Is the North Atlantic League a part of football's future?
I, for one, welcome our new Calenavian overlords. (I don’t.)
In Saturday’s match between York City and Boreham Wood in the National League, Boreham Wood goalkeeper Nathan Ashmore made a mistake.
With a clearance over the top from York running long and a defender shielding it for Ashmore to collect, the goalkeeper stepped outside his box and caught the ball like it was the most natural thing in the world.
The York Community Stadium is home to York City and the York Knights rugby league team. You know the rest.
These incidents inevitably grow legs on Twitter now because Twitter is humanity’s septic tank. Sure enough, Ashmore’s boo-boo generated an avalanche of crylaugh emojis and lukewarm red-top banter as well as hundreds of armchair officials aghast that he wasn’t sent off (or even booked – imagine!) as if the match referee doesn’t know as much as some mouth-breathing twat on the internet.
How wasn’t he sent off?! Why isn’t that a red card?!
“Not a sending off then no?” This one’s a direct quote from the official account of a football club and don’t get me started on that.
He wasn’t because it isn’t. Hope that helps.
Is the North Atlantic League a part of football's future?
In the gilded corridors of football it’s long been said that 2024 might prove a watershed in the sport, that television deal renewals will coincide with the European Championships and UEFA-CONMEBOL’s silent war on FIFA to usher in a new era.
There’s money to be made in tension and politics. The European Super League was considered a real possibility. A restructuring of the Champions League to make it more lucrative for a handful of protected clubs was always more likely. Whatever the outcome, powerful people we’ve never heard of were talking about 2024.
Football’s already dealt with some of the significant orders of the day that will never come. The Super League went off half-cocked after getting all excited with the world falling apart and squandered what Florentino Pérez and his pals thought was its moment.
The Champions League will do what the Champions League does and the clubs that reach the latter stages are now so disgustingly rich that the rest of us don’t really care. The same goes for international television rights. You’ll forgive me for not being bothered what happens to a sport run for morons by scumbags.
The 2024 chatter sashayed into my realm of knowledge three or four years ago, around the time one of football’s unsquashable harebrained ideas cropped up most recently. Silly and unworkable it may be, but from the standpoint of the cynical supporter there’s no denying that a merger of leagues as a reaction to the status quo is more intriguing than the basic action of institutional greed that caused it.
There’s no reason to be more receptive to the idea of the Atlantic or North Atlantic League than the hated European Super League. It’s effectively the same thing, after all: a handful of clubs coming together across borders in order to further their economic interests. It mightn’t be Super, but it’s still a European League.
Yet when big clubs, proper clubs, traditional clubs in these nations are willing to rally against the prevailing congealment of football glory, it’s easy to find the suggestion seductive.
Ajax and PSV, Celtic and Rangers, Copenhagen and Brondby, have no automatic right to European success. But it shouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility and when it is, well, football is broken.
The Atlantic League seems like one of those conceptual flights of fancy that used to come around every now and again before being forgotten about, but it has figureheads and drivers just like the Super League and it’s nearly quarter of a century old.
Plans emerged with the stink of fireworks still in the air in January 2000. They wafted up on the smoke from Eindhoven, where PSV chairman Harry van Raaij and executive Peter Fossen hatched the Atlantic League concept in order to bridge the growing chasm between Europe’s most powerful clubs and the rest.
Van Raaij, who passed away in late 2020, was clear about the problem he and Fossen sought to fix by bringing together clubs from the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Scotland and Scandinavia.
"The bigger clubs in smaller countries will come to a position when they cannot compete with the bigger clubs from the bigger countries," he told BBC Radio 5 Live. "We are planning to meet each other in order to investigate the possibilities to improve our position in Europe."
In the past 23 years the willingness or otherwise of the Glasgow giants has been accepted as a make-or-break matter. In 2000 the Atlantic League had the explicit support of Celtic, whose chief executive Allan McDonald considered Scottish football a “bankrupt hindrance” and made no attempt to pretend television revenue wasn’t the Bhoys’ motivation.
