The Premier League has established itself as the most popular football league in the world.
Billions of pounds flow into its coffers through the sale of international broadcast rights. Its stadiums have become tourist attractions, bringing in visitors from around the world.
While some of Europe’s other leagues are home to huge clubs and superstars players (Kylian Mbappe at Real Madrid in La Liga, for example), they all fall considerably short of the Premier League when it comes to eyeballs and money.
There have been attempts to bridge the gap. Some Spanish and Italian clubs tried to disrupt English football’s financial dominance with the proposed European Super League (ESL), an alternative to the Champions League, which became public in April 2021.
A22 Sports and Florentino Perez, Real Madrid’s president, were at the forefront of the plans, with the backing of Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Juventus, Milan and Inter.
Six Premier League clubs — Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur — agreed to join it too, seemingly attracted by the improved financial proposition compared with the Champions League. But condemnation from other clubs and supporters led to their withdrawal within days.
That was the only time the Premier League’s supremacy has been seriously challenged. Why?
The Premier League itself could be described as a model challenger league. At the beginning of the 1990s, English First Division clubs decided to pursue wholesale changes.
That led to the 22 top-flight teams resigning from the Football League and seeking independence from the Football Association so they could control their own commercial and broadcast income. They formed the Premier League, which cranked into life on August 15, 1992. The number of clubs was then reduced from 22 to 20 at the end of the 1994-95 season. The wealth of this season’s clubs is underlined by the table below, which shows the estimated final earnings of each team
But in the eyes of Richard Scudamore, the former chief executive credited with turning the Premier League into the global behemoth it is today, describing the English top flight as a challenger league is wrong.
“Nothing changed, right?” Scudamore tells The Athletic. “It’s not like LIV Golf, the IPL (cricket’s Indian Premier League) or the proposed European Super League. The Premier League didn’t come along and say they were going to compete head-to-head with the existing structure of English football.
“The smartest thing about it was that it was all change, but nothing changed. It was really just a marketing arrangement. When the Premier League season started, 92 teams in England all lined up, so it disrupted only in a governance sense — it didn’t disrupt in a footballing sense. But it certainly disrupted the economics of the sport.”
Richard Scudamore resigned from the Premier League in 2018 (Jason McCawley/Getty Images for Sydney FC)
Charlie Stillitano disagrees. In the Italian-American executive’s eyes, the Premier League certainly is the “ultimate” challenger league — especially in how it has usurped the other major leagues in Europe, including Spain, Italy, Germany and France.
Stillitano is the president of TEG Sport for North America, the former executive chairman of Relevent Sports, and he is known as football’s ‘Mr Fixer’ when organising and promoting games for European sides in the United States.
One of the reasons Stillitano doesn’t believe a new competitor league to the Premier League is plausible is down to the money that has been poured into England’s top flight via broadcast deals, including in the U.S., where NBC pay $450million (£332.4m) a year for exclusive rights.
“That that created, at least in the U.S., a bit of a vacuum for everyone else,” Stillitano tells The Athletic. “What people forget is we had the economic crisis in 2008 and then financial fair play kicked in, so all those things conspired to make the Premier League, with the money they had, the main league.
“The only league that could really compete was La Liga in Spain. They had the two best teams (Barcelona and Real Madrid) with the two best players (Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo) in the world for 10 years, but a lot of that was when they were on BeIN and there were only eight million viewers over here.
“And when you look at the Premier League now, the economics have gotten so out of whack and they become so incredible in the Premier League relative to the other leagues.
“What’s changed dramatically is the actual figures involved in the Premier League. They have created the ‘super league’ in England.
“You would need to create a league as rich as they are, and the only way that can happen is if you try to cobble together all the teams that tried to join the European Super League.”
Even La Liga’s star power, including Kylian Mbappe, David Alaba and Vinicius Junior at Real Madrid, can’t compete with the Premier League’s popularity (David Ramos/Getty Images)
In other sports, challenger leagues are much more common.
Major League Soccer (MLS) in the U.S. is about to have a rival on its doorstep, with the United Soccer League (USL) set to launch a new first-division men’s professional league in 2027-28.
The USL already has two professional leagues, the second-tier USL Championship and the third-tier USL League One. But it has plans to have a 12- or 14-team first division in place for the 2027-28 campaign, which would operate as a direct competitor to MLS.
