This reminds me of the early days of promoting the SEC as a conference on college football instead of just individual teams.
I worked as volunteer writer for a recruiting service site for my alma mater, and there were a LOT of people that thought the idea of “conference loyalty” was stupid.
Fans were like “I’ll NEVER ever root for Georgia, FL, Bama, etc,etc”
Then it became: “You losers better not let the conference down!”
Then: “ SEC, SEC, SEC!” at every game and with every championship.
Growing to the tagline: “The SEC: It just means more.”
If all of that were just marketing, it wouldn’t amount to much, but it’s slowly, but surely turned into more money under the table to players. More money over the table to players. More money to the conferences and leagues. And about 20 years later, the SEC is now completely dominant.
The parallels are even closer when you consider that the only two real outliers are the historic powers of Ohio State, and Michigan that rely almost purely on their rivalry game for attention.
At some point the disparity between the leagues will get large enough, especially financially, that outside agencies like UEFA will try to artificially level the playing field between the leagues, and that is when I think you will see this come to ahead because the Premier league will not stand for having its growth halted, or slowed down by the failure of the other leagues’ product.
Fans of teams outside the Premiere league can get offended, or claim it’s not true all they want: Teams like Real and Barca wouldn’t be fighting so desperately, STILL, in court for the Superleague if they didn’t feel it was necessary.
