The Europa League quarterfinals were madness. The US could never.
What closed leagues take from us
It was a typical Thursday.
Donald Trump threatened to fire Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. The Supreme Court placed on its docket a challenge to the Trump administration’s attempt at ending birthright citizenship. And Manchester United center-back Harry Maguire scored a season-saving, last-minute header from the No. 9 position.
The US isn’t unique in backsliding into illiberal democracy, but it does stand alone in making impossible nights like the Europa League’s quarterfinals.
Tottenham Hotspur traveled to Germany to face Eintracht Frankfurt, who had scored in 21 consecutive matches in their domestic league and who hadn’t lost at home in the Europa League competition. Spurs had oscillated this season between disappointing and embarrassing. Naturally, Spurs won 1-0. It was the most important victory of the season.
Due south in Rome, Lazio hosted Bodø/Glimt, a Norwegian team that plays in a town of 50,000 above the Arctic Circle. Bodø/Glimt carried forward from the first leg a surprising 2-0 advantage, but Lazio evened the match with a dramatic goal in stoppage time. A goal a piece came in extra time, then a back-and-forth penalty shootout resulted, at long last, in Bodø/Glimt advancing to the semifinals, giving the club its most important victory ever and forcing football fans like me to learn that Bodø is a Norwegian town of 50,000 above the Arctic Circle.
And the match of the night—perhaps of the European football season—was the United-Lyon tie, which was as bananas as the score sheet indicates.
(The fourth quarterfinal, between Athletic Bilbao and Rangers, was a relatively unremarkable 2-0 triumph for the Spaniards. Sorry, Glaswegians.)
To Americans unfamiliar with it, the Europa League can seem something like a J.V. tournament. While the Real Madrids and Bayern Munichs of the world play in the Champions League, unknown and underwhelming teams beat up on each other in the European hinterlands in the continent’s second-tier competition. Tottenham has an astounding seventeen losses in the domestic Premier League season, and in the Europa League semifinal Spurs will travel to the North Pole to play the once-obscure Bodø/Glimt. It’s not exactly the Super Bowl.
But football is so great because, and not in spite of, the wounded giants United and Tottenham having hope for salvaging their seasons. And football is so great because it allows the ascendant Bodø/Glimt and steady Athletic Bilbao a chance at glory. It also reveals a major failing of American sports: Most of our professional competitions are pointless.
Bracketing the Europa League quarterfinals stateside was the NBA play-in tournament, which is a playoff to make the playoffs. Six of the eight teams possessed records at or below .500. At 37-45, the Miami Heat didn’t belong in the NCAA tournament, let alone the NBA postseason, yet they eked out a couple wins in the play-in and now they get to have their ass handed to them by the top-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers. The play-in tournament might seem analogous to the Europa League, but it’s really a product of the NBA’s closed league structure.
Since the advent of advanced statistics and analytics, which revealed how fruitful (and lucrative) it is for a team to be purposefully bad and in turn increase their odds at attaining top talent in the draft, the NBA has tried a lot of different things to get teams to try during the regular season—rejiggering the draft odds and structure, punishing teams who sit their best players, staging a midseason cup competition, introducing the play-in tournament. None of it has worked, and the NBA regular season has devolved into a desultory slog. This isn’t a hot take:
From Slow Boring: “The NBA has an audience problem”
From The Athletic: “March badness: This month shows the worst of the NBA, but would the league ever change that?”
From Yahoo! Sports: “NBA's Ratings Slide Continues - Even Luka Doncic On The Lakers Couldn't Avoid Drop In Viewers”
The NBA has dismissed the one thing that would imbue the regular season with meaning and competition, as ESPN reported in 2022:
Speaking of a concept in European soccer, [NBA Commission Adam] Silver told employees that the league has thought about relegation as a potential solution to ensure the worst-performing teams are incentivized to compete. But the commissioner then said relegation would be "destabilizing" to the NBA.
In such a scenario, Silver told employees, relegation would essentially mean demoting the worst one or two teams to the G League while promoting the best team or two from the G League to the NBA.
"It would so disrupt our business model," Silver told employees.
That business model is operating as a cartel monopoly. NBA owners don’t make money by winning. They do so by snuffing out competition and constraining the supply of professional basketball. The same is true across the US’s other major sports leagues. It’s their fundamental failing, that a given team’s financial prospects aren’t tied to its performance. This results in leagues like the NBA reverse-engineering competition and making competition the players’ problem. Only MLB lacks a salary cap, which is sold by the leagues and owners as a way to maintain parity.
