(On Soccer)
It all started with a letter. In the summer of 1990, Daniel Jeandupeux, a young Swiss coach, was bored. To be more exact, he was bored with the men’s World Cup that year. The romance of Toto Schillaci, the joy of Roger Milla, the flowing aria of “Nessun dorma”: none of this might take away the feeling that, in general terms, it had been a profoundly “ugly” tournament.
That idea inspired Jeandupeux to explore the reason behind that sentiment. As he described it to the Dutch news outlet De Correspondent, he used one of the first examples of football data analysis software, a platform called Top Score, to examine the shape the game took, particularly in matches where one team took an early lead.
The answer was that the game essentially stopped. In some cases, the goalkeeper of the winning team “touched the ball up to ten times more” than all the other players combined. Jeandupeux discovered that the best way to win at soccer was to ensure that as little soccer as possible was played.
Jeandupeux sent his findings in a letter to an old friend, Walter Gagg, who worked in the FIFA technical department. The warning was stark. “So much possession is bound to kill the game,” Jeandupeux wrote, unless action is taken to rectify the course.
Jeandupeux chose the right moment immaculately. FIFA had been concerned regarding an epidemic of lost time for a decade or so, but had always found the International Football Association Board — a British-dominated body responsible for the rules of the game — reluctant to change. However, there was one person at the top of the organization who was determined to end the impasse. The downside was that that person was Sepp Blatter.
A few months following the World Cup, Blatter created a special commission he called Task Force 2000, just the kind of name Sepp Blatter might have come up with for anything. With Michel Platini at the helm— once more, in hindsight, a bit of a problematic situation—the commission was tasked with making the game more dynamic and dramatic.
Jeandupeux’s letter crystallized many of his views. Jeandupeux suggested banning the most outrageous form of time wasting (a cornerstone for decades): Jeandupeux said goalkeepers should be prohibited from giving the ball to a teammate, receiving it back and picking it up once more, only to repeat the process a few seconds later.
The Task Force decided that this proposal was not sufficient. Instead, its members decided that goalkeepers would no longer be able to use their hands to receive a teammate’s pass. Within a few months of Jeandupeux sending the missive to Gagg, they had invented what would become known as the relinquishment rule.
In modern football, everything flows from that change. Without that letter, without that Task Force —and, yes, without Blatter— there would be no tiquitaca, there would be no high blood pressure, there would be no Arsène Wenger, Pep Guardiola or Jürgen Klopp. There would be no game as we see it today.
That’s important to remember now that the game is once once more debating a change. UEFA, the governing body of European football, has already approved a new format for the Champions League. This week, the organization confirmed that it would reserve two places in the tournament for teams that qualified by “historical merit,” as it has been somewhat euphemistically called.
However, even that was not enough for Nasser Al-Khelaifi. In his role as president of the European Club Association — not president of Paris Saint-Germain, beIN Sports, Qatar Sports Investments or vice president of the Asian Tennis Association — Al-Khelaifi has other changes in mind.
These range from the rather vague—essentially equivalent to a list of Web3 buzzwords like “metaverse” and “NFT”—to the more concrete. Al-Khelaifi believes the idea of an expanded European Super Cup is worth exploring, which would turn a semi-serious attraction into a tournament in its own right, one that might be played outside of Europe. He would also consider a final four-style tournament for the Champions League. If we read between the lines, Al-Khelaifi would consider changing kick-off times to suit television markets in the United States and Asia.
At first glance, expanding the Super Cup is a reasonable idea. The benefits of staging the Champions League semi-finals and final in one place – the feeling that something special is going to happen, the drama of a knockout – may outweigh the sheer complications of security, logistics and lost revenue. and, crucially, the atmosphere that semi-finals generate at a local club venue.
Even the concept of allowing teams to progress to the Champions League despite failing to qualify at their local competitions is not as absurd as it has been presented to you: although such a proposal would undoubtedly increase the inequality that remains the biggest challenge in the game, at least there is a logic behind the idea of rewarding performance in the tournament itself.
So there is no reason to reject Al-Khelaifi’s ideas, just because they represent change. In fact, the problem is the opposite: these ideas do not represent enough change.
For example, it was shocking that Al-Khelaifi cited the Super Bowl as an example of the kind of thing football should be doing. No one, anywhere, is as obsessed with the Super Bowl as the people who run European soccer teams. None of them ever seem to stop to consider the fact that the global audience for the Champions League final dwarfs that of the Super Bowl, the reality that football is more popular than the NFL by an order of magnitude globally, or that it has accomplished all of that despite not having a halftime show.
Football influencers propose these things — fireworks, dance companies, refreshed image competitions, format changes and all the rest — because, while the changes that would have the greatest effect are simpler, they are far removed from their interests. .
The way to make every game “an event,” in Al-Khelaifi’s words, isn’t to invite Maroon 5. It’s to increase the competitive balance between two rival teams so that the outcome doesn’t feel like a foregone conclusion. The reason the group stage isn’t “captivating” isn’t because it’s missing a Jean-Michel Jarre-esque light show before kickoff, but because it’s a group stage, so there’s no a genuine sense of risk.
Anyone who has the slightest iota of understanding of football -of sports- understands it: it is only enough to remember at most last week and the World Cup qualifiers to realize that the drama is not generated by the staging of a match or not even the quality of it, but the meaning and the content.
Of course Al-Khelaifi will not propose such a radical change. Addressing the chronic lack of competitive balance would not benefit PSG or the rest of the cabal of superclubs whose agenda continues to dominate UEFA’s mindset. Rather, he and his peers will continue to believe — and insist — that soccer’s path to growth lies in improving the packaging, not the product.
