European League on the model of the NFL: the Teams?

[Pangur Bán]

I have a paper to work on, so it onl makes sense to do some procrastination. Here we go:

The idea of a closed European League on an American model was suggested in another thread. If this were done, we could have the sort of city-franchise model they have there...Teams could be assigned to cities based on population and soccer interest.

Let's start with the 32 team model.

Let's take into account this info:

64 Largest Urban Areas in Europe

1. Moscow
2. London
3. Istanbul
4. Paris (If we can count Reims as part of the greater Paris area; PSG CWC)
5. Ruhr area * (Dortmund EC, CWC & Gelsenkirchen UC)
6. St. Petersburg
7. Madrid *
8. Berlin
9. Barcelona
10. Milan **
11. Athens
12. Rome
13. Kiev
14. Naples
15. Upper Silesia Area (Katowice)
16. Lisbon *
17. Stuttgart
18. Birmingham * (Aston Villa EC; Wolves UC)
19. Hamburg *
[Werder Bremen won the CWC, but Bremen and Hamburg are pretty distant]
20. Budapest
21. Brussels
22. Manchester *
23. Warsaw
24. Bucharest *
25. Amsterdam *
26. Leeds
27. Frankfurt
28. Donetsk
29. Munich *
30. Nizhniy Novgorod
31. Cologne (Leverkusen)
32. Kharkov
33. Minsk
34. Vienna
35. Belgrade *
36. Stockholm
37. Mannheim
38. Glasgow *
39. Turin *
40. Dnipropetrovsk
41. Copenhagen
42. Marseilles *
43. Valencia
44. Lyons (taking Saint Etienne near enough to Lyons)
45. Liverpool *
46. Samara
47. Volgograd
48. Düsseldorf (Mönchengladbach actually)
49. Lille (includes Mouscron and Kortrijk, Belgium)
50. Oporto *
51. Prague
52. Sheffield
53. Antwerp
54. Kassel
55. Helsinki
56. Seville
57. Sofia
58. Kazan
59. Rostov
60. Rotterdam *
61. Hanover
62. Saratov
63. Odessa
64. Ufa

Wikipedia's Largest Metropolitan Areas of Europe


Madrid, Lisbon, Milan, Glasgow, Manchester, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Munich, Liverpool, Nottingham, Birmingham, Hamburg, Turin, Bucharest, Porto, Eindhoven, Belgrade, Barcelona, Marseilles and Ruhr/Dortmund are the 20 cities that have all taken the European championship.

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bold = City with European champion
italic = city with European runner-up
underline = city with either a UEFA cup or Cup Winner's Cup winner

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Nottingham, Eindhoven, Malmo, Florence, Genoa, Zaragoza, Newcastle, Zagreb, Ipswich, Gothenburg, Parma, Bratislava, Magdeburg, Tbilisi, Aberdeen and Bremen all have honors mentioned above.

 

[Pangur Bán]

I would take it for granted that Europe's largest 10 cities: Moscow, London, Istanbul, Paris, the Ruhr area, St. Petersburg, Madrid, Berlin, Barcelona and Milan would get franchises.

The next 22 would have to be determined from the best mix of

1) Population
2) Footballing pedigree of teams
3) National representation
4) Wealth

 

[Pangur Bán]

Using this info and criteria, who would you determine for the next 22 positions?

 

[Nico92]

Originally posted by calgacus
4. Paris (If we can count Reims as part of the greater Paris area; PSG CWC)

Where did you see that Reims was part of Great Paris ? Reims is at 130 km of Paris. If you would count Reims, than you should also count Rouen, Chartres and Troyes !

Paris has already 10 million people. That's already enough. Let the nice people from Reims in Champagne.

Moreover, I don't know what had been your criteria to determine the largest urban areas in Europe but it's pretty subjective (as always when we deal with that kind of thing). For instance, Lens is in the middle of an urban area of more than 1 million people with cities like Douai, Valenciennes or Béthunes, however, the city itself don't have more than 50,000 inhabitants. It would be stupid to say it's one city of 1 million people, but it would be also stupid to say it's just a town of 50,000 people. Tell me now how would you determine the stuff ?

Now on topic, if such a league would be created, they wouldn't create new teams, they would let former ones joining it. And if there are two clubs from Milan, that wouldn't be an issue since there are two clubs from L.A in the NBA championship (lakers and clippers).

