The Atlantic League and Allan MacDonald

Year by Year: 1999 I 2000 I 2001 I Allan MacDonald

The Atlantic League

In late September 1999 Allan MacDonald announced that he had been in talks with a number of clubs in the Netherlands to set up a cross-Europe league to be known as the Atlantic League.

The Atlantic League was the idea of Frank Kales, commercial director of Ajax. Tired of seeing his team torn apart and players recruited by the big spending, high revenue teams in Italy, Spain, Germany and England, he proposed setting up a league which would maximise the revenue of smaller clubs which, though successful in their own countries, were unable to break into the revenue and largesse enjoyed by the regular participants in the latter stages of the Champions League. What was envisaged was a league made up of the top teams from Belgium, Holland, Scotland, Portugal, Denmark, Norway and Sweden playing each other in a competition which was not controlled by UEFA or any of the various national leagues. The games would attract media interest and generate, it was hoped, significant television revenue for the participating clubs which would better allow then to compete against what would become the G14 clubs.

The ideas were developed at the beginning of the 1999-00 season and MacDonald went to Ajax to listen to the proposals, returning animated and enthusiastically advocating their investigation. He believed that this showed a direction which Celtic could take which would remove them from the big-fish-in-a-small-pond view that was Scottish football even under the recently started Scottish Premier League. The ideas were made public in Scotland at the Annual General Meeting in September 1999 and picked up by the media. The SPL chief executive, Roger Mitchell, immediately spat the dummy over the proposals saying that Rangers (for they too had jumped onto the bandwagon that MacDonald had started rolling, after initially indicating that they were not interested) and Celtic had a contract to fulfil with the SPL and as such the Atlantic League was a non-starter. Kenny Dalglish went so far as to state that he believed that Celtic would not be playing in Scottish football within five years. MacDonald was very clear on what he wanted.

He said:

"If there is going to be change then we want to be part of the discussions. Celtic, together with the SPL and the SFA, must be proactive with UEFA, FIFA and others in discussions on how to make the economic model better.
“I don't know what the outcome will be.
"It is clear that when a Premier League manager cannot afford a player's salary because it is the equivalent of a sixth of the turnover of his business, and you contrast that with Barcelona who I understand have just done a pay-per-view deal worth $50million a year for five years, and you contrast that with Celtic and Rangers who genuinely want to compete in Europe and therefore compete to attract the better players, then obviously the economic model which we have in Scotland is not going to generate success in Europe for any Scottish club.
"We have to have discussions on how we develop a scenario which works for everyone and Celtic are going to be involved in those discussions."
"In our strategic review we are looking at the market in which we operate and asking if Celtic can compete in Europe in this market.
"If you look at the economics there needs to be change. The current Scottish model is not a good one.
"If that ultimately means we play our football in a market other than Scotland and it's for the betterment of Celtic and Scottish football then that is what will happen.
"Let's be practical. We won't bring other clubs with us in terms of where we play our football. I don't know the answer but whatever it is it has to be healthy for Scottish football – not Celtic in isolation.
"We can't be too parochial because we will be seen as trying to row our own boat and others will try to frustrate us.
"I advocate an approach which looks at everybody's interests – see if there is a solution which we could all still be part of but there must be change."
"For domestic competition alone last season (1998-99) I'm told Manchester United received TV money somewhere in the region of £10million. Negotiations will start soon on the English premiership TV rights and they are expected to be worth £1billion. In total we got pounds £3.4million. Celtic earn just 8% of their total revenue from television rights, as opposed to 26% by English Premiership clubs and 37% in Serie A. £3.8million a year doesn’t secure many stars.
"In terms of the number of spectators coming through the turnstiles we are the fifth biggest club in the world, yet the money we receive is minuscule. It all comes down to TV audiences. What can you attract? Italy, Germany, France and England are all plus 50million in terms of audience. You then look at Spain with 35million.
"In Holland there is 15million, in Scotland 5million and if you put that together with Portugal, Belgium and others you might get a 50 million round-up. That makes sense and has to be given consideration."

