I have been a fan of Atlanta United since the club was founded in 2017.
I’m ashamed of this right now. The current team is terrible. They spent big money signing offensive stars, but they ship in goals like a rusty battleship. They have no midfield to speak of, which means they don’t “earn the right to play” and those offensive stars are wasted. They’ve only won three games all year, none of them away from home.
If we were in Europe, or almost anywhere else in the world, things would be happening. Atlanta would be in a relegation dogfight, threatened with dropping down into a lower league, meaning less revenue beyond the gate receipts. But America has no promotion-and-relegation, which means the club does nothing, just plays out the string on a horrible, terrible, no good and very bad season.
This is why we threaten the rest of the world.
Global football is capitalist. Its governing body forbids government interference in the game. Failure is an option. The English team I supported before Atlanta entered the sport is failing as I write this and might be forced into bankruptcy after 158 years.
Teams around the world go bankrupt or become moribund all the time. Wrexham AFC was worthless before Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny bought it a few years ago and invested in getting it promoted. That’s the whole point of the sport. Anyone can rise, and anyone can fall, depending on whether they invest in the product, and how well they manage the investment.
This is the order America now threatens.
MLS is State Socialism
American sport is socialist. Worse, it’s state-sponsored socialism, worse than anything Lenin or Mao ever conceived of, even when Karl Marx was a boy.
All of America’s professional sports are socialist. Why no one in politics ever points this out amazes me.
In American leagues, revenue is shared equally. Financial risk is removed by salary caps. Local and state governments build the stadiums, as Atlanta’s government built the Mercedes-Benz Stadium for United and the football Falcons. If governments don’t want to hand billionaire owners tax money, teams can blackmail them into complying or find another government willing to pay their bills. This is what the Oakland A’s are doing, what the Oakland Raiders did before them, what the Columbus Crew of MLS threatened in the last decade.
Socialism is very, very good for those who own franchises. Atlanta United is now the 21st most valuable team in the world, worth nearly $1 billion. That’s as much as the average English Premier League club, and more than Aston Villa, even though Villa brings in over three times as much revenue. Yet Atlanta’s is only the fourth most-valuable club in MLS, behind the two LA clubs and Inter Miami.
The Super League
European clubs want some of that sweet, sweet socialism. That’s what the so-called “Super League” proposal of 2021 was all about.
Instead of having to compete in their domestic leagues for places in the Champions League, Super League teams would be guaranteed their places and opt out of domestic competition. Domestic leagues already have spending caps of various kinds (often ignored), but in theory the Super League’s caps would be enforceable.
The Super League, in other words, was a European version of MLS.
The Super League collapsed. Everyone who wasn’t part of it hated it. Those behind it were forced to back down. But the sponsors keep finding partners who try to bring it back through the back door .
That’s because the numbers are so compelling. Passenger teams can spend the minimum required by their leagues and never pay a penalty in the form of financial loss or relegation. Franchises can be passed down through the generations. Because their number would be limited, teams could shake down their hometowns by just threatening to move, as Wimbledon moved to Milton Keynes a generation ago. Only now they’d get away with it.
Already, socialism is creeping in. Manchester City was given a stadium built for the Commonwealth Games. Now Manchester United wants the government to chip in on its new 100,000-seat palace. Their arguments could have been written by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
The Solution Exists
Gianni Infantino (left), who runs the sports’ governing body, known by the French acronym FIFA, was in the U.S. this month giving lip service to the idea of promotion-and-relegation within American football.
But it was just lip service. The solution is to enforce relegation through a FIFA edict, and toss America out if it doesn’t comply with that edict.
But the trends are in the opposite direction.
That’s because football is run by billionaires who would rather be guaranteed a profit than earn it. That’s what the franchise model used by MLS does. Unless the socialist consortium is broken, that’s the model world football will move to.
I’m almost sorry we got a club.
