably a team that was in the final of the Champions League taking place from the 12th of July, 13th of June, sorry, to the 12th of July.

And then we start again.

This is totally impossible.

It is totally impossible.

Does that mean, Kieran, that A, there'll be a push to make the Premier League smaller?

And B, clubs will say, hang on, a 25 isn't enough.

We need a 30.

So the top clubs will just like hoover up more players and sort of keep them even if they don't play that much.

Yeah, I think we will move to even more of a two-tier system that we have at present.

If you're in the Champions League,

you've got eight great group games.

At the A22 proposals was to have 14 group games under

their scenario.

And all of this will add up.

You'll have to have bigger squads.

Players will not be able to play 60 games a season because the sports scientists will say that the players aren't physically 100%.

And also the players will be picking up the level of

soft tissue injuries that we're seeing, which have become increasingly prominent.

Brighton's first season in Europe, this league, as a fan, it's absolutely brilliant.

The players and the manager want it, but the squad isn't simply able to cope.

And we're seeing that Newcastle, again, it's their first season in Europe for a few years.

They've had an injury crisis.

Other clubs, we're seeing it more and more.

And that's on the back of shifting the World Cup to winter, reducing the amount of recovery time in the summer.

So these are elite athletes.

You wouldn't do that to Hussein Bolt.

You wouldn't do that to a racehorse.

Why are we doing it to footballers?

I work with the PFA.

They are genuinely concerned because it's their members who are either having to play football.

when they're not able to be the elite athletes they want to be, or they're suffering longer and longer injuries, which of course has an impact upon their long-term careers.

I think fans care about this, Barney, but at the same time, you know, the purpose of football for most people is not to sit on a Zoom call and analyse what you know the European Super League will look like in 15 years' time.

It's to forget about how your week's been and just go and sit next to your mate and watch it, or go to the pub and watch the game.

So, like, for most normal fans, they just want to watch the football that is happening, don't they?

It's interesting, isn't it?

Because the one really visible,

the only thing, the only thing football, people who care about football have collectively taken direct action over, really,

among all the many crooked, abusive things, is the European Super League announcement.

That's the only thing that's literally brought people into the street.

And that was a really strange combination of circumstances.

It was the end of the COVID lockdown times.

There was a weird spirit abroad in the nation.

I feel like it could have quite easily not happened, like many things in history that did happen and had a profound effect.

It could have quite easily not happened and you had a period of four or five days you know it's a bit like the um you know the valkyrie plot against hitler there was this little period where you just needed to get through and get people on side and then the coup would have taken place and it would have been fine but that that window didn't went the other way and there was popular resistance i wonder what people would realistically i don't think it would happen again now I don't think if they announced something similar tomorrow that people would be out in the street protesting again.

I really don't.

I think a large part of it was led by broadcasters.

We had these incredibly passionate speeches from broadcasters on Sky, whose whole model is based on the old thing.

And I slightly

question

their ability to be guardians of everything that is wholly in the game.

But Gary Neville's incredibly passionate and lucid screeds about preserving all that is good and vital and precious to us did have an effect.

You know, people suddenly felt mobilized.

Here's something we can agree about.

I mean, I don't know how much people care.

I think it's an increasingly fractured world generally, not just in football.

I mean, you know,

you have the ability to kind of coalesce as aggressively polarised tribes on pretty much every subject.

Is there enough unity to try and...

Do people share the same opinions?

I don't think it's conservative or stick in the mud of us to sit here saying that there are things that should be preserved in football because

the culture of this thing is is incredibly valuable and not all new new things are good.

It's interesting when Philip referred to Philip Larkin earlier,

the cast of crooks and tarts, as a way of referring

to people in charge of football.

I mean that was about England.

Larkin was writing about England and about the country he'd grown up in and feeling that had been corrupted.

So I mean, things being corrupted is as old as things not being corrupted.

And

in a way, this is all very much in keeping with with football, that football should continue to eat itself.

Maybe the greatest tradition the game has has been, I know that people will disagree with this,

you know, run by a central body interested in maintaining its own power.

It just happens that in the world now, it's hard to say the Super League doesn't reflect the power structure of the world as we see it right now.

So maybe football's just ahead of the game.

Barney, I think

the picture you paint of the fans is perhaps for me a little bit, it goes a bit against the the grain of the fans that I'm working with.

And perhaps it's because I'm working with those fans in various other countries.

