my guess is that independent bodies would form leagues and invite teams to join them on the condition that they could kick anybody out at anytime. And in return the clubs would get a full slate of fixtures and probably some sort of shared tv revenue if the league was popular enough, and over time the most profitable leagues would invite the most profitable teams. So I think there would be some sense of promotion/relegation but not like we see it today. I don’t think clubs would be relegated based solely on their on field performance over the course of one season, but more on what are they bringing to the league from a financial point of view.
Most football fans don’t want to hear it (at least the vast majority of the ones I talk to), but I could certainly see European Super Leagues forming (Chelsea, United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Man City, Spurs?, Real Madrid, Barca, Bayern Munich, AC Milan, Inter Milan,Juve,Roma, Celtic? Rangers? PSG? (just for the big media market, although I will admit to being ignorant to the intricacies of French football, I know that Lyon and Bordeaux are good and Marseilles is decent and popular but thats about it)
You are right in that (at first) it doesn’t seem like a good idea to let a club with a huge pull relegated. But at the same time I think relegation battles do plenty to enhance appeal of football as it makes even matches of bottom teams meaningful. A large club occasionally dropping down a division or two (Newcastle) only serves to underscore this severity. It also gives fans of low tiered teams something to hope for in the long term. Portsmouth fighting its way from fourth to first tier over the span of the 1980s, mighty Leeds imploding into near obscurity with future uncertain… these are the stories no other sport and few other league systems can offer.
I think relegation is important as it increases the stakes and adds to the tension. So it adds to the most important thing that IMO makes football popular (tension arising from the fact it is a low-scoring and unpredictable game where even the most abysmal team probably won’t fall behind until 15 or 20 minutes into the game and where you can always be the team that plays better and creates more chances but in the end loses 2-0).
I really think that if the G-14 created a closed super league and the rest of European clubs created a lets say a continental four-tiered league system (that was linked with national and regional (ie multi-national) leagues bellow) that in a decade or two the super league clubs would come to have a lesser financial pull than the largest/most successful clubs in this hypothetical continent spanning multi-tiered league that incorporated relegation. I think it is that important. I think the fans would come to think of the closed super league as a part competition, part cow milking enterprise and increasingly transferred their attention to its more internally dynamic competitor.
Basically if the competition aspect is more important to the fans than the brand aspect then leagues will realise this and incorporate relegation as this would increase their profits. Which of the two would be more important to fans we can’t know, but in my opinion the brand aspect is important to people who buy merchandise and the contest aspect is more important to the spectators.
Really? Modern sports participants are willing to endure rigorous training and the possibility of serious injury or death for the chance to become a star. Take MMA, muay thai, or boxing for instance. Would these sports full of eager participants really be that much different if they were allowed to go the extra step?
Yes, mate, it’s highly irregular to have tens of thousands of pounds riding on a Draw-Draw half-time/full-time result for a 4th division game!
You can’t exactly “collapse the odds” on the exchanges. If people see a glaring parity between the exchanges and the bookies they’ll arbitrage and bid the price back up while the bookies drop theirs down.
And yes, we do accept multi-million pound bets at quoted odds. I was a high-rollers agent. One of our customers had a daily liability range well into the millions.
fans like to think of themselves as purists, and I am sure there are a lot of them out there, but it seems to me that what really drives the needle is the sell out type of stuff, the big names, etc. Especially if your looking for a world wide audience and want to cash in on the market in India and China. I would agree with you that relegation keeps the bottom of the table interesting, but to me the question is how much? Is it worth the cost? In South America, they have a different relegation system. Its based on a points per game basis that spans a 3 year period. Basically its there to ensure that one terrible season for the big clubs (which actually happens more than you would think) doesn’t see them go down. I could certainly see that type of formula being adopted by leagues. Possibly, also with a multiplier coefficient that was based on how much each team was contributing to the league financially.
Also, over time if a club kept finishing at the bottom of a league, its fans are going to lose interest and hope, and eventually that is going to show up in how much that club is bringing to the table. So eventually, in the long run everything is based on results on the pitch, it just might not make economic sense to have such a volatile system as is currently in use.
