Rupert Murdoch plans Club Football Summer Contest

by rwo power Sat Jun 15, 2013 11:16 am

Rupert Murdoch plans summer contest for football's top clubs
16 teams from European leagues would play in cities around the world under plans by tycoon's global broadcasting company

Mark Sweney and Owen Gibson
The Guardian, Friday 14 June 2013 19.48 BST

Rupert Murdoch's global broadcasting company is exploring an ambitious plan to create a summer football competition featuring Europe's top clubs, including English Premier League sides, with matches to be played in cities from Los Angeles to Shanghai.

Leading clubs such as Manchester United and Chelsea would be invited to participate, should the tournament come to fruition, competing with the biggest clubs from Europe's other top leagues – the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

The idea would see a 16-team competition run for 10 years with a potential start date of 2015 in the close season when clubs traditionally play exhibition matches.

Matches would be aired on Sky and by Murdoch's other broadcasters worldwide. The mogul's 21st Century Fox company – being separated from publishing business News Corporation later this month – also owns broadcasters in Italy, Germany, Asia and the United States.

One source described the plan as akin to the "Formula One-isation of football", with cities from Europe, Asia and the Americas bidding to host tournament matches.

The Guardian understands that approaches have been made to a number of cities by executives from Murdoch subsidiary Fox International to explore partnerships to host the exhibition-style tournament matches. But the proposal is at its early stages.

"One of the major issues is if it gets to the stage of trying to pull the empire together and paying what they think is a fair share," said a second source.

With more than half of the clubs in the Premier League in the hands of overseas owners, and five of those now owned by Americans including Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool, the desire to go global has increased.

Manchester United, third behind Spanish giants Barcelona and Real Madrid in terms of overall revenues, have shown the way in commercialising their overseas fanbase, vastly increasing their income by tapping into international sponsorship markets. As such, plans for overseas tours in the close season have also become increasingly ambitious.

Chelsea, for example, headed to the US to play Manchester City as soon as their marathon season finished and will head to Thailand, Malaysia, India and back to America before the start of the 2013-14 season. Manchester United will go to Thailand, Malaysia, Japan and Hong Kong. It is in that context that Fox International executives have drawn up their plan, but they will have to convince club owners it represents a better bet than forging their own path.

The Guinness International Cup, featuring eight clubs including Milan, Chelsea, Real Madrid, Juventus and LA Galaxy would appear to be a dry run for the more ambitious scheme. Early rounds will take place in Europe, with the finals in Miami in August.

The thinking may also be influenced by the fact that Fox has lost the rights to live Premier League football in the US to NBC for the next three seasons. In what is expected to be a watershed moment for the appeal of football in the US, NBC will show every match live including 20 on its main network.

Murdoch has made several attempts to shake up sports – in the 1990s News Corp set up its own rugby Super League in Australia, forcing the sport's national governing body to partner to create the National Rugby League competition. Earlier this year it emerged that BSkyB and News Corp were interested in creating a new world series of cycling – while in 2011 Murdoch's media group made an unsuccessful attempt to take control of Formula One.

Plans for a European Super League have been proposed with various degrees of seriousness several times in the past decade. There was a detailed plan doing the rounds in 2009 and again in 2011, but the Uefa president, Michel Platini, has been alive to the threat and sealed a deal in 2012 with the European Clubs Association, representing 137 of the biggest clubs, that will hold until 2018 and should keep them within the Uefa fold.

With the idea of playing regular season games abroad torpedoed in the short term by the negative reaction to the Premier League's unusually half-baked "39th game" plan in 2008, attention has turned to the close season.

News Corp and BSkyB declined to comment.

Drawing up ambitious plans for a close season tournament would allow the clubs involved to avoid clashing with their domestic leagues and the existing European club competitions, although Fifa and Uefa may have concerns over what is becoming an increasingly cluttered summer football calendar. The fixture list has become a battleground for the ongoing political battles between the clubs, leagues and governing bodies jostling for control of the calendar.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2013/jun/14/rupert-murdoch-summer-contest-football

I sincerely hope this will get shot down, as then the clubs will have even more matches and the players will be less able to recover. Moreover, the pre-season will get messed up as then the coaches don't have time to properly build a team etc. I mean, 16 teams, that is a lot of matches, almost like a league. (The normal pre-season tests and mini tourneys have maybe 4 teams and thus only 2 or so matches per team).

by Art Morte Sat Jun 15, 2013 2:04 pm

Yeah, I don't see how you could squeeze out anything more of players. Also there's no mention of World Cups and European Championships, so surely this kind of non-sense tournament could only be played every second year.

I'm sure any organizers, producers, boradcasters etc would adore this, but I'm pretty confident that the clubs realize that these sort of ideas are mostly stupid and unnecessary for them.

by fatman123 Sat Jun 15, 2013 2:33 pm

Nope, this tool so very nearly ruined Rugby League when he bought in the Super League, i wouldnt want him involved with football.

Plus theres no way teams can afford to be playing 16 matches in preseason, and when you get big name clashes like United v Barca, fans are going to pressure clubs to play there best XI which could cause burn out and serious injuries at the back end of the season which nobody wants to see