Insuperable: Europe’s football fiasco

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping world. After a landmark ruling against the police officer who murdered George Floyd, we have a quick word with our United States editor about what the verdict means and the Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle east, but unlike other ethnicities, they've never had their own state. Not for the lack of trying. We take a look through decades of dashed hopes and at where things stand now. Plus, you probably know many of the rules, I before E except after C and so on. But the truth is that spelling, particularly in English, is weird. That's W E I R D. We ask why that is and whether anything should or even could be done about it. First up though, In London last night, football fans celebrated in the streets. The cheers weren't for a new trophy, but rather for the failure of a plan that had convulsed the sport for the past few days. On Sunday, 12 of Europe's best known football clubs had said they were going to break away from existing competitions to form a. But the ambitious plan fell apart within days of being Announced under pressure from fans, coaches, even prime ministers.

Be in no doubt that we don't support the creation of this European Super League.

I think it's not in the interests.

Of fans, it's not in the interests of football. How can it be?

Right then, late last night, the dominoes began to fall. First Manchester City, then Chelsea, and then all six English Premier League teams said they would withdraw. Yet the dissolution of the league doesn't spell the end of the problems facing the beau.

The European Super League is super no longer.

Henry Kerr is our economics editor.

But the collapse of the plan in the face of public outrage doesn't mean that football's economic problems over the long term have been resolved.

So why did this collapse so quickly?

I think that there was essentially a complete lack of engagement with the people who it would have affected, the fans and even the players, and even people like the managers within the clubs. We saw high profile people within the game, such as Manchester City's manager, Pep Guardiola, speaking out against the plan.

A sport is not a sport when the relation between the effort and the success, the effort and reward don't exist. So it's not a sport.

The owners essentially had no one on their side. It felt like a pure power play almost.

And does the way this fell apart mean that the idea itself was bad or just that it was badly communicated?

Well, it wasn't a bad idea for the owners, that's for sure. They were aiming to replace the existing club European elite competition, the Champions League, with the European Super League. And the Champions League is a very lucrative competition already. Nonetheless, the projection was that the revenues of the new competition were going to be something like 4 billion euros, about twice what the Champions League brings in, which is extraordinary. That's in part because there would have been many more matches between Europe's top teams. And there's enormous global demand for those kind of matches, and they would have reaped the profits from that. Now, it is true what the owners have been saying, that football is a bit financially wobbly under the current system. But when you look at the sports economics of this, some sports economists would argue that that's a feature and not a bug.

Well, walk me through that. What is the system as it stands?

Well, the way that football operates throughout Europe is you have your top domestic league competition, say in England, that will be the Premier League. And clubs that finish towards the bottom of that league table get relegated, they get bumped division below. Likewise, teams in the division below who finish at the top of that league can get bumped up to the Premier League. And so there's a principle of openness, that any club can make its way up the pyramid. Even the smallest town can have a football team that makes it right the way up to the Premier League with a closed system, which is much more similar to how sports are organized in America, where there tends to be no promotion and relegation between leagues. Actually, the Super League would have had these five open slots, so it would have had a bit of open competition, but for 15 teams, they would have been in it every year. And that's much more like what happens with these clubs or franchises as they are in America that are guaranteed their position within a given league.

Why is it, though, that the sports economists would argue that the relegation promotion system is a feature is a good thing?

I'm not sure. You could say that there's a consensus among sports economists that one model is better than the other, but you can say that they have different effects. So in these promotion relegation systems, what tends to happen is that you have more cutthroat competition between the clubs because they're worried about getting relegated and they want to get promoted. What that means is that the owners of the clubs are incentivized to invest a lot to try and win their way up or not fall down. So players take home a higher share of revenues, and the owners tend not to make much money on average in these systems because a lot of these gambles fail because everyone's trying to work their way up. In closed systems, by contrast, there's more cooperation between the clubs because the clubs don't have to worry that if they help a rival, that they're going to empower a team that's going to dislodge them from their position in the league. So you have things like more revenue sharing, salary caps on what the players can earn. And in America, these draft systems, where the best new talent is equitably spread out between the teams.

And given the crumbling of this plan, has that kind of theoretical cost benefit analysis now all become moot?

I don't think the incentive to become a closed shop is going to go away. I think it's a sort of dominant economic model for owners. The reason it's been stopped, though, this time is because of the degree of public backlash in the local markets of these clubs from their fans and from the politicians. And so the question is, will that stay the same forever? Will it always be the case that a breakaway proposal will attract that level of backlash? Because I think the economics will continue to. To drag owners towards wanting it to happen.

