A bibliometric study of the European Super League of football – A new plan or an old threat?

ABSTRACT

The year 2021 was critical for European football, as the COVID-19 pandemic led to financial problems that brought back the idea of top clubs creating a European Super League (ESL). This idea has been popular in the past, but its discussion in scientific literature has generally been brief and infrequent. Seen by some authors as the salvation of the industry and by others as a threat, this is a topic that promises not to disappear any time soon. Therefore, this bibliometric review intends to identify the trends and gaps in the literature, the directions followed in each work, and the networks between authors, as well as to highlight the main contributors. Such a review will help set out a future research agenda on this topic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sky Sports, ‘European Super League plans set to be announced’.

2. Wells, ‘Joan Laporta breaks silence’.

3. Hopcraft, ‘The Football Man’; Mangan and Holt, ‘Epilogue heroes for a European future’; Szymanski, ‘Why is Manchester United so successful?’; Hoehn and Szymanski, ‘The Americanization of European football’.

4. Dowling, Leopkey and Smith, ‘Governance in sport’; Santos and Garcia, ‘A bibliometric analysis of sports economics research’; Schreyer and Ansari, ‘Stadium attendance demand research’.

5. Franck, ‘European Club Football after “Five Treatments”’; Van der Burg, ‘EU Competition Law, Football and National Markets’.

6. See note 2.

7. Aznar-Sánchez et al., ‘Water Ecosystem Services’; Mourão and Martinho, ‘Forest Entrepreneurship’.

8. Hopcraft, ‘The Football Man’.

9. Giulianotti and Finn, ‘Change, Continuity and Other Contradictions in World Football’.

10. Cleland, ‘The English Premier League in a Global Context’.

11. Pijetlovic, ‘EU Sports Law’.

12. This is not the only time that the CL’s format or revenue distribution has been changed in favour of the bigger clubs, and the latest announced modification was no different. Pattle and Rathborn wrote an article in The Independent in which they explained that from the 2024/2025 edition onwards, the new Swiss model of the CL is expected to increase the number of games between the top clubs and attribute backup spots for elite clubs that would fail to qualify through domestic competitions. Curiously, this revamped CL was officially announced one day after the announced plans of ESL of 12 clubs, and its discussion came to public after some threats of ESL at the end of 2020.

13. While the MPI proposal did not materialize, it showed the big clubs would have greater negotiating power with UEFA and FIFA if they worked together. Accordingly, 14 clubs created the G14 in 2000. After a 2008 agreement with FIFA, the group disbanded and was reorganized into a larger and more inclusive group called the European Club Association.

14. Green, Lozano and Simmons, ‘Rank-Order Tournaments, Probability of Winning and Investing in Talent’.

15. Follert, ‘The Superleague from an Economic Point of View’.

16. Ruiz, ‘Florentino Pérez Makes Appeal for New Euro Super League’; Ingle, Walker and Ames, ‘European Super League Collapsing’.

17. See note 15.; Follert and Emrich, ‘What Happened If … ?’; Hoehn and Szymanski, ‘The Americanization of European football’; Késenne, ‘The Peculiar International Economics of Professional Football in Europe’; Solberg and Gratton, ‘Would European Soccer Clubs Benefit from Playing in a Super League?’; Vrooman, ‘Theory of the Beautiful Game’.

18. Van der Burg, ‘EU Competition Law, Football and National Markets’.

19. Groot, ‘European Football: Back to the 1950s’.

20. Drewes and Rebeggiani, ‘Die European Super League im Fußball’; Franck, ‘European Club Football after “Five Treatments”’; Hoehn and Szymanski, ‘The Americanization of European football’; Késenne, ‘The Peculiar International Economics of Professional Football in Europe’; Vrooman, ‘Theory of the Beautiful Game’.

21. See note 2.

22. Mourão and Martinho, ‘Forest Entrepreneurship’.

23. Ibid.; Aznar-Sánchez et al, ‘Water Ecosystem Services’.

24. Bullough, ‘UEFA Champions League Revenues’; Franck, ‘European Club Football after “Five Treatments”’.

25. Késenne, ‘The Peculiar International Economics of Professional Football in Europe’; Scelles et al., ‘Competitive Intensity in the French Ligue 1’.

