Pondering the Possibilities of the Atlantic League

While the Aughts have been full of speculation/proposal about the Old Firm join­ing the EPL, the 90’s was about the Old Firm join­ing what was dubbed as the Atlantic League. It was a joint pro­posal from the big clubs in the Nether­lands, Scot­land and Por­tu­gal. ESPN is report­ing that there may be another attempt at this break away league, which would involve the afore­men­tioned clubs along with Bel­gium and the Scan­di­na­vian clubs.

I’m all for tra­di­tion, but I like the idea of this league.

For one rea­son, his­toric clubs such as Ajax, Celtic, Rangers, Porto (Mourinho-era aside), Sport­ing, Ben­fica, PSV, Ander­lecht and FC Copen­hagen have no hope of com­pet­ing in the Cham­pi­ons League any longer as they are finan­cially dwarfed by the clubs in the big six leagues of Europe. These are mas­sive clubs and don’t deserve to become also-rans because of the size of their country’s population.

For another Scan­di­navia, which once pro­duced clubs that could cause an upset in Europe, have been reduced to two clubs in the Europa League. Nor­way and Swe­den, which pro­duce many tal­ents for other clubs, haven’t had a team in the knock-out stages since the mid-90’s. Both con­fed­er­a­tions sit in the 20’s in the coef­fi­cient rank­ings. And Den­mark hasn’t been much bet­ter, although they do typ­i­cally have a team in the group stages.

If Michel Pla­tini is about strength­en­ing these leagues, then allow­ing smaller coun­tries to con­sol­i­date to fight the money and pop­u­la­tions of Italy, Spain, France, Eng­land, Rus­sia and Ger­many is only fair. And with Ger­man clubs again com­plain­ing about the 50+1 rule, as was dis­cussed here ear­lier, such a change would only help push the Nether­lands, Scot­land, Bel­gium, Por­tu­gal, Den­mark, Nor­way and Swe­den fur­ther adrift.

Finally, if a break­away league can be formed for these coun­tries, it could pro­vide a blue-print for the East­ern Euro­pean nations that find them­selves in the same position.

And it’s not like we haven’t had this before. The old Yugosla­vian league dur­ing the Com­mu­nist era was essen­tially the same thing being pro­posed, and was com­pet­i­tive in Europe with­out the avail­abil­ity of for­eign transfers.

If they could set up a league, per­haps even with two tiers, it could gain enough pop­u­lar­ity to rival Rus­sia or France, which are broad­cast widely. They could have rel­e­ga­tion and pro­mo­tion with a two tier sys­tem. And for the sec­ond divi­sion, teams could drop back to their country’s league sys­tem if they fin­ished in the bot­tom three. Say Hibs came in last in league 2, they could be replaced by Aberdeen, the win­ner of the SPL. This could work if it were just one league, too. The ques­tion would be, how many teams would be allowed into the Cham­pi­ons League. This new league might need to be given a fifth slot to account for the eight countries.

Think about this league:
Celtic
Rangers
Porto
Ben­fica
Sport­ing Lis­bon
Rosen­borg
Valerenga (included because I love them)
FC Copen­hagen
Bronby
AIK
Gothen­burg
Malmo
PSV
Ajax
Feyeno­ord
Ander­lecht
Club Brugge
Stan­dard Liege
HJK
MyPa

That would be a highly com­pet­i­tive league with his­tor­i­cal clubs ooz­ing out of it’s pores. It would take place in eight coun­tries, two teams each for the 5 mil­lion nations and 3 each for the 10 mil­lion nations. The league would encom­pass a pop­u­la­tion of 67 mil­lion peo­ple, tak­ing it past Italy, Spain, Eng­land and France. And other than travel to Por­tu­gal, would rarely com­pete with the travel involved in an Bayern-Hamburg match. Lin­guis­ti­cally, it would entail Dutch, Dan­ish, Nor­weigian, Swedish, Finnish, Eng­lish, French and Por­tuguese. How­ever, the Scan­dana­vian coun­tries can com­mu­ni­cate as their lan­guages are so sim­i­lar, except for the pro­nun­ci­a­tion dif­fer­ences from Dan­ish to Swedish. 25% of all Finns speak Swedish as well. Wal­loo­nia speaks Dutch. And to be per­fectly hon­est all of the afore­men­tioned nations, speak bet­ter Eng­lish than the Scots So really we are talk­ing about a league that could con­cen­trate on Eng­lish and Portuguese.

By the way, the Gaffer may soon be seek­ing an Atlanti­cLeagueTalk writer

*Pop­u­la­tion notes: Bel­gium 10.5 Nether­lands 16.5 Por­tu­gal 10.7 Swe­den 9.2 Den­mark 5.5 Nor­way 4.7 Fin­land 5.5 Scot­land 5

Tagged as: AIK, Ajax, Atlantic League, Benfica, Celtic, FC Copenhagen, Feyenoord, Malmo FF, Porto, PSV, Rangers, Rosenborg, Sporting Lisbon