But if the demand side of this is just wanting more high profile matches between the biggest, glitziest teams, is there a way to do that while keeping the promotion relegation system that has the good economic effects?

Well, it's possible to sort of have your cake and eat it here. The question of how many matches are on between the big clubs and the question of whether you have promotion and relegation are separate. And so if the existing competitions were formed to have more games between Europe's biggest clubs but maintain open access, then that would keep the promotion and relegation system in place and the lower tier clubs probably would be happier with that because one of the knock on consequences of the promotion and relegation system is it encourages more investment lower down the pyramid. So you can imagine this sort of model where you have lots of clashes at the top bringing in a lot of money, but the whole system is set up in a way that incentivises a bit more of that money to flow down the footballing pyramid.

Well, there's another angle, and here I should disclose that Andrea Agnelli, one of the architects of the Super League, sits on the board of Exor, which in owns a stake in the Economist's parent company. The cynical view here is that these big clubs were essentially trying to force the hand of the existing competitions to make those kinds of reforms.

Some people thought this was all a negotiating ploy. And the existing Champions League format is changing. It hasn't actually changed as fully as is probably necessary to satisfy the demand for more clashes between top clubs. And then there's the question of what this means for the clubs involved in the long term. There's been some talk that they might be disciplined and face points deductions this season. I think that's possible. But the idea that they're going to be damaged in the long term from this, in terms of their fan bases, I think is probably optimistic on the part of their critics. These are immensely powerful global brands and even at a local level, it's not as if fans are known for switching teams they support. So I don't really see this impacting the economics of the clubs over the long term.

Henry, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

The trial of Derek Chauvin took three weeks. It took the jury less than a day to find him guilty of the murder of George Floyd. Instead of the protests and confrontation some had feared fears that we spoke about yesterday, it was a moment of release for the crowds awaiting the verdict. I spoke to John Pruddo, our US Editor and the presenter of Checks and Balance our podcast on American politics about the decision.

This verdict is a big moment in the history of American criminal justice, and I think in American civil rights history. You'll remember that the protests that followed George Floyd's murder, and we can now call it a murder, we've been referring to it as his death. That murder sparked off the biggest civil rights protests in American history. And so this verdict is very important because the first demand of those protests was justice for George Floyd, and justice has now been served.

And this verdict is certainly something of a catharsis in America. I mean, where does America go from here, do you think?

Well, many people, including President Joe Biden, have been saying this is only the beginning and there's much more work to do.

We can't stop here.

In order to deliver real change and reform, we can and we must do.

More to reduce the likelihood that tragedy.

Like this will ever happen and occur again.

All of that is right, but I think it's also important to be realistic about where America starts on this. Number one, it's very hard to police a country where there are more than 300 million guns in circulation without police officers shooting people. Number two, in 98% of cases where police officers kill somebody in America, no criminal charges are then brought. What I would say is that since George Floyd's murder, various jurisdictions have introduced some meaningful reforms, particularly to something called qualified immunity, which is a very blanket defence that police officers are able to use when accused of unjustified use of force. So I think there have been some changes and there will be further changes in the light of this. But we should be realistic about where America is starting out on this.

And this is no doubt something you'll be exploring further on Checks and Balance this week.

Yes, that's right. So please do go and find that wherever you get your podcasts.

And that'll be out as ever on Friday. John, thanks very much.

Thanks, Jason.

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In the aftermath of the First World War, the Allies carved up the Middle east, creating artificial states in an area that had previously been divided along ethnic, linguistic and religious lines. Today, 30 million Kurds are spread across a mountainous region straddling Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Armenia. Kurds make up the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle east, but have never had a state of their own. The past few decades have brought occasional glimpses of hope. In April 1991, for example, Western powers established a no fly zone over northern Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War. It was an attempt to stop Saddam Hussein's brutal repression of the Kurds, and it allowed the first autonomous Kurdish territory to be created. This month marks the 30th anniversary of that decision. As it stands though, for Kurds everywhere, the dream of statehood has faded.

The Kurds are strewn between four different countries and live under four different non Kurdish regimes.

Nicholas Pelham is one of our Middle east correspondents. He recently traveled to Iraq and Syria and met the president of Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government, Nature Van Barzani those governments.