A midseason matchup between, say, the Miami Marlins and Chicago White Sox has an impact on the MLB standings, of course, but it practically means nothing to either team because neither will be punished for their poor performance. In fact, through the draft order, they’ll be rewarded.
In the NBA, the Philadelphia 76ers effectively quit this year after they ruled their three best players—Joel Emiid, Paul George, and Tyrese Maxey—out indefinitely. Those players might have been able to tough it out or have come back from injury, if only relegation was a possibility. Instead, they were okay with getting blown out by 32 points by the Chicago Bulls on February 24. American sports is maybe the only enterprise in which offering a shit product and treating your customers like shit is good business.
The Europa League, on the other hand, sits within a system of promotion and relegation that breeds competition because it rewards performance.
The winner of the Europa League earns an automatic bid to the following year’s Champions League. This results in a windfall to the qualifying team, which affords the team better players, which gives the team stronger standing in their domestic league, which (typically) allows them to avoid relegation, if not compete for domestic trophies. This is basically the business model of the world’s biggest football clubs, like Manchester City and Real Madrid.
Additional qualifying spots to the Europa League are based on domestic performance, which gives teams something to play for even when they’re not in the hunt for domestic trophies. That’s how Tottenham got into this year’s Europa League. They finished fifth in the Premier League last year. (The top-four finishers qualified for the Champions League.) Even though Spurs are having an atrocious season domestically this season, their deep run into the Europa League gives fans a rooting interest and the team a financial incentive to compete and win.
The flip side of this should be apparent, but it’s worth making explicit: If you stink, then you make less money. What a concept! The US, which fetishizes free markets, maintains robust safety nets not for its everyday residents but for its oligarchs and in turn its billionaire team owners. When American sports leagues do try to induce more competition, like by expanding the playoffs or adding in-season tournaments, it’s ultimately a cynical half-measure and actually exposes the meaninglessness of the regular seasons.
As Adam Silver put it himself, the business model of American sports is based on monopoly, not competition. It’s us fans who suffer. It’s a lot like America itself.
I’ve written a lot about promotion and relegation in these pages, so my point here isn’t to shake my first at the sky again. The point is to highlight, through the madness of the Europa League on Thursday, what we deprive ourselves of by placing a chokehold on professional sports in America.
The redemptive arc of Ange Postecoglou is not possible in the US. The beleaguered Tottenham manager said in September “I always win things in my second year,” which has hung over him in this frustrating season like a cartoon rain cloud. And yet, he stands two victories away from keeping that promise and giving Spurs fans their first trophy since 2008.
Manchester United’s magical comeback against Lyon is not possible in the US. Often compared to the New York Yankees or Dallas Cowboys, United sits 14th in the Premier League table and their critics (i.e. everyone) are reveling in their struggles. If the Europa League didn’t exist—if there was only the domestic league season, as it exists in the US—then that would be a tired, one-note story: Goliath is felled.
United’s run in the competition gives the season more depth and flavor. After the win, United manager Ruben Amorim said, “We tried to put Harry Maguire up front because he’s the only guy that can score a goal.” He chuckled, then quickly added “with his head.” I don’t want the Cowboys to win the NFC East division anymore than I want United to win the Europa League, but Amorim admitting he has no faith in his high-priced, high-profile forwards is worth the price of admission.
And Bodø/Glimt is not possible in the US. Green Bay is the smallest American city with a major sports team and it’s twice as big as Bodø. It’s not that small cities in the US can’t support competitive pro teams. It’s that the major sports leagues won’t allow them to. I’ve previously explored how MLB hates Troy, New York, a town exactly as big as Bodø, and the impact of monopoly on where top-flight sports are played.
World and European football are not perfect. The only two governing bodies more corrupt than Congress and the Supreme Court are FIFA and UEFA, and the specter of a closed “super league” still looms. But on a random Thursday, between work meetings and amid the din of life, the Europa League offered something exciting, interesting, and meaningful to care about.
The night before, the NBA served up two play-in tournament games. One game featured the Sacramento Kings down by 23 at halftime. The other was a 19-point rout by the Heat. The NBA’s business model was on full display.
No one else in the U.S. writes so intelligently about European football. Keep teaching us, so we can give up our addiction to American professional sports: all boring all the time.