I'm sure that if you talk to people from the ultra-movement in Germany,

you will find very, very strong resistance towards those ideas.

I think if you talk to people who are club members in Sweden and Norway, where you also have the 50 plus one or the 100% rule, you will find the same thing.

But those people have no locus standee to stop a European Super League.

It was British English, fans of English clubs that I'm talking about.

Well, I mean, let's look beyond England because maybe the salvation of football will come from beyond.

I don't know.

But I also see the fact that I'm starting to see football fans from different leagues getting together under the umbrella of the Football Supporters Europe, for example, but also the fight against multi-club ownership, which is bringing fans from clubs which are, you know, could be a Belgium, France, England, whatever, bringing them together to fight against that.

So I do think that there is an element of counter-power which can exist.

And the counter-power, and perhaps that's where you wanted to lead us, Max, but if we have to have reasons to hope, it's precisely because these counter-powers can exist and can grow, one of them being the players and the other being the fans, i.e., the two categories of people whose advice and opinion is never sought by the people who decide what to do with the game.

So, I think that you perhaps you paint too negative.

Also, for example, I don't think I'm mistaken when I say that the attendances for non-league football are growing in this country, which is showing that people do care about this type of football.

And, you know, maybe that's for better.

Maybe our future of football is not going to see

the soccer dome in Birmingham watching Real Madrid 1959 play against Ajax 1973,

but

going down your local club and enjoying it.

That's what I was going to ask actually, Kieran.

lower down the pyramid, right?

What do they just pick up the scraps and just have to deal with what they have to deal with?

It seems very much down the pyramid, and I suppose not entirely unlike this at the top as well, is you're so it's so defined by the people that run your club and you can be lucky or unlucky.

But what do you see the, you know, as Philippe says, attendances are going up in non-league.

I don't know where they are in the EFL, but there is obviously a huge support base there, just talking about, you know, the English league.

But what is the future of that part of the, you know, because everyone says the pyramid is so important.

I think that's why people complain about the Super League was this idea there was no relegation was just anathema to us.

Whereas there are other countries, the A-League in Australia, right, doesn't have relegation, right?

You know, it's not anathema everywhere, but it is for most of European football.

As far as lower league and non-league football is concerned,

it's not the same sport as Premier League football or Champions League football.

It attracts a different audience.

The crowds are absolutely brilliant.

Looking at it through my lens, which is the financial one, the National League is the worst in football, though, because you've got clubs like Stockport County getting promoted, losing 90 grand a week.

Salford City, they lost a lot of money.

The losses in the National League are bigger than those in League Two and equivalent to those in League One.

And your reliance upon that sense of local and civic belonging far greater than than exists at Premier League clubs.

So it's a different experience.

It's a great experience as well because I love love going to it.

I love Cambridge United.

And obviously it's the Premier League is kind of irrelevant to them, right?

What happened in the big six?

But would it be the same if that wasn't there?

Like it's this idea, right?

You're a Brighton fan, you know, you've been through that.

Like it's this idea that we could get to there.

So if there wasn't there, would I still, does that make sense?

like i couldn't get there if those six disappeared like would that wreck the whole pyramid i feel it would have such a dramatic impact on all of it i i don't don't think it would because i think we're realistic you know if the fa cup still exists i think you know as a cambridge united fan or or a a non-league fan that's what you're hoping for uh is is to get that that that day of memories um and then you and but deep down we all know you know it's a bit like the rumors about father christmas not existing you know deep down we know well it might not be true.

And

you have to accept it in the way that it is.

Have we solved it?

Have we worked out what football is going to be like, Barney?

No, we just had quite an interesting conversation that

I ever expected to, but I've found it interesting, but I don't know if I know what it'll look like still.

Yeah, I mean, I certainly haven't solved anything.

I've just moaned about stuff.

If we were supposed to be proposing an acceptable or even likely version of the future.

I think a few things have come up.

I mean, what Philippe was just saying about the idea of counter-power was very interesting, and probably we should have just done our podcast on that because we all know the problems, and we spent a long time stating them in a state of despair before a few kind of shafts of light appeared at the end.

I think it's important to note that

for all the kind of doom stuff,

and it's easy to say this within England with the Premier League I mean, football is brilliant.

I mean, it's

the level of the Premier League product, if we're going to call it that, is incredible.

It's brilliant.

