European football: Back to the 1950s

The point of departure in this paper is the diagnosis of Hoehn and Szymanski (1999) that the interlocking system of European football creates an unbalanced system. To secure competitive balance at both the European and the national level, they recommend to reform European football into a closed superleague American-style. In this paper I argue for a radically different route. Instead of giving up dominant traditions of European football, like promotion-relegation and the interlocking system, it is possible to maintain the defining characteristics of European football by returning to the state of affairs in the 1950s, before the commercialisation of football through the media started. This requires the free of charge distribution of football matches on TV, which can be justified by standard economic welfare analysis.