"The major clubs in those countries find that they have little in the way of competition to attract audiences, and that prevents clubs with ambition and huge fanbases from realising their potential," he said in an interview with the Bhoyzone website in 2000.
"We see the Atlantic League as a way of attracting larger TV audiences, and of increasing our revenue. But more importantly it is an opportunity to get a better level of competition than we get at the moment, and a bigger stage to play our football on."
Slated to start as early as 2002, Van Raaij and Fossen envisioned a superleague in the strictest Latin sense – it would sit above the domestic leagues, complete with promotion and relegation, and feed into UEFA’s continental competitions.
UEFA rejected the idea and responded by expanding the UEFA Cup. The Atlantic League was eventually booted into the long grass by a threat to expel any participating club from the Champions League.
In 2002 the Atlantic League returned, this time without any involvement from Scandinavia. Van Raaij and PSV were again the source but the proposal coincided with an ugly pinch point between the Old Firm and the rest of the Scottish top flight. Nevertheless, Rangers secretary director Campbell Ogilvie denied a claim in Eindhoven that talks had begun.
The stated ambition of Atlantic League Version 2002 was to become Europe’s sixth league. The invited clubs would cease to be part of their domestic competitions but promotion and relegation were again a part of the plan.
At the start of Scotland’s 2002/03 season McDonald’s successor was bullish. Ian McLeod told BBC Scotland that the Atlantic League could be just months away. By now, talks between the clubs were reportedly advanced.
If in doubt, switch it out. 2003’s Atlantic League refresh was in fact a proposal for a cup competition between sixteen clubs comprising the top four league finishers from the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Scotland. It fizzled out.
Five years later, the late Rangers manager Walter Smith indicated his support for what was now more specifically a North Atlantic League concept. Version 2008 went nowhere, thankfully; it would have left ghost teams rattling around in the relevant domestic leagues.
Ajax chairman and KNVB president Michael van Praag distanced himself and the Dutch governing body from the Northern Atlantic League idea the following year by writing to the Scottish Football Association to assure them it wasn’t something he planned to raise with UEFA.
After going quiet for the better part of eight years the idea popped up again in early 2016. If somehow squeezing a meritocratic buffer league between domestic and continental competitions has some pros, Version 2016 was all con.
It returned to the Atlantic League’s original invitational form. FC Copenhagen, Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord, Anderlecht, Club Brugge, Celtic, Rangers, Malmö, Rosenborg, HJK Helsinki were the listed clubs in what would have nakedly been a play for television revenue by a cabal of clubs. It was the North Atlantic Super League by any other name. Very advanced talks were confirmed with Van Raaij again at the helm but progress was halted by UEFA once more.
The North Atlantic League hasn’t gone away. Andrew Doyle, a co-owner of League of Ireland club Shelbourne and the head honcho of SAL Sports Capital, was apparently willing to put his outfit’s money where his mouth was in 2020. £350 million in broadcast rights is no joke.
Doyle’s proposal was to include clubs from Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden but was dead on its arse because Celtic’s interest had eroded to such a degree that they didn’t want to know. By the end of the year Norway’s football authorities had dealt another fatal blow.
Fossen is now the CEO of AIM Sport, a tech-based sports marketing and digital advertising firm, having left PSV after nearly three decades in the autumn of 2021. His and PSV’s remaining interest in the North Atlantic League is unknown, publicly at least, but it might now be more viable than ever before – which is to say, barely viable.
The matter has been quiet for some time but the unexpected supporter du jour is one Aleksander Čeferin, President of UEFA. A couple of years ago Čeferin revealed that the confederation’s executives were discussing the idea of regional leagues and that conversations had been had with some national federations.
"More and more countries are interested in the possibility of a regional league because that would increase the value of clubs, as well as income from sponsors and the sale of TV rights,” he said.
"UEFA, in principle, has nothing against regional leagues. The main problem is how to go from those leagues to European competitions. UEFA would have to solve that problem.
"In addition, we do not want to create some regional leagues that would destroy national championships. So, regional leagues are a serious undertaking and nothing concrete has been decided yet, but it is being considered."
