Europe is ours
Since the turn of the century, Spain has dominated football to an extreme degree. A Spanish football club or the Spain national team ultimately took up one of the major footballing trophies in each of the years between 2008 and 2012. Spanish teams and the national team won two Euros, two Champions Leagues, and one World Cup during these four years. They were indeed at the top of their game. The Spanish league drew the top players in the world as was to be expected given how dominant they were. As of 2009, La Liga could be proud of having players like Kaka, Benzema, Higuain, Aguero, Henry, Xavi, Ibrahimovic, Raul, Iniesta, and of course, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Pride hath a fall
In European competitions, things have also gotten really bad. Regarding the Champions League only one Spanish team advanced from its group this season. The narrative continued into the 2020–2021 season. Only one representative from Spain made it to the quarterfinals. Compared to the ten years from 2008 to 2018, this is an entirely different story. Spanish clubs reached the final seven times during this time. Five of these occurred between 2013 and 2018 in consecutive years. In two of those years, two Spanish clubs faced off in the championship game. That is the quality that we were accustomed to back then, but it is quickly disappearing.
Therefore, it raises the question of why Spanish football is declining. Well, let’s start with COVID-19. A large number of the Spanish teams were severely impacted by the pandemic’s economic impacts. Since then, they have had difficulty getting off the ground. The two most prominent clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid have lamented how the pandemic’s consequences have left them feeling uneasy. In light of this, consider how much worse it has been for the smaller clubs.
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Two-team competition?
Clubs like Valencia and Sevilla, who were formerly among the best teams in the nation, are currently involved in a relegation fight. That much has been lost in terms of norms. And it will always be a major issue if only one or two teams dominate your league. This is why the German Bundesliga and the French Ligue 1 are not given much respect.
Furthermore, you practically ruin your league when you build up two to cripple 18.
For instance, the television rights between the large clubs and the other lesser clubs in the league are distributed quite unevenly. Barcelona and Real Madrid each received $170 million from TV rights for the 2021–22 season. Atletico Madrid, who have managed to establish themselves as somewhat of a major team, received $139 million. The other people had to eat scraps. The 10 of the other clubs received less than $60 million. While less than $50 million was given to teams like Mallorca and Rayo Vallecano. In comparison to Madrid and Barcelona, clubs like Sevilla and Real Betis, which ought to be big in Spain, received around 300% less funding.
Man City earned £153 million from TV rights in the Premier League during the 2020–21 season, which was the highest amount. Sheffield United received the least amount, £96.5 million, though. That is £56.5 million difference top and the bottom-ranked team. Between first and third place in La Liga, there is a difference of nearly $40 million.
The Premier League
Consequently, the Premier League is miles ahead of the Spanish Premier Division in terms of spending during the transfer window. The 20 Premier League teams spent a staggering £2.36 billion, an increase of £0.4 billion from the previous year, with an average expenditure of £121 million. Teams in La Liga were only allowed to spend a total of £456 million. An amount of which alone Jude Bellingham, whose asking price was £103 million, makes up one-fourth.
The Premier League is significantly more competitive than La Liga for this very reason. The league takes care of its lesser clubs and provides opportunities for their expansion, and because of this, you can see smaller clubs challenging the more powerful ones, upping the level of competition overall, and making the league more entertaining to watch.
Tyrant Tebas
One could counter that this is because La Liga clubs make relatively little money, but the difference between the top 2 leagues is unquestionably alarming. Additionally, the league is doing little to improve the situation for the clubs. La Liga president Javier Tebas is proven to be a very stern and authoritarian figure, especially about his FFP measures. The capacity of the clubs in the league to sign players or even keep them has been severely limited by the extremely strict financial constraints that he has put in place.
If you paid close attention, you would have seen that Gavi began the 2022–2023 season with the number 30 on his back. Then, in the middle of the campaign, he switched to wearing the number 6. But he had to change back to wearing number 30 a few weeks later. All of that was because of Tebas and his team. They informed Barcelona that they lacked the financial resources to add Gavi to their first-team roster. Therefore, Barca was forced to reinstate his youth contract. This meant that Gavi might have been a free agent after the season and left Barcelona and potentially La Liga.
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Caught unprepared: Ensnared in Fleeting Triumph
If you recall, Messi was compelled to quit Barcelona and La Liga in 2021 as a result of the same financial constraints imposed by Javier Tebas. Right now, the league is only in self-destruct mode. They are losing their best players to other leagues as a result of the rigid and, to be quite honest, stupid structures they have put in place.
And how on earth do you propose to compete with them if you keep losing your best players to leagues close by? Neymar, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi were three of La Liga’s most prominent stars who left for Italy and France in just four years. The league administrators are essentially disabling the league with their actions.
Speaking of Ronaldo and Messi, they spent nine years living together in Spain. La Liga was perhaps the most popular league in the world at that time. These two well-known athletes helped Spain achieve great success and gave the Spanish league a lot of exposure, fans, and sponsors. They generated a tonne of revenue on their own and elevated La Liga significantly. But maybe that wasn’t a good thing. The success the two greats were bringing to the league seemed to have distracted the league so much that they neglected to diversify. They got too dependent on Ronaldo and Messi as the league’s faces, unable to plan for what would happen if they disappeared.
They never considered what they would do without Ronaldo and Messi to retain those viewers and sponsors. They never took steps to ensure that their league remained exciting and competitive even when these players moved on. All they were thinking about at the moment was the success those guys were bringing.
But now that they are both gone, it seems like the league is paying for their lack of preparation. Nowadays, fewer and fewer people watch La Liga matches. According to statistics, on average, more people will watch Serie A matches than La Liga matches in the 2022–23 season. This season, 29,701 people have watched on average per game in the Italian top division. While 28,978 fans watch on average each game in La Liga. Currently, more people watch Serie A matches than La Liga matches. It seems like we are returning to the 1990s.
They did not make preparations for life without Messi and Ronaldo. They are enacting strict financial regulations that are displacing its top players and making it challenging for the teams to sign star players. Recall that La Liga had Prime Ronaldo and Messi. However, they were unable to persuade the top two players of the newest generation, Mbappe and Haaland, to join their league. Barcelona almost sold Frenkie de Jong last summer and could have lost Gavi this season due to the same regulations.
The Boring League?
This, for sure, is not benefiting La Liga and Spanish football in general. So Javier Tebas and the rest of his team better sit up and do something about Spanish football. If not, it could find itself being nothing much better than the French Ligue One in the next few years. Or who knows, maybe he’ll have to leave for things to get better. Already, Barcelona fans and stakeholders have started asking for Tebas to step down.
Let’s see how that develops. And if that’s the solution to the current problems La Liga is facing. But what do you guys think though? Is Spanish football fading away? Or is this just all in our heads?
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