Let's think about this rationally:
1. "Club football is way bigger than international football, therefore the threats to exclude players from World Cups are meaningless."
The World Cup, and this is pure facts, is the real money maker for football. Based on actual financial data about the revenue of various competitions, and TV ratings worldwide, this is once again pure facts. There is literally zero chance that a superleague can ever compete with a World Cup, I don't care if they sign up every single pro footballer in the world and it comes down to us Coli brehs who get called up to represent our countries at the World Cup - it
will always outrate and outearn any club tournament by a
vast margin. More people will watch and get excited about you and me kicking a ball around badly for our national teams at the World Cup than they will watching some sort of Brazil 1970 + Barcelona 2008 superteam assembled to play in the superleague.
1a. Quality does not matter. The average World Cup viewer couldn't tell you the difference between Sam Allardyce's Bolton Wanderers 2006 and Johann Cruyff's Netherlands 1974. The average person couldn't explain the offside law. They couldn't tell the difference between a perfectly executed pass and move routine to build up from defence, and a hoof from the goalkeeper to the big lad up front to knock down. The vast majority of football viewers are too ignorant to either know or care about whether the top players are in it or not, about whether something is really the highest level of the sport or not. If you market something as though it is the pinnacle of the sport, they'll swallow it up. It helps that the World Cup needs no marketing at all - this is the tournament of Pele, Maradona, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane. The average idiot fan will automatically associate whoever the best player at any given World Cup - even if he is a middling League Two journeyman - as the equals of Pele et al. because the World Cup's brand has already been established. It can never be shaken as the pinnacle of world football.
1b. The proof of this can be seen in TV ratings. The all time record global TV viewership for El Clasico, the biggest fixture in club football, is 75 million. The all time record global TV viewership for the Champions League final is 380 million. The record figure for the World Cup final is 1.2 billion. Even the women's World Cup final smashes the TV audience for a match such as El Clasico, coming in at 83 million. Like I said in my first post on the matter today, there is no comparison between European club football and the World Cup. It's like comparing some League of Legends or Fortnite tournament hosted on Youtube and Twitch compared to a proper football match broadcast on an actual TV channel with actual things at stake.
2. "Domestic leagues and UEFA will be killed if they ban the big teams, therefore they will go along with this."
Domestic leagues and UEFA will not be "KiLlEd" if they ban the big teams. They are dead already. They were dead the second this superleague was announced. They have nothing to lose by banning the big teams and possibly everything to gain - it could be enough to shut it down. But in any case, what we are really dealing with here for the Premier League, for La Liga, for Serie A, for UEFA, is a question of do we just roll over and die or do we go down fighting and die?
2a. Death is assured no matter what happens. If this superleague goes ahead and the big clubs are kicked out, then the TV rights deals for the domestic leagues and for UEFA will plummet, and all the clubs will go bankrupt, and the entire pyramid structure across all of Europe will crumble. If the superleague goes ahead and the big clubs are not kicked out, within a few years time they will secede entirely and make their superleague a full-time thing, all week long, all season long.
2b. The question at hand here is not 'will the leagues die' - they are dead already, the superleague is a terminal diagnosis and the only question is will they die tomorrow or in 2030. Their only shot of survival is to undermine the competition before it starts.
3. "FIFA, UEFA, Sky, BT, and everybody else protesting this are just mad that they weren't in on the heist."
3a. In 1941 the only person who stood in the way of Hitler and domination of all Europe was Stalin. You're damn fukking straight I'm standing with Stalin, I don't give a shyt how evil he is and how many dozens of millions he killed. I'd stand with the devil himself to stop Hitler and his Hugo Boss fashion model squad. If the FIFA bigwigs can put a stop to this, I will build golden statues of Sepp Blatter and pray religiously to it every day. I will climb Mt Rushmore and carve the face of Jack Warner next to the other faces. So miss me with that hypocrisy shyt. I'm the one being pragmatic here by throwing my support behind what is objectively by far a lesser evil. You can keep on waiting forever for your flawless white knight to ride on in and save the day if you like.