The NFL, America’s biggest and most popular sport, has grown massively in recent years and now hosts multiple games abroad every year, but even they have been subject to other leagues trying to muscle their way into the conversation, though ineffectively.
In 2001, Vince McMahon, best known for his role as a co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), created the XFL, which operated as a joint venture between the WWE and NBC.
The plan was that it would be another American football league that would begin at the end of the NFL season. The first match attracted more than 15 million viewers, but that number quickly plummeted, leading to its demise after only one season.
In 2018, McMahon returned and had another crack at entering the American football market by reviving the XFL with new rules to help speed up the game and differentiate it from the NFL.
There were eight teams across the U.S. and the season would run from February to May, with each side playing 10 regular-season fixtures before four teams entered a play-off to eventually crown a champion.
ESPN reported that McMahon expected to spend around $500m on reviving the XFL. It attracted sponsors such as Gatorade and the Anheuser-Busch company, and had more than three million TV viewers, as reported by the LA Times, on the opening weekend.
But only months into the 2020 season, its first one back, the Covid-19 pandemic led to the rest of the campaign being cancelled. On April 10, the XFL filed for bankruptcy.
“The challenge for XFL was that the NFL had the billionaires, and there wasn’t enough money to dislodge the NFL,” Stillitano says.
Marc Trestman, a successful American football coach who most recently worked with the Los Angeles Chargers as a senior offensive assistant in 2024, signed up to coach the Tampa Bay Vipers, one of the now-defunct XFL teams.
“The XFL was an opportunity for me to lead, I was in a great place and I was impressed by Oliver Luck (the XFL’s CEO) and his presentation and how the league went about doing things,” Trestman told The Athletic.
Trestman when he was head coach of the Tampa Bay Vipers in 2020 (Julio Aguilar/Getty Images)
“We never approached the XFL as being in competition with the NFL, and we never looked at it that way. From a leadership standpoint, we never tried to say we were going to be the NFL.
“The fact they would take a whole year to ramp up the league, and not jump into it immediately, was a green flag that said they were trying to do it the right way.
“All the flags were positive. We traveled first class, our training facility was first class and we had the resources we needed to do the job. When we left in March 2020, we really felt that we were going to be a good team, but we really felt good about the league — and most of the coaches felt the same way.”
Although Trestman said the pay for coaches was “very, very good”, there was a chasm between what players in the NFL were earning compared to those in the XFL. One left tackle in the XFL was being paid “around $125,000” a year, while “the best tackles in the NFL may earn $20m” a year, Trestman says.
Players’ earnings were not an issue for LIV Golf, a breakaway golf competition bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). It entered the fray in 2021, causing a metaphorical earthquake in a game that the PGA Tour had dominated. The aftershocks are still being felt.
Golf’s most successful players were targeted, with some accepting nine-figure sums to leave the PGA Tour behind. Dustin Johnson, a former world No 1 who had already amassed more than $70m in career earnings, was reportedly given a $150m signing-on fee to join LIV Golf.
Yet while money was never an issue, credibility was — and the PGA Tour remains the dominant organiser of golf events, with Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, arguably golf’s biggest names, choosing to stay.
“LIV Golf is interesting because golf is made up of individuals,” says Scudamore. “Individual sports are going to be more vulnerable to somebody coming along and going, ‘Right, I’m going to pay you more than you’ve been paid before as an individual’.
LIV Golf’s South Korea event this month (Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
“When that happens, it is only the athlete, their agent and advisors who have to decide whether they want to switch. When someone comes along and asks whether they want to be paid a lot more for doing a lot less, guaranteed for three years, that is going to be attractive.
“When you look across the whole sporting landscape, you can just see sports that are ripe for disruption. But I don’t think the Premier League is ripe for disruption.”
Scudamore says the Premier League’s competition still comes from other leagues, adding that “the economics of a challenger league being set up to challenge its existence are just so difficult”.
“You would need the money to build appropriate stadiums capable of hosting matches, you then need to buy and pay the players, set up the teams, and build other infrastructure such as a training ground,” he says. “To do that is so, so hard.”
The most recent attempt to draw away some of the Premier League’s dominance has been the money being poured into the Saudi Pro League (SPL) by the nation’s Public Investment Fund.
