First of all, just to say that this idea absolutely sickens me, and is really hurting my relationship with the very sport itself right now. In a few weeks I'll likely have forgotten this even happened, but right now I could just walk away from it all. This whole idea is just disgusting.
It should also be added that there are a lot of mixed reports regarding this - some are claiming it's a replacement for the CL, some a replacement for the PL while the clubs themselves are trying to insist that they were only discussing a pre-season tournament (yeah...right...) My personal suspicion is that they were talking about restructuring the CL, but it's hard to say.
The PL's new TV deal changes the entire football landscape. This graphic is from a few years ago (and doesn't take into account the new TV deal), but the numbers are still staggering. PL clubs don't need to break away and form a super league . . . they're already playing in one.
You're missing the point. You're looking at how much English clubs make right now from TV money compared to other teams in the other major European countries, rather than comparing it to the potential earnings of a super-league.
Remember that the PL makes £5.1b in domestic TV money alone over a three years period atm, and that is for an annual competition where only about 200 of 380 games get broadcasted, plus one which contains the likes of Norwich, Bournemouth and Watford - the kinds of teams most foreign fans have never even heard of. Sure, they earned their place there, but the TV executives don't care about that, and since what the boards of the major clubs care about is money and those TV executives provide it, the club boards don't care about them either.
Realistically, only games involving the "big five" clubs - in fact, if you wanted to be cynical yet realistic, only games involving United, Liverpool and Arsenal - get the truly huge audiences, and those figures increase exponentially when those teams are playing each other. As far as the TV executives see it, the games between the three major clubs are what earns them most of their money. So they are thinking "well, if we can get £5b domestically alone from 6 games a year, what could happen if we had 380?"
That, therefore, is the plan. If they could engineer a league where only the top three teams played each other all season long while somehow not making it get stale, their TV revenue would likely not drop by much. How better a way to do that than to find 17 other high-prestige clubs from around Europe, thus also forcing their respective countries into the TV thrall. Imagine if they could make Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, etc all pay comparative rates to what the British companies pay for their broadcasting, but all for the same league. You could see clubs making more than half a billion each just from the major European revenue. Then on top of that, your product is simply the only thing that the rest of the world's TV stations are interested in showing, aside from a side line in their own product, so they start pumping cash in too.
The money this kind of competition could produce could end up making the PL looks like a kids' game.
