LogFAQs > #976853063

XIII_Rocks posted...

With that said, 10 out of 20 PL owners are American now I think. There's a chance that it will soon be 14, at which point they can bend the competition to their will - create a truly closed shop with no relegation, guaranteed CL for certain teams, potentially a playoff system, etc, and truly Americanise it.

On this note, it's not physical sports, but let me tell the tale of League of Legends as an esport, which is basically speedrunning your exact concerns here.

When Riot Games took over the Professional League of Legends circuit in America and Europe, and transitioned it from an open circuit to a closed league (End of 2012/start of 2013), it was originally a Football-style promotion/relegation system - Bottom of the standings in each region's top league had to play to avoid being relegated to the secondary league. After five years of this (Going into 2018), all of the orgs complained about the lack of stability (Getting relegated was largely a death sentence for an org in the scene, and not many of the promoted teams did particularly well), and the top league in each region transitioned to an American-style system.

When this transition happened, the amount of money and investment into the scene (Which was already trending up in anticipation of this exact happening) exploded, especially in America. Most of the teams partnered with existing sports orgs (Most notably, MSG/New York Knicks, Golden State Warriors) or other major investors (Literally Disney was, and still is, involved).

And, now that we're five years after that, it's become clear to those major investors that the ROI for them is not what they were hoping it would be. People who follow that scene have been watching that bubble slowly burst in real time for the past year or two.

And the point I'm trying to make is, if you think EU Football is a bubble waiting to burst now, an Americanized system will probably follow a very similar path, flood in a bunch of money to blow that bubble up even further for a few years, and then burst just as you're fearing.