Should Smaller European Leagues Merge to Compete?

By: Daryl | March 23rd, 2009

Say what you like about Michel Platini, but the man is never short of ideas. And his latest idea is about merging European leagues. Specifically, he wants the top eight teams from the Netherlands and the top eight teams from Belgium to pool their respective resources into one semi-super-league.

The Guardian’s Leander Schaerlaeckens isn’t fond of the idea, mostly because he thinks Dutch football has a bright future all on it’s own. But with all respect to Mr. Schaerlaeckens – who will probably forget twice as much about Dutch football than I’ll ever know – I think Platini might be on to something.

It’s no secret that the big European leagues (Prem, La Liga, Serie A and maybe the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 too) are leaving the smaller leagues behind. More money, better players and more teams in the Champions League, which leads to more money better players and more teams in the Champions Lague, and so on. It’s a vicious circle.

So why shouldn’t the Dutch and Belgian leagues combine forces to form a more exciting league that has a larger target audience? Interest, TV revenues and audience attendances would all rise, and suddenly the Netherlands-Belgium league (NetherBel?) is a lot more attractive and competitive than either could hope to be on its own.

Obviously this isn’t a good idea for all nations. Platini’s plan to merge the Balkan nations back into one big league was – to put it mildly – idiotic. Remember what happened at the Australian Open when Novak Djokovic played Amer Delic?

Yep, that’s Bosnian and Serbian tennis fans throwing chairs at each other.

So maybe a Balkan league isn’t such a smart idea.

But in nations with less explosive rivalries, mergers could be the future.

Which is stronger: a Scandinavian Super League, or the separate Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnnish leagues? Wouldn’t Austrian football benefit from joining an Austro-German Grosse-Bundesliga? Imagine Celtic and Rangers in the English Premier League?

There’s a small-scale version happening in North America right now, with Canadian team Toronto FC joining American teams in Major League Soccer. TFC and its fans have been good for MLS, and MLS has been good for TFC. Although, it’s not like Canada has a strong professional league TFC could have joined instead.

We’re probably some way off any of this happening in Europe. Fans like Schaerlaeckens don’t want to see the league they know and love be transformed into something they don’t recognize. Traditionsis important. And there are UEFA statutes that prevent leagues from merging right now (though I’m sure Platini could fix that with a stroke of his pen). But if the money keeps flowing to the very very top, then it’s only a matter of time before smaller leagues are left with a choice: merge together or get left behind forever.