League 1 as a business is much worse than the Premier League and no sheikhs and artificial infusions of money can change this. As far as I heard, tickets for League 1 games are several times cheaper than for Premier League games, and everyone knows that TV rights to show EPL games bring record amounts. League 1 needs to develop as a business, then over time they will be able to reach the level of the EPL, all other artificial methods are nonsense.
Yes that is what I meant. Ligue 1 as a commercial product will probably never even get close to what the EPL is today. I can't really recall what the EPL was like decades ago, but if my feeling is right here I think the EPL has always been on top of things along with the Primera Division? Is that about right?
The EPL has so many top clubs with a long established history. Well, it might not be impossible to turn a club like Olympique Marseille into a huge club with sheikh money. There is a little number of clubs with a long and well known history as well in Ligue 1 if I am not mistaken, but still the effort to elevate Ligue 1 to EPL levels is just outrageous I would imagine.
For now they can be happy to have at least PSG in order to be perceived on international stages as well. But that might be over against Bayern Munich already. Looking forward to those games as well!
I remember when Serie A was top 1, hehe. But the Premier League has always been >> than Ligue 1. In fact, Ligue 1 is closer to the weaker championships than to the big four (although this is subjective and I may be wrong).
In any case, reform processes are underway and we will see the struggle between two projects - the Super League and the Super League from UEFA (the new format of the Champions League). Whoever wins, everything is going to be something like a single European league and no doubt several teams from France will get there. Perhaps this will smooth out the differences between countries (although it is likely that smaller clubs will suffer).
I admit that I kind of lost track of the most recent news regarding the reform processes. Just looked it up and yes, I recall that the competitions is going to be increased significantly. For me personally, that's no good news. I found the UEFA Nations League already lead to an inflationary number of soccer games on the international level. I don't even watch those games.
Now they say that the number of games will be increased from 125 to up to 225 for the newly created Champions League competition. Seriously... Even as a big soccer fan, I still like the idea of having exclusive events that take place only so often in a year.
Sheikhs and business man are conquering the sports markets right now. The only way to attract new audience to a league is through signing the world elite like Messi, Mbappe and so on. But that's only possible when more big money enters those leagues and I don't know if all of that will ultimately be to the detriment of the fans, for instance, in terms of ticketing prices.
I would say that even the players themselves suffer from imbalances within their national competitions. Under normal circumstances, PSG would probably have at least 10 points more now, but you can see that guys like Messi can't take that competition as seriously because they don't have to. There is no need to perform every single game as if you were just facing Manchester City in the Champions League final and you can't even blame them. Those guys decided to haunt the money, that's true, but those players benefit from fierce competition like Messi benefited from Ronaldo and vice versa in La Liga.
Ligue 1 is totally imbalanced right now and even PSG management itself subordinates all national competition to the Champions League because that is what the world is watching.