Even for someone who spent a lot of time moaning about it, or your entire career complaining about it, I have to admit that this is an incredible thing, and the kids have never had it so good.

The Champions League, I think, is brilliant.

It's a brilliant competition.

I travel to watch quite a lot of it, and it's fantastic.

So, something's going right.

It's just the feeling that I feel like we're on the edge of a precipice where things, as Philippe says, there's a change that's coming from above, from interested parties who've had a look at this and thought, yep, I want a part of that, and which is not organic and which is not growing out of some need or some desire other than the desire of a small cartel of very rich people.

And I think that's the problem the game has.

Also, if you were to do this podcast in France, Germany or Belgium, a lot of it would be about how the Premier League ruining other leagues and hoovering up not just players, but talent, expertise, interest, local clubs where the kids just wear Premier League shirts and don't.

I mean, the Premier League, it's remarkably hypocritical for anyone in the Premier League to say that the Super League will kill football, anyone who's benefiting from that, because the Premier League is a massive problem for everyone who's not in it in Europe.

And that's essentially where this comes from.

And it's one of the people never want to give up power.

But

in cricket, for example, there's talk of the big three nations having to fund other nations to keep playing Test cricket, otherwise, the game will die.

I can see no situation where the Premier League agrees to give up some of its market dominance in order to keep the sport healthy in other countries because, hey, just hoover up those consumers.

But it is a problem.

The Premier League is, in many ways, the problem

because of its own success.

Interestingly, it has a huge pyramid supporting it.

So maybe people should pay attention to why it's so successful.

And if you were in Yaoundé or Accra,

it's not just the Premier League you would be talking about, it's also the Jupiter League and the Liga.

We have to see beyond not just England, but also beyond Europe.

Because the biggest imbalance is there, it's continental imbalance.

And the thing is that the Club World Cup is not going to address this imbalance at all.

Because guess what?

FIFA has introduced in Africa, it's a super league, right?

It's introduced a super league in which one of the clubs happened to be owned by the president of CAF, Mr.

Matsipe, Mamelo D.

Sundowns.

So we can see that it's not aimed at transforming the game to make it truly global in terms of financial balance.

It's intended to make it global for a super elite, which can be found in every single continent.

So I think I was trying to say something hopeful, and I've said something which makes me despair even more of

what the future holds for us, which is basically we're all we have to see beyond our own borders, and also to see it beyond European borders, which is something that we hardly ever do.

Finally, Kieran, are you hopeful?

Oh, I'm very hopeful.

It's still 11 versus 11.

You can't have one very, very rich person being able to outbid all of the other very, very rich persons.

So, you know, the money, the money has flowed to footballers

and they spend it as they see fit.

But we're turning up as we've never done before.

Subscriptions to the broadcasters are very, very high.

The number of people,

let's face it, we all know a big Dave down the pub who can also get us a far cheaper version of the broadcast product.

Non-league's good.

Crowds in continental Europe are good.

German football culture is absolutely amazing.

I get the opportunity to teach all over the world.

And Premier League's fantastic export.

It's the first thing I get asked as soon as people know I work in the city of Liverpool and Manchester,

United City, Everton, Liverpool, whatever it's going to be.

Football is great.

What else in life makes you hug strangers?

Good question.

Yeah,

copious amounts of alcohol.

Election results.

New Year's Eve 25 years ago.

And that's pretty much it.

You're right.

All right.

Well, look, let's have this conversation again in five years if we're all still employed.

I would have one thing to add: that we have talked about the men's game and that we should do the same thing

for the women's game.

To talk about both in the same breath, I don't think would be quite right because we're talking about the same sport and two different sports at the same time.

And the way that the women's game is going to evolve is going to have a huge impact on the men's game as well.

But that is something which I think we should be looking at, and perhaps with people who know more about it than we do ourselves.

But we should be having a look at it.

And not just because there are more people going to games of Arsenal and Chelsea than there has ever been before, or because of the lionesses and all of that.

But it's very interesting to see how another template could actually be proposed by the women's game.

To be absolutely honest, I don't think it's going to happen.

I'm very pessimistic as well for this one, but I think it's a conversation we should be having in the future.

And we'll do it.

All right.

Thanks, Philippe.

Thank you.

Thank you, Barney.

Cheers, everyone.

Thanks, Kieran.

Thank you very much.

Football Weekly is produced by Joel Grove.

Our executive producer is Max Suns.

This is The Guardian.