If UEFA’s outlook has thawed in the Čeferin era, a significant obstacle has been removed. Another is feasibility, however, and doubts are held strongly and widely, and with no little justification. Čeferin’s penultimate point is a sticky one.
Scotland’s involvement has been ever-present in the theoretical stages but there’s no reason to assume a regional league in Northern Europe could happen without it. Nevertheless, Scottish opinion carries weight and the days of Rangers managers and Celtic executives shouting its virtues from the rooftops of Glasgow are long gone.
Scottish Professional Football League chief executive Neil Doncaster is no stranger to football’s corridors and his comments in April 2021 suggest a more measured view.
Doncaster pointed out the inherent structural difficulties of cross-border merged leagues. While recognising UEFA’s apparent understanding of the problem – inequality – and openness to a solution, he made clear that there are fundamental challenges in bringing such a league to life even with UEFA’s acquiescence.
One of those challenges? Inequality even between the national leagues and clubs involved. Doncaster, an Englishman, had his gaze to the south, not the east. If Scotland’s geographical attachment to England suggests a British merger is the more logical option, the power dynamics between the two counties make it a non-starter.
Should the idea of crossing the Irish Sea come back around, it’s likely to meet its warmest reception yet from UEFA. But Čeferin being more on the fence than in opposition fixes few of the obvious problems with any North Atlantic League concept.
It must still find a way to feed into the Champions League, for one, and indifferent presidential buy-in is hardly the silver bullet for that. Champions League participation is the end goal for the clubs in question; take that away, fail to make it work, and it’s done.
As above, so below. The North Atlantic League would by definition have an uncomfortable and unorthodox interface with the national leagues from which its teams are either drawn or withdrawn. There is righteous opposition from the other clubs in those leagues and no way to avoid a detrimental impact domestically.
Realistically, the idea dies right there. Its headstone reads: “Here lies the North Atlantic Football League. Defeated by common sense and the cultural might of domestic football. 2000 - 2024.”
But to be sceptical of the fix is not necessarily to ignore the fault. The Atlantic League and North Atlantic League were proposed by clubs because of the competitive imbalance to which they are artificially subjected in what’s supposed to be a sport.
These clubs are stuck in between one thing and the other. They are big clubs held back by football’s modern economics. They do have a case for a better share of television revenue on a continental and global level.
Heritage matters in this game and when the likes of Ajax, PSV, Celtic, Rangers and Anderlecht are frozen out, it’s inevitable that they’ll rail against the newly powerful.
That doesn’t mean they’re right. They’re simply fighting their own corner, after all. But Fossen and Van Raaij planted a seed at the turn of the millennium and the influx of monstrous amounts of money from outside the sport have only exacerbated their reasoning.
The North Atlantic League will probably never happen. There’s no doubt some other answer will grow in its place.
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“The 15-year-old player took a punch to the back of the neck during a tournament at the end of last season, fell instantly into a coma, and died a few days later in hospital. The local football community expressed its collective shock and dismay, but for those of us refereeing on the morally rotten front line of the amateur game, the tragic outcome was the logical consequence of football's utter failure to address the issue of embedded verbal and physical violence.”
This is the first paragraph (or most of it) from the introduction to Ian Plenderleith’s latest post on Referee Tales. Heartbreaking.
Salty beef extracts
I visited the EFL’s bottom club Doncaster Rovers in search of crisis – I found something else (i)
James Maddison: I want to be an entertainer and give Tottenham fans joy after Harry Kane’s exit (i)
In life and death, a football club is an anchor, a conduit for connection (The Guardian)
Manchester United are a mess no one wants to take responsibility for (The Guardian)
Getafe’s grateful ‘Hola’ for Mason Greenwood comes as no surprise (The Observer)
Can new look Chelsea actually succeed? (Grace On Football)
Dessert
50 years into the life of Lotto, the famous Italian sports equipment firm has unveiled a celebratory edition of the Lotto Stadio football boot. Yes please.
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