Also, I could also imagine these league forming organizations set up their own 2nd divisions, and then have pro/rel within their own set up.
I think it could look something like MMA promotions. There is one giant one (UFC) and it has its own sister organization (WEC), its locally based in North America with occasional trips across the pond. Then there are 2nd tier leagues (Dream, Strikeforce) which are a little more localized and have a couple top notch fighters, but nowhere near the depth of the UFC, and then there are all kinds of small time promotions that exist at sort of the grassroots level. Fighters move up between the ranks but not based on any sort of formal system, and its not entirely based on talent (i.e Kimbo Slice) its a combo of talent and marketability
I don’t think any high level athletes would compete in any sort of fight to the death. I think it could only be done as a sort of bum fights with knives, and would have a very small sort of niche market. There would be a whole lot of people completely appalled by it, then some who would only watch it once, and then even fewer would become hardcore ‘fans.’ Actually, I highly doubt there would be a big enough market to make enough money to pay the fighters enough to justify the risk.
True, it would only happen if you were impatient and wanted to match the whole amount momentarily.
What can I say, impressive. But was this true for every event? Would you have let him consistently place 20 million on something obscure that almost nobody else bet on?
It could depend on how many good clubs there were. If you have only a small number of very large clubs and right after them a bunch of no-names with no infrastructure, quality or local support then probably invitations or multi-year coefficients are the way to go. But if you there isn’t a gulf in quality like that then you could be shooting yourself in the foot. If we take England I don’t really think Newcastle or before that Leeds dropping down had an effect on the overall awe factor of the league since football in England is so well developed in depth (and since TV money is spread around anyway by the FA). But if you had a league that only has half a dozen generally watcheable teams then if one of them drops down and is for a year replaced by a team playing their football on a parking lot then you would certainly be left with an inferior product for the year for no long term gain. Maybe that is the case in the South American situation.
An increased possibility of death. It isn’t certain either way.
Meh, I think a lot of people would dig it. Look at how many people just watch hockey for the fights, or how there are entire anthologies of sports injuries you can buy. Haven’t you ever seen Bloodsport?
The customer wasn’t doing singles in the millions, it was lots of different mixes of multiples in the tens of thousands. On slow days it was obscure stuff like county cricket, yeah.
Customers aren’t dumb with their money for the most part. They do try to “buy” money with big bets on heavy odds-on stuff like Chelsea vs. Stoke or something and it can bite them in the ass on the off occasions. But again, the over-rounding does work out in the end because there’s such a broad customer base at large.
The exchanges are only really of concern if arbitrage situations, or other unforeseeable snafus, arise which are quite rare. In the end the exchanges are usually giving well over 20% better odds than the regular bookmakers because the layers can only get their books green by offering attractive enough prices to get their bets matched.
One way I used to make a fast buck was to price up a book of the races the night before and check what the exchanges were offering. If any selections were 2 pts higher than what I got in my book I’d back 'em in the anticipation that the big bookies would be thinking along the same lines as me and the minute they release their prices the market quickly adjusts, making for an easy lay. If a horse seemed like it would be highly favoured I’d wait it out until post-time and watch the market back it down even more and then make the lay for a decent profit.
Good times, they were. The gambling freedom and tax exemption of it is the best part of the UK [H]
Newcastle and Leeds are one thing. United or Liverpool would be a whole different story. TV people would be demanding some of their money back. I would imagine there are very few Newcastle fans that aren’t Geordies. In South America, its not uncommon for a whole host of players to be sold to clear debt and things like that and it takes the big clubs like Boca and River a few seasons to recover, plus, with their smaller squads, sometimes they just really try and focus on winning the Libertadores (South American Champions League), but anyway, it would be very hard to sell Argentine footie to places outside of Argentina without Boca and River.
If your talking about a European super league, yea you could probably replace Roma with Lazio no problem or Sevilla with Valencia, but there would be no way of avoiding a significant loss if one of (Chelsea, United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Barca, or Real) dropped off, and that would certainly be possible in a league of the 20ish best clubs in all of Europe where any club could beat any other club home or away if they played up to their ability and got a few breaks to go their way.
