Just my idea. To start with, take the 32 teams in the UEFA Championship and create two 16 team division (Messi Division and Ronaldo Division, in honor of our departed heroes), rank 1 to 32, odd numbers to Messi, even numbers to Ronaldo, Top 4 of each league have a playoff for the championship. Given so many other good teams not in the league, bottom 2 in each division are relegated and replaced by best 4 available. Television rights to a cable package showing all matches and replays.
Just my idea. To start with, reinstate the old rule that any football club can employ at most 2 foreign players, and limit the amount that can be spent on transfers. Goal: make national competitions more interesting and severely limit the role that billionaires can play, while at the same time diminishing the financial difference between the haves and the have nots club. In other words: the exact opposite of any development toward a trans-national competition. The current EUFA cups represent plenty opportunity for international club matches. Football supporters could easily force such a change: just boycot all professional football games (don't go to the stadium and don't watch on TV) for 1 month. The crazy "investments" and outrageous salaries budgets in what should be an enjoyable game need to be stopped, and such a popular resistance would render these investments instantly worthless. At the same time what it would achieve is football competitions no longer disappearing to pay-tv and tickets to actually see a match would go down in price. I would say it's a worthwhile goal. As an aside: there has been an actual attempt some years ago by some of the top clubs to do precisely that: create an international league of the "happy few". Luckily that turned out to be a lead balloon. P.S. My plan won't fly either I'm afraid; the masses are too easily manipulated by big money.
Can money buy a super team? Can the highest goal scorers in the world, achieve fame without the backing of other team players? The man who places the ball at their feet is just as important as the scorer of the goal, what about the defenders too? Ronaldo's return to Man-Utd couldn't bring back the quality they once had, much as he tried, his fellow players lacked the enthusiasm despite his attempts to regain the clubs reputation. Time will tell if all these Maradonna's gell together, within the "Arab Super Pro" league.
I am not a big football fan but here's a conundrum i sometimes wonder about, in the 70's to 80's Scotland had some of the best players in the world who played for top English and foreign teams BUT when it came to world cup or any international games, put 11 of them in the same team and if they even managed to qualify then they could never get past the opening stages. Some newspapers blamed it on too much pre match swally but i think there was more to it than that. Look up ally's tartan army swally (ˈswæliɪ) n, pl -lies informal a. an alcoholic drink: I'll have the odd swally. b. alcoholic drinks in general: Did you overdo the swally on Friday?.