(quoted from Daily Record, 5/10/99)

What has to be borne in mind is that this was a very fluid and dynamic period in the history and development of the game. The G14 group were finding their own feet. UEFA and FIFA as runners and rulers of the game were realising that they could no longer run the game without consultation, but their positions were not clear and they frequently found themselves at loggerheads. But overwhelmingly what was being felt was the influence of money, media and market. The game was going world-wide. Clubs and the game had to move or be lost to the trends that would shape the future of the game for years to come. MacDonald had the foresight to realise this and wanted Celtic to be in at the beginning.

UEFA’s position soon became very clear and they categorically stated their disapproval of the proposals. Though their statement fell short of being an outright condemnation of the Dutch proposals, they did appear to say that it would be almost impossible for clubs to compete in an Atlantic League and still continue playing in the Champions League / UEFA Cup competitions. Similar statements to the SPL reaction were also released by the Scandinavian league and the Eriedivisie in the Netherlands. Should the top clubs break away then these national leagues would be without their star clubs and earners. Should the top clubs break away then the whole route to UEFA competitions via the national leagues would be broken. All the clubs had an inkling what was involved but every club could see both advantages and disadvantages and in February 2000 Celtic attended a meeting in the Netherlands with representatives of PSV, Sporting Lisbon, Benfica, Porto, Anderlecht, Feyenoord and Ajax as well as Rangers. In the end the big stick held by UEFA and the growing sense of power that the early G14 were feeling saw little agreement between the clubs on a way forward and as such the proposals floundered through 2000, with all parties making appeasement noises.

In 2001 however the proposals for the Atlantic League received a new breath of life from Harry van Raaij, chairman of PSV Eindhoven in 2001. PSV were in a decent position having been one of the clubs that had set up the G14 group in September 2000 (the group had been in existence unofficially before this date, starting as a G8 then a G14 group, however it was only in September 2000 that they officially got together as a group with group interests), along with Ajax (the other original members being Liverpool, Manchester Utd, Juventus, Inter Milan, AC Milan, Marseille, Paris St Germain, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Porto, Barcelona and Real Madrid as well the Dutch two). PSV had presented the Atlantic League ideas to the other members of the G14 but had been rebuffed by them. So they went back to the original idea but without the Scandinavian clubs, the plan being for a cross-Europe league involving a maximum of 20 clubs to raise the quality and desirability of fans and TV to see games between these teams, with again the bottom line being to maximise income. Pointedly Van Raaij commented, “UEFA have to realise that the situation for clubs like ours is becoming more critical and they need to accept that some clubs have outgrown their domestic markets.”

These were fair comments from the Dutch chairman and they were particularly pertinent to the situation that Celtic found itself in. With a small market in Scotland, the payment to clubs from TV and media companies for the rights to broadcast games was small in comparison to the sums paid in Italy, Spain and England in particular. The most that Celtic could hope for in the Champions League was to reach the Group Stages. In a media-money dominated environment, Celtic were doomed to less revenue and competing in a market where players transfer fees would go through the roof, and wages rise to reflect competition between the major clubs in countries that commanded larger audiences and bigger TV money.

The outcome has been little short of demoralising. UEFA really poo-poohed the prospects of an Atlantic League as it would undermine the authority they had to run the European game and would in effect devalue their own competitions and show that they were inherently flawed. They were happy to see the proposals gradually die. Instead they tinkered with qualification rules and toyed once more with the ideas of salary caps (completely unworkable) and foreign player quotas (which would seem to be precisely against the articles of the European Union). At the same time UEFA were under attack from what was the G14 group who at one time threatened to secede from UEFA and set up their own league. This would be unthinkable for the European organisation and as such the reworkings of European competition rules have been a compromise which has been biased towards the big clubs. When Michel Platini was elected President of UEFA in January 2007 he pledged to fight for the ‘small clubs’ in Europe and to address the discrepancies which had seen big clubs grow bigger and smaller clubs all but disappear and face financial black out. As yet his dealings have prompted discussion but absolutely no real change.

In 2009 the Atlantic League proposals received a renaissance and call for re-assessment from Walter Smith when Rangers failed to qualify for Europe. With the lukewarm response of UEFA however, and the seemingly unlikelihood of Celtic or Rangers ever being admitted to the English leagues, and following the recent collapse of the broadcaster of Scottish football, Setanta, there seems to be little hope for change.

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