Tebas: "A European Super League would be an audiovisual, financial and social failure"

Javier Tebas covered various ongoing issues in European and Spanish football with news agency EFE on Tuesday morning and highlighted the danger that the creation of a European Super League would bring to each domestic league, stating that it would be "an audiovisual, financial and social failure."

The LaLiga president laid down the negative repercussions that a European Super League would trigger, a view which some of the biggest clubs on the continent have supported: "I'm looking at the models that are being discussed in audiovisual terms and it's impossible for any of the clubs in the Super League to receive an average of 300 million. Not even 200. It doesn't make financial sense because you have the UEFA Champions League, a competition that works and whose audiovisual rights raise the same as LaLiga's and a billion less than those in the Premier League. Putting the whole audiovisual balance at risk for a competition would be a failure, it's outrageous."

Javier Tebas also focused on possible social consequences of the proposal: "Real Madrid v Liverpool in Italy wouldn't pique the same social interest that they think. LaLiga's position on this is that any change to the current Champions League format has to have the consensus of all European leagues."

A recurring theme in recent months has been the push for a European Super League from England. The LaLiga president believes the reason "isn't that English sides are unhappy, it's that they disagree with such an equal distribution system. If the Premier League corrects that at some point, I'm sure they wouldn’t even think about this experiment." The head also discussed the reasons why other European clubs are in favour of a Super League. "The Italian league lacks leadership and they aren't clear about their targets for growth and even less so when it comes to defending their audiovisual rights. Juventus and AC Milan have low revenues because of poor management in Italian football. Bayern are 'the German team' alongside Dortmund, but they have the audiovisual rights problem. If the distribution were not as it is, those clubs wouldn't be part of the project."

"LaLiga has managed to treble the value of its international rights and double its national rights. We receive information on our competition and on others every week. We get the figures for the Premier League and Serie A in China, the United States and Europe. It would be impossible to raise such funds and it would seriously damage the national product that currently works very well. Rather than reconfigure a European Super League model, what they should do is configure the distributive model of audiovisual rights in their countries," concluded the president of LaLiga.