However, we have now to discuss about which clubs would join it... what would be the criteria ? The number of victory in the domestic championship ? The results during last season ? Or, more probably, the budget of those teams ?

And another interesting questions... how would you divide the conferences ? You would group several countries ? Or maybe the easier would be to consider each country as a conference, and then to organize some kind of playoff where the best of all those countries/conferences would challenge each other !

wait... isn't that called the Champion's league ?

 

[Nico92]

Another sidenote, Lyon has 1,600,000 people and is not linked to Saint Etienne. Saint Etienne is another city of 300,000 people. Please do not mix both.

I'm sorry if all my comments are about France, but obviously your main mistakes have been done only with that country.

 

[pboily]

@Nico: he got the list from Wikipedia. When he says that Reim is in Paris' met area, he doesn't necessarly mean in terms of population, rather if I understood correctly, Reims has won or did pretty well in a major championship but Paris has not (Is that true? Hard to fathom) so in order to keep Paris on the list of cities with a team, the met area has to be a bit larger... is that right?

================
Anyway, in the spirit of calgacus' post:


I wonder if they couldn't go for a 64 team league; there are enough players worldwide and enough clubs in Europe for it.

Besides, our European friends' love addair with relagation/promotion (come to think of it, this is a ringing endorsement of capitalism, with capital replaced by football success ) could go on.

A giant EFL with 64 teams and two divisions, and maybe the last 6 place finishers get sent to second division, or whatever...

As for selection, well.... maybe size isn't all that matters (Think Green Bay in the NFL)

I imagine that as long as at least one team from each EU country was selected (and let's include Scotland in that list) the rest of the teams could be chosen according to some ranking system that includes past history as well as record during the next 4 years.

Most major cities would be represented anyways...

I saw a site that proposed something like that. I'll try to find their list.

 

[Pangur Bán]

They aren't "mistakes" Nico

...simply assigning certains teams to nearby cities. If I needed correction, then why on Earth would I have said anything in the brackets? Never mind

 

[Marla_Singer]

Originally posted by Nico92
I'm sorry if all my comments are about France, but obviously your main mistakes have been done only with that country.

Well, get over it Nico. Calgacus is convinced that Paris doesn't have more than 2 million people and that there are no other cities above 1 million in France. Knowing that France is as much peopled as Britain or Italy, it would mean all French people would still be farmers but he's fine with that idea... no matter for which reason.


Now about the Euroleague idea. It would never worked because Europeans wouldn't want it. And as Nico92 already said it pretty well, if we want to adapt the system of conferences and playoffs to Europe, that leads us to a system of domestic championships and a champions league. So it wouldn't work.

 

[Marla_Singer]

Oops! I've forgotten to post a little table proving how much Paris is a small village lost in the middle of a country of farmers as Calgacus always annoys me to say :

 

[Pangur Bán]

Originally posted by Marla_Singer
Well, get over it Nico. Calgacus is convinced that Paris doesn't have more than 2 million people and that there are no other cities above 1 million in France. Knowing that France is as much peopled as Britain or Italy, it would mean all French people would still be farmers but he's fine with that idea... no matter for which reason.

Calgacus isn't convinced of that...Marla should try to be accurate when mentioning someone else's opinion in another context.

I could just say, Marla's convinced that I'm evil.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Originally posted by Marla_Singer
Oops! I've forgotten to post a little table proving how much Paris is a small village lost in the middle of a country of farmers as Calgacus always annoys me to say :

You're obsessed Marla.

I'm just after posting a link that gives Paris almost exactly that population.

EDIT: perhaps you'd be interested to learn that the New York urban area is 29,881, 200 - now that's a big city

 

[Hitro]

The list above pretty much illustrates why no real football fan would want such a league.

 

[Nico92]

Okay I won't get in the little fight between Marla and Calgacus.

Anyway, sorry about my little comments about Reims and Saint Etienne. You were saying that there were Kortrijk and Mouscron included in Lille, as Reims did nothing in football since the 50's and that it has never been a professional club during my lifetime, I thought you were also including Reims in Paris... which sounded quite weird to me !

Moreover, you didn't mention Tottenham, Arsenal or Chelsea for London and you didn't mention Lokomotiv and Spartak for Moscow, so it was really quite confusing. My mistake. Apologies.

However, Marla has got my point. That NFL alike league wouldn't work in Europe. Today's system is far more efficient and it's a lot more tough to win the Champion's league that it will ever be to win the NFL championship. Sorry to ruin your game, but it was just to point out you won't go far this way.