Have often been authoritarian and virulently nationalist. The Kurds were subject to chemical weapons under Saddam Hussein. In Turkey, they've been dismissed as mountain Kurds. Their language has been banned and they've craved a safe haven and a place of refuge.

And have the Kurds ever gotten close to that ambition to their own state?

There have been some very short lived attempts at a Kurdish Republic. They've been snuffed out pretty quickly. Something dramatic happened after the Gulf War in 1991, when the Kurds rose up following Saddam Hussein' eviction from Kuwait. The west declared a no fly zone and created a safe haven. And in one way or another, the west has protected that safe haven in northern Iraq ever since. And then there was another significant gain. Twenty years later in 2011, this time in Syria, when that country rose up during the Arab Spring against the Assad regime and the Kurds in the north declared autonomy. So in Syria and Iraq at least, everything seemed to be going the Kurds way.

But how did that tide turn? Why were things at that stage going the Kurds way?

In both Iraq and in Syria, the Kurds are very much the foot soldiers of the American led coalition to eliminate Islamic State's caliphate. And as Islamic State was pushed back, the Kurds gained increasing territory in Iraq. They captured the vital city of Kirkuk, which is an oil rich city. And in the process they took some very large oil fields. And that was very much the high water mark. It was a moment of hope. But in some ways it led to overreach. In 2017, Kurdish leaders in Iraq took the fateful decision to hold a referendum on independence. That was against the advice of both their neighbours and their Western allies. Kurds voted overwhelmingly in favour. But the result was also swift and punishing. From the Kurds neighbours, the Iraqi government and its allied militias recaptured about a third of the territory then in Kurdish hands, including Kickok and its oil fields, and they closed the airspace. Turkey and Iran also punished the Kurdish leaders for holding the referendum. They closed off their borders with Iraqi Kurdistan and cut the region's customs revenues. So it really looked as if this autonomous project, which was then something like 25 years old, was on the brink of collapse.

And what about the intervening years? I know that you've recently been to Iraq and Syria. What's the situation on the ground now?

Ever since, Kurds in Iraq have been trying to claw back what they lost then, but it's still a pretty despondent place. When I visited Erbil, the Iraqi Kurdish capital, you could definitely feel the hopes of independence had faded. The hint of spring in the air had long gone. I spoke to the president of the Kurdish regional government, Netjevan Barzani, at his palace in Erbil, and I asked him whether Kurdish ambitions were shrinking. Ask me as a Kurd. Yes, you would like to see the Kurdish independent?

Of course I will tell you.

Yes. Yeah, okay. But I will not. So now I will not do something to harm my people. But yes, it's there. If you ask any Kurds, they will.

Give you the same answer.

But the reality is different from what you want. There's this realization that any move towards de jure independence will cost the Kurds big time. They realize they're better off trying to push for greater independence on the ground, even if that doesn't amount to an international recognition of sovereignty. But when you're in a bill, you really feel a dramatic difference with the rest of Iraq. There's been next to no development in Iraq since the American invasion in 2003, except in the Kurdish north, where you have stability, you have access to all revenues. And that money isn't just being squirreled away in corruption. It's being invested on the ground in huge construction projects.

And what about the situation in Syria these days?

There too, the Kurdish forces have been pushed back by successive Turkish incursions. And to placate their American backers and an Arab majority on the ground, they've played down Kurdish nationalism. They profess to want a united but federal Syria. They want a similar arrangement that the Iraqi Kurds have, where they get recognition of autonomy, they get a budget subsidy and a share of the country's raw materials, but still remain within the framework of a single country.

And ranging a bit more widely, we haven't talked about Kurds in Turkey. What's been happening over recent years there with that notion of autonomy.

In the first years of the millennium, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government made unprecedented attempts to deal with the demands of Kurds in Turkey. He allowed more use of their language in schools. And he tried to clinch a peace deal with the Kurdistan Workers Party, the pkk. It's an armed group that has fought Turkey security forces for nearly four decades. But then in the Turkish elections of 2015, the People's Democratic Party, the HDP, which is the strongest political voice of Turkey's Kurds, saw its support increase significantly.

And what happened then with the prospect of a real political voice for Kurds in Turkey?