Ah, I understand now. He split up his money over separate bets so your balance on the other side wasn’t really threatened that way.
I was wondering actually since when I was dabbling on Betfair (did good on the ‘next manager’ markets by laying the press favoured candidate of the moment, but didn’t feel keeping money in the account just for these sporadic opportunities worth it) the most I saw matched on a single even was something like 7 million.
So to have the capacity to cover 20 on just one event would really be something.
He would use lots of permutations with the same selections occurring in different sets of trebles and trixies. Obviously we limit the max stake and the number of times he can repeat selections otherwise if one came in we’d be in the can. Still, if just a handful of his selections come in he more than breaks even so the liability is always there.
I think when the Ashes were happening I recall seeing just the outright market matching 20 million so the potential is there. It will be interesting to see if Betfair booms during the World Cup.
Yes, but then again everyone who is not a United or a Liverpool fan hates them and couldn’t be happier to see them suffer.
As I said I don’t think there would be nearly as much TV money in the game so I think the game would find it more profitable to cater to the hardcore matches going fan rather than the armchair fan from China.
I am not a TV expert, but I imagine a TV station can easily pick up the video signal of a rival station and transmit it as its own with its own audio. I don’t know what is wrong with this either but it is illegal today due to monopolistic IP-style TV rights contracts. (They even go after internet streams.)
That is true. But if Barcelona dropped down they would come back the next year. So you would maybe see some drop in revenue the year they were out of the first tier because of this. But this could potentially be more than offset by the higher earnings over the years once she came back and people appreciated a league which includes Barcelona but from which she can obviously also be gasp! relegated if she doesn’t perform.
Also you must understand that in such a system the clubs would not necessarily stay at the size they are now. Clubs with a strong tradition, good infrastructure, a history of creating talent and strong local support but from poorer leagues could easily soon rival clubs from what are now richer leagues. There is no reason that after several years Ajax, Celtic, Porto or Steaua couldn’t grow in stature to approach the rank of Juventus and Arsenal. I mean even in England you have these shifts. Everton is traditionally a considerably bigger club than Chelsea and so forth.
So if Barcelona went down to be replaced for a year by Dynamo Kyiv in those circumstances that wouldn’t necessarily mean such a tectonic shift that it would if it happened right now.
Good point, most gladiators were not killed in a battle. It was rarely a “to the death match”. Empiricle evidence shows many humans love watching this type of event. The rapid growing popularity of the purely privatized MMA type events shows this.
I would agree with all of those points IF and only IF your point about getting the global money rang true. There is such a huge demand over there that isn’t going away that there would be a very strong incentive to find a way to cash in on it. Like I mentioned, it might be worth it for these leagues to set up deals with movie theatres or bars or something where they could set up a secure feed that was not a regular tv feed being blasted out over the world but only on a secure network that went into certain bars/movie theatres that paid for the rights to do so. There would be a strong incentive to police these outlets to make sure they weren’t up to any funny business with streaming it out for free over the internet.
Plus part of this super league could involve playing a bunch of games in Asia or the Americas. They are going to want to watch the big clubs, not Steau Bucarest.
Ultimately, I think they are going to try and “get away with” as much as they can commercially without completely pissing off the base of the support.
I am a huge MMA fan. Most fans that have been following for a long time are not there for the ‘bloodlust’ its to see the exhibition of skill
That’s fine. When I said “this type of event” I didn’t mean blood for the sake of blood, I should have been clear. Gladiatorial combat was more entertaining to Romans than watching people getting crucified or eaten by exotic beasts, for example. Besides that most (?) gladiators were well trained one on one fighters. They had schools for them.
I mean that people love a high risk “war game” one on one type settings. It seems the bigger the risk and the less the rules the value goes up (with some cultural variations). I would bet that if there was a gladiator type of combat were allowed, it would exceed MMA in terms of popularity. In fact it is a some what natural extension of it as it has a higher risk.