 

[pboily]

Originally posted by Nico92
However, Marla has got my point. That NFL alike league wouldn't work in Europe. Today's system is far more efficient and it's a lot more tough to win the Champion's league that it will ever be to win the NFL championship. Sorry to ruin your game, but it was just to point out you won't go far this way.

Yes, yes, we know it won't happen. We get it. But hell, if we cared that much about realism, none of us would ever play Civ...

Let's play along and suppose a closed EFL was formed (but it would never ever happen!!!!). What teams would be in it?

I know just enough about European Football to recognize most of these clubs. Considering that non-Football fans are more likely to know "great" or "succesful" football teams than crappy ones, these are "famous" enough to be included in any preliminary list. (The Scandinavian teams I've never heard of so I don't know if they are appropriate, but this is not my list... heck there is even a list of 64 other teams out there...)

AEK (Gre)
Ajax Amsterdam (Ned)
Arsenal (Eng)
Aston Villa (Eng)
Athletic Bilbao (Esp)
Atlético Madrid (Esp)
Bayer Leverkusen (Deu)
Bayern München (Deu)
Benfica (Por)
Bologna (Ita)
Bordeaux (Fra)
Borussia Dortmund (Deu)
Brøndby (Den)
Celtic Glasgow (Sco)
Chelsea (Eng)
Croatia Zagreb (Cro)
CSKA Moskva (Rus)
CZ (Red Star) Beograd (Yug)
Dynamo Kiyv (Ukr)
FC Barcelona (Esp)
Fenerbahçe (Tur)
Ferencváros (Hun)
Feyenoord (Ned)
Fiorentina (Ita)
Galatasaray (Tur)
Glasgow Rangers (Sco)
Göteborg (Sve)
Grasshopper Zürich (Sui)
Hamburg (Deu)
Inter (Ita)
Juventus (Ita)
Kaiserslautern (Deu)
La Coruña (Esp)
Lazio (Ita)
Leeds Utd (Eng)
Lens (Fra)
Liverpool (Eng)
Lyon (Fra)
Mallorca (Esp)
Manchester Utd (Eng)
Marseille (Fra)
Milan (Ita)
Monaco (Fra)
Nantes (Fra)
Olympiakos (Gre)
Panathinaikos (Gre)
Paris Saint-Germain (Fra)
Parma (Ita)
Porto (Por)
PSV Eindhoven (Ned)
Rapid Wien (Ost)
Real Madrid (Esp)
Roma (Ita)
Rosenborg (Nor)
Schalke 04 (Deu)
Slavia Praha (Cz)
Sparta Praha (Cz)
Spartak Moskva (Rus)
Sporting Portugal (Por)
Sturm Graz (Ost)
Udinese (Ita)
Valencia (Esp)
VfB Stuttgart (Deu)
Widzew Lodz (Pol)

 

[stranraerfc]

Celtics full name should be Glasgow Celtic not the other way around!

 

[Dell19]

Interesting to see Leeds in the list

 

[Marla_Singer]

Originally posted by Dell19
Interesting to see Leeds in the list

Won't Leeds be relegated next year ?

 

[Inter4]

Yes. But they are getting relegated this year.

 

[MrPresident]

pboily, you have Aston Villa but not Newcastle, why? Newcastle average an attendance of about 52,000 whereas Villa only manage 35,000.

 

[pboily]

As I mentioned above, this is not my list. It was made by the guy who runs this site: EFL Proposal, which is not a closed league, just a gigantic European League with 128 teams.

If I understand correctly, it is based on some mixture of historical and recent (last 10 years or so) performance, and demographics, and it tries to represent most of the European Leagues (+ Turkey). So it is not entirely based on merit.

As for Leeds being ****ty now... in a closed league, this would make no difference, and we are postulating a closed league.

Besides, I don't even know where Aston Villa plays, let alone what kind of crowds they attract. So you can take the list for what it is... a fun little exercise.

Keep in mind that in any "closed" league, some decisions will be ridiculous to some people. For instance, Angelenos are probably baffled that they do not have a club in the NFL, but that Green Bay (WI), with a metropolitan population of about 400,000 (about, although it also serves as Milwaukee's team) has one.

And, as most of you have argued (I use the word loosely here), it will probably never happen anyway. But these lists are fun to do.