Unicorns, in Silicon Valley, tend to be conceived accidentally. Take, for example, an app called Cicada, established with the admirable purpose of hosting three-to-five-minute videos on a wide range of educational topics that might supplement the schooling of the teenagers it saw as its audience.
Quickly, though, the start-up’s founders — Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang — spotted a slight hitch. Nobody wanted to watch educational videos. On any subject. What they wanted to do, it turned out, was lip sync to bubblegum pop. So Zhu and Yang pivoted. They renamed their app Musical.ly. They later rebranded it again, and conquered the world with TikTok.
As the author Taylor Lorenz noted in her book Extremely Online, many of the billion-dollar start-ups that have come to dominate our lives boast equally unlikely genealogies. YouTube was initially a dating site. Twitter grew from the ashes of Odeo, an abortive podcasting app, and was conceived as a way of telling your friends when you were having dinner. Facebook set out to assess whether people were hot or, alas, not. They both just turned out to also be good at influencing elections.
It is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility, then, that in a few years, millions of people will happily open the streaming platform Unify blissfully unaware that it was, when it first launched, supposed to be a European Super League.
Actually, maybe that is unfair. Maybe Unify will end up as a hyper-realistic AI companion that looks like Florentino Perez, or an app that measures your level of hubris, like the one that tracks your steps, or a simulator that allows users to relieve stress by flogging dead horses. All of these would be perfectly fitting, given its roots.
Unify, in what can loosely be called its current form, is the latest brainchild of A22, the “sports management” company that appears to exist solely to pursue the abolition of European football as we know it. The bespoke streaming platform is, in fact, “central” to the firm’s latest set of proposals for European football’s alternative future, according to the publicity material that accompanied its submission to UEFA and FIFA this week.
A22’s vision is of a cross-continental league that contains four distinct divisions, containing a total of 96 teams. There would be groups, played on a round-robin, home-and-away basis, and then knockout play-offs, presumably culminating in some sort of final. Everything would be shown — either for free, with adverts, or thanks to “affordable premium subscriptions” — on the Unify platform.
The details beyond that are a little sketchy. A22 has been discussing the idea with various clubs for almost two years but has not divulged whether anyone has actually signed up yet. The names given to the four divisions of the competition — Star, Gold, Blue and Union — sound like the sort of thing you get in an unlicensed video game.
Bernd Reichart, A22’s chief executive, has stressed that teams would have to qualify through their domestic leagues — abandoning the closed-shop model that proved so off-putting to fans when the idea was first floated in 2021 — but the qualifying process needs refinement, to say the least.
Indeed, pretty much the only issue A22 seems to have addressed is sponsorship. The new competition would be known, the company revealed with a flourish, as the Unify League. In many ways, that seems to encapsulate the situation nicely: naming rights to a tournament that does not contain any teams have been given to a streaming platform that doesn’t actually exist.
It should be no surprise, then, that the reaction from the institutions that A22 hopes to overturn has risen from disinterest only to express disdain. “A project that still does not count on any support from clubs, federations, players, fans or institutions,” as a forthright statement from La Liga put it. Javier Tebas, the president of La Liga, went further, accusing “the guys from A22” of producing “formats like churros”, presumably because they have no nutritional value but are sprinkled with sugar.
Alex Muzio, owner of the Belgian team Union Saint-Gilloise and the president of the Union of European Clubs, told journalists in Belgium that the project was “poorly constructed and poorly conceived. It’s got so many flaws. It’s like a 10-year-old’s summer homework that Mum and Dad didn’t look at. I can’t believe anyone would sign up for it.”
While valid, though, that reaction might be almost exactly what A22 wants. During the course of the 2016 presidential election, The Atlantic journalist Salena Zito wrote that the problem with assessing the candidacy of Donald Trump was that the “press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally”.
A22’s plan, in its current form, seems to fit the second definition, rather than the first. Reichart likely does not believe this iteration of his project will one day play out on the pitches of Europe.
Real Madrid won last season’s Champions League before the tournament was revamped this year, but who knows what will come next? (Antonio Villalba/Real Madrid via Getty Images)
What he does believe is that, according to a ruling from the European Court of Justice last December, UEFA and FIFA must allow third parties to propose and explore new competitions. Their role is to act as regulators for the game, but they must do so in a “transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate” manner. If A22 proposes something that works better for fans, or players, or teams, then UEFA and FIFA are legally bound to consider it.
“There is a paragraph in the ruling that talks about the fact that a so-called regulator cannot go on ad infinitum and must respond to requests within a reasonable period of time,” Reichart said yesterday. “I am sure we will find that paragraph and make it available.”
This proposal, then, is more than a kite being flown; it is a trap being set. If UEFA allows clubs to investigate the idea, that works for A22. If it reacts as it did to the initial Super League proposal, creating what Reichart described as “an environment of sanctions and threats” and potentially placing itself in breach of its duties as an independent regulator, then that might be even better.
In that case, the real issue with the ideas A22 has put forward would come into much sharper focus. “They have talked about UEFA being stodgy and old-fashioned,” Muzio said. “But today it is: ‘We’re bringing back home and away (group-stage games) like everyone likes!’ Who is being innovative? This is still three points for a win, one for a draw, zero for a loss, 90 minutes.”
That part of A22’s work should be taken literally. Reichart and his team have met with countless clubs over the past two years. The group has stressed it has been open to all sorts of constructive feedback as it attempts to overhaul a sport that has huge, systemic issues that the various powers-that-be have shown precious little appetite to notice, let alone address.
And their solution, as it stands, extends to little more than allowing fewer teams to enter European competition — 108 comprise the extended group stages this season — tweaking the format slightly and giving them names of frequent flyer programmes.
There is no attempt to solve the financial inequality that has made football as a whole more predictable, or to empower teams in leagues outside the major television markets, or to stop the game’s elite from hoarding talent. Even Unify, the streaming platform, is an idea that most major leagues, as well as FIFA, are currently exploring.
A22 is not proposing a revolution, but a retrenchment, an attempt to allow the powerful to solve the problems they themselves have created. Sometimes, as those unicorns prove, ideas take on a life of their own; things do not always turn out the way their designers intended. But all of them, at heart, offered something new, something different. They met a demand, provided a service. The same cannot be said for A22, no matter how many streaming platforms it can conjure from pure imagination.
Additional reporting by Matt Slater, Guillermo Rai and Dermot Corrigan
(Top photo: Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images)