European Super League: Right, yet So Wrong.
Half a Billion pounds, and not much better than paracetamol at treating flu. The Tamiflu controversy back in 2013/14 left the UK government with a stockpile of useless medicine which they had defended to the hilt, and a PR disaster.
How and why? Cherry-picking. A combination of civil servants selecting agreeable research along with publication bias — a tendency to publish positive papers in clinical trials for new treatments - led to the appearance of a big thumbs-up from medicine. But that veneer was false. Various power brokers and institutions along the way, for a variety of reasons, had selected some findings and abandoned others. The whole canvas — which the science of meta-analyses in the 80s and 90s grew to try to bring to light — was blanked out, and a tiny 1cm square corner of the painting was exhibited instead.
Suffering from ‘Tamiflu syndrome’, Perez, Agnelli et al, grotesque though their European Super League proposals were, were not entirely wrong. They simply selected a tiny corner of the canvas. It is true that in theory, research, and practice, we see a big shift in the consumption habits of football fans. They watch less, stream more, want to pay less. Bigger games draw them more than the bottom of the table encounters. They support more than one team, etc.
That much is true. It’s just that that’s not all we see. When doing research, you learn that no one piece of evidence floats in a vacuum. All data are relational, associated, causal, interconnected.
The evidence that hypnotised the ESL founders correctly identified a change in viewing habits of the game in Gen Z and Millennials to shorter, digital, anytime/anywhere consumption. Practitioners in the game felt it was accurate. Rises in the average age of season ticket holders, the large-scale failure (in England) of conversions of U18s to adult season-cards, the decline in viewing figures in paid for broadcast, the price of the game, the tendency for younger fans to consume more than one game (even more than one media!) at the same time, following players before clubs; we gradually saw intangible feelings about the change in fans manifest themselves in influential reports.
The ESL cronies clearly read the research too. But they missed something else there. Perhaps — though we can’t prove it — they deliberately ignored this discovery because it contradicted their escapist agenda.
What they obscured was the finding — incredibly in the same studies that the ESL were using to justify their plan — that younger fans were demanding a more social, moral, and ethical game. They wanted a connected game with purpose. They looked to the voices of Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling, Colin Kapernick, Forest Green Rovers, and St. Pauli as the new North stars in their sport. One could say they wanted their game back, and whilst they looked forward to newer forms of consumption, they looked back too: to a version of the game that was more deeply connected to community and values. Indeed, they showed (about football) and had already demonstrated (elsewhere) that they were willing to walk away when their expectations went unmet.
As practitioners in the game, we also knew this finding was bang on the money.
That selectivity in the evidence they put forward was the violence the ESL mafia committed on the research, and quite possibly a contributing factor to why the protests continue now at Old Trafford (last night) and elsewhere. Their remedy worked against the symptoms they claimed to cure, because they ignored a crucial, probably centrally significant factor for fans: what the game and its actors now stand for, and stand against.
Cherry picking research, as the Bad Science author Ben Goldacre showed, is dangerous for society. It’s also bad for the health of football club owners, apparently.