Ronaldo, for example, left Manchester United to join Al Nassr on a money-spinning deal, worth more than £170m ($230m at current rates) a year, in January 2023. Riyad Mahrez, a five-time Premier League winner who was at Manchester City, left for the SPL a few months later, signing for Al Ahli. Two former Liverpool players, Sadio Mane and Jordan Henderson, were signed by SPL clubs (Al Nassr and Al Ettifaq respectively). Last summer, Brentford and England striker Ivan Toney left the Premier League for Al Ahli.
Deloitte reported that in 2023, SPL clubs spent more than $950m on new signings. This also coincided with clubs investing in their infrastructure, with projects ongoing. Yet despite the significant investment, including infrastructure, it remains to be seen whether the SPL will become one of the most popular leagues in world football, with many political and environmental hurdles to overcome.
Stillitano also points to the power of clubs as brands. “You can create a new league and say you are going to be big because we have the money to be big, but you have to have the money and the brands,” he says. “That’s why the only league that could have competed with the Premier League was the European Super League.”
The company behind the ESL rebranded and created a new concept called the ‘Unify League’, which would see 96 teams divided into four divisions with 16 teams each in the top two tiers and 32 in the second two.
At a Premier League meeting in June 2022, the owners’ charter was updated to include the following: “We will not engage in the creation of new competition formats outside of the Premier League’s rules.”
Al Ahli in the Saudi Pro League lured Ivan Toney away from the Premier League (Yasser Bakhsh/Getty Images)
Individual players may be tempted but for now, Premier League clubs themselves seem unlikely to take part in any new rival competition. “The prospect of a challenger league is a pretty nebulous one — in the Premier League, each of the clubs is a single shareholder giving them an equal vote on all matters and a right to the distribution of broadcast and commercial revenues,” says Samuel Cuthbert, a sports and commercial law barrister at 4 New Square Chambers.
“The FA has a special share in the Premier League — known as the golden share — which means that certain actions can only be taken with its approval. Any challenger league would likely need ratification from the FA, as the Premier League did, but that may be difficult to acquire given the clear stake the FA has in the Premier League.”
Quitting the Premier League is not impossible, though. “In terms of the mechanics of a club leaving, it’s possible under rules B.7 and B.9 of the Premier League handbook for a club to resign from the Premier League, which would take effect at midnight on the last day of the third season following the season in which notice is given,” Cuthbert adds.
“There is an ongoing requirement that at some point in each March of those intervening three seasons, the club giving such notice shall notify the Premier League’s company secretary in writing whether such notice is confirmed or withdrawn. If no such notice is given in any year, the notice under Rule B.7 is deemed to have been withdrawn.”
Cuthbert’s conclusion is that it is “very difficult to foresee a successful challenger to the Premier League establishing itself at the top of English football”.
Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, Stillitano doesn’t think it’s impossible. “Let’s be honest, there are enough billionaires in the world, and they might say, ‘Let’s scrap this relegation and promotion thing in England’,” he says of a rival league.
He adds: “You need to have a country that is really robust. One country that you could do it in is the United States. Players would come here, you can pay them the money and they will have a good life, and it’s the biggest media market and commercial market in the world.
“But we also have sports fans who like football. You could get billionaires here together to do it, but you need the courage to do it.”
Last week, a new global women’s seven-a-side tournament — World Sevens Football (WS7) — took place in Portugal. Bayern Munich beat Manchester United 2-1 in the final, earning $2.5m in prize money. Six other teams, including Manchester City, Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain, also competed for a combined prize pot worth $5m.
As seven-a-side football is not a recognised form of football by FIFA or UEFA, WS7 did not need permission from either governing body to kickstart the new concept and attract players and clubs to participate.
Over the past few weeks, the Baller League has been broadcast in the UK. Its founder and chief executive, Felix Starck, described it as “a new way to consume football”. It includes former professionals and social media influencers to attract a younger audience, and has been successful in Germany. But it wasn’t set up to challenge the Premier League. Nor would it be able to.
At least for now, England’s top flight will maintain its position as the most-watched football league in the world, scaring off potential competitors through its sheer popularity and the well-established history of its biggest clubs.
The wait for them to be challenged goes on.
(Top photo: Darwin Nunez celebrates Liverpool winning the Premier League this season; Carl Recine via Getty Images)
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