26. Geeraert and Drieskens, ‘The EU Controls FIFA and UEFA’; Maguire and Pearton, ‘The Impact of Elite Labour Migration’.

27. Boanares and de Azevedo, ‘The Use of Nucleation Techniques to Restore the Environment’.

28. The ESL of football is often confused with rugby Super League.

29. Only eight relevant results would have been collected with WoS and Scopus.

30. Durieux and Gevenois, ‘Bibliometric Indicators’.

31. Kahn, ‘The Sports Business’.

32. Giulianotti and Robertson, ‘Globalization & Football’; Gratton and Solberg, ‘The Economics of Sports Broadcasting’; Hutchins and Rowe, ‘Sport beyond Television’; Smith and Westerbeek, ‘The Sport Business Future’.

33. Szymanski, ‘The Champions League and the Coase Theorem’.

34. Van Eck and Waltman, ‘VOS’; ‘Software Survey: VOSviewer’.

35. To make the co-citation map more understandable, only authors with at least two citations were considered.

36. For example, Stefan Késenne has more links than Rodney Fort (517 against 472), because he was co-cited with more authors, but this latter presents a higher total strength of links (8744 against 13,520) because the co-citations were more frequent.

37. Andreff and Szymanski, ‘Sport and Economics’.

38. Sometimes the online version of an article is not published in the same year of the printed version. The date of the older version is considered in the present study.

39. Szymanski, ‘Football in England’.

40. See note 11.

41. Drut and Raballand, ‘Why Does Financial Regulation Matter for European Professional Football Clubs?’.

42. Maguire, ‘The Global Media Sports Complex’.

43. Kringstad, ‘Comparing Competitive Balance between Genders in Team Sports’.

44. Wills, Tacon and Addesa, ‘What Drives TV Audience Demand for UEFA Champions League Football?’.

45. Vrooman, ‘Theory of the Beautiful Game’.

46. Neale, ‘The Peculiar Economics of Professional Sports’.

47. To make the co-occurrence map more understandable, only terms with at least three occurrences were considered. Additionally, some terms were revised to create an informative map. This included: (i) editing terms wrongly identified by VOSviewer (e.g. ‘serie’ was identified instead of ‘Serie A’); (ii) merging terms with similar sense (e.g. ‘team’ and ‘club’, ‘nation’ and ‘country’, ‘soccer’ and ‘football’); (iii) merging terms with few occurrences into the same field to create a more encompassing term (e.g. ‘Major League Baseball’, ‘National Football League’ and ‘NBA’ all merged into ‘American sport league’); and iv) removing terms with high level of generality (e.g. ‘analysis’, ‘author’, ‘data’, ‘paper’, ‘research’ and ‘literature’). All revisions were based on the analysis of the original studies, and the revised terms are included in Tables A1 and A2 of the Appendix.

48. The Bosman ruling of the European Court of Justice liberalized the European football labour market by allowing free player transfers at the end of their contract between clubs from the EU and banning the restrictions on the allowable number of foreign EU players.

49. See note 18.; Hoehn and Szymanski, ‘The Americanization of European football’.

50. Franck, ‘European Club Football after “Five Treatments”’; Millward, ‘An Analysis of the G14’.

51. Scelles et al., ‘Competitive Intensity in the French Ligue 1’; Scelles, ‘Star Quality and Competitive Balance?’.

52. Budzinski and Pawlowski, ‘The Behavioural Economics of Competitive Balance’.

53. Pawlowski, ‘Testing the Uncertainty of Outcome Hypothesis in European Professional Football’.

54. Nalbantis and Pawlowski, ‘The Demand for International Football Telecasts in the United States’.

55. See note 15.; Follert and Emrich, ‘What Happened If … ?’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the PhD grant no. 2020.05672.BD, funded by national funds through FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. This work was financially supported by the research unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policy (UIDB/04058/2020) + (UIDP/04058/2020), funded by national funds through FCT. Paulo Mourao acknowledges the following funding: This paper is financed by national funds of the FCT within the project ‘UIDB/03182/2020’.