I think their strength really unnerved Mr. Erdogan. He abandoned the peace process to court a Turkish nationalist vote. He became much more nationalist in his tone. He arrested one of the leaders of the HDP and rounded up countless mayors and parliamentarians. And when the pkk, the armed Kurdish movement, tried to fight back and resume the armed struggle, he launched a punishing onslaught against the Kurds, resuming their four decade long war and destroyed much of their historic city, Deirbakir. So in Turkey, the vast majority of Kurds feel as if they're on the back foot. The PKK has renounced the separatism that it advocated decades ago, and it's largely been forced back to Iraq and Syria, where Turkish forces are pursuing them there too. But the Kurds do have one thing going for them, that's their political strength. And a country split evenly between Mr. Erdogan's supporters and his opponents, the Kurds, have become the political kingmakers.

And so with all that in mind, let's come back to that big question of the prospects for Kurdish statehood. Is it a realistic goal given how things are now?

As you can see, in every front, the Kurds have lost a significant amount of ground. And these days, few Kurds believe that they will live in a single sovereign Kurdistan in their lifetime. But even if they don't believe that they'll have independence anytime soon, that dream hasn't died. You can still feel it on the streets. And the worse their neighbors treat them, the more that aspiration is likely to grow.

Nicholas, thank you very much for joining us.

Jason it's always a pleasure to be with you.

Latitude l a t I t u.

D e there's something triumphant about spelling bee contestants getting it right.

Bcidalus r e c I t a l I s t b citalis and.

There'S something tragic about them getting it wrong.

Bigotry b I g a t r y bigotry.

Listening to spelling bees really takes me back. Stay with me here. I'm not sure whether I'm embarrassed or proud of this, but back in school days, I won the county spelling bee eight years in a row. If spelling were regular and intuitive, spelling bees wouldn't even exist. But it's not English Spelling is famously difficult, and plenty of languages present similar confusion. So why is that, and why not change it?

People around the world are baffled by their writing systems.

Lane Greene writes Johnson, our column on language.

For example, many people in China don't input their Chinese characters in their phones by the Chinese character themselves. They use the Roman Alphabet. So they're increasingly struggling to produce those characters cold when they have to write them with a pen. In France, children have what's called the dictee, which is an exercise in school where a teacher reads aloud a passage and the children have to write everything down correctly. And of course, the spelling of the English language is notoriously difficult.

Well, why? Why aren't writing systems more intuitive?

Well, most spelling systems are quite old, and so they could have arisen either before we had a really scientific knowledge of pronunciation and the different sounds of a language, or many systems and especially English really arose in quite chaotic circumstances. When English was being codified, you had a Germanic people that had been conquered by the Norman French and a sort of merging of those two languages. And there are different ways of using an Alphabet that was designed for a third language, Latin, into early modern spelling. In the Chaucerian period. And then you got lots of scribes making mistakes. And then the other factor that erodes the reliability of all spelling systems is simply time. Pronunciation changes. There's very little you can do to stop it.

Why not reform them, then? Start from scratch, reset the clock on some of the weirdnesses?

Well, one argument against starting from scratch and making a perfect correspondence between sound and written form is that spelling, for example, gives you useful information about things like etymology. So lots of silent letters will tell us the connections between different words. Other arguments against reform are even more compelling. For example, if we were going to write the English language as it's pronounced, that just screams the question, whose pronunciation are we going to privilege? And finally, all languages are always changing, so you'd only ever buy yourself time.

So in a sense, there's no point even trying to make changes.

Well, not necessarily. I think modest tweaks could actually work better than dramatic revisions. But unfortunately, even these small reforms can be very hard to push through. People are naturally very conservative about their language, where you do get thorough root and branch kind of reform. And spelling, it's usually been implemented by an autocracy. In the 1920s, Turkey replaced its spelling system, which used the Arabic Alphabet, with the Latin Alphabet. Under Kemal Ataturk, this was the newly independent Turkey that had succeeded the Ottoman Empire. And Ataturk wanted to turn Turkey from the Islamic world to the European one and was able to push through this dramatic reform. It rendered a lot of people functionally illiterate, and they had to learn the new system.

So if that deep reform is really only the province of autocratic regimes, then liberal societies, well, they're just gonna leave it alone.

I think it's more likely than not. Inertia is a powerful force. And I think the real social fact here is that all the people who would have the power to change this thing, these people have all learned the old system. Anybody who would gain from reform, well, these are people who haven't learned the old system. These are children or people who are currently illiterate. And they are easily ignored by politicians and the powerful. And so I think these really supercharge the forces of conservatism.

Lane, thanks very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the the Show Notes. See you back here tomorrow.