In July 2025, Sporting Clube de Portugal sold Viktor Gyökeres to Arsenal for a guaranteed €65.7 million, with another €10.2 million potentially due in performance bonuses. He had scored fifty-four goals across all competitions in the season prior. He had been, by some distance, the best centre-forward in the Liga Portuguesa, possibly the best centre-forward in any league outside the so-called Big Five. Sporting’s supporters had spent two years watching him become a player around whom a generational team was being built. He stayed long enough for one title push and one Champions League campaign and then he left, because of course he did, because the structural physics of European football make it impossible for a player of that calibre to remain at a club of that revenue base for longer than the time it takes to attract a bidder.
I do not begrudge Gyökeres the move. I do not particularly begrudge Arsenal the signing. The transfer, looked at in isolation, is a small example of a market doing what markets do. The problem is that there is no isolation any more. The Gyökeres transfer is the same transfer as Cody Gakpo from PSV to Liverpool, as Sven Botman from Lille to Newcastle, as the parade of Eredivisie and Liga Portuguesa graduates whose names blur together because the pattern is so monotonous: develop the player at home, sell him at twenty-three, hope the fee buys you another two-year shot at finishing top in a league that the rest of European football has stopped watching.
The Liga Portuguesa is not a development league. It is, on the public record, a four-time European champion’s league. Sporting, Porto, and Benfica between them have won three Champions League titles and seven UEFA Cup or Europa League titles, with European finals as recently as 2011. The league has, in the present moment, become a holding pen for talent that everyone with eyes can see is en route to the Premier League or La Liga. This is not the league’s choice. It is the consequence of a continental structure that is, on the visible evidence, designed to extract value from the so-called secondary leagues and concentrate it in five or six clubs whose revenues now exist on a different planet from the football economy that produced them.
This piece is the case for treating that extraction as the problem it is. It is not, I want to say upfront, an argument against the Champions League or against international club football. It is an argument that the institutional architecture currently being built — expanded continental competitions, club-tier global tournaments, the looming legal possibility of a breakaway Super League — is hollowing out the domestic leagues that are, in any honest accounting, the cultural foundation of the sport.
What the Continental Map Looks Like Now
The 2024–25 season was the first under UEFA’s restructured Champions League. The competition expanded from 32 clubs to 36, replaced the group stage with a Swiss-model league phase in which each club plays eight different opponents (four home, four away), and added playoff rounds for clubs finishing between ninth and twenty-fourth in the league phase. The reforms increased the total number of Champions League matches across the competition from 125 to 189. The total prize pool for 2024–25 reached approximately €2.71 billion, the highest figure in the competition’s history. PSG, the eventual winners, took home roughly €144 million in prize money alone — a figure greater than the entire annual revenue of every Eredivisie and Liga Portuguesa club combined.
In June 2025, FIFA staged the first 32-team Club World Cup in the United States, a tournament financed against a $1 billion prize pool and contested by clubs across six confederations. The tournament was added to a calendar that already included expanded UEFA competitions, the post-2026 World Cup expansion to 48 nations, and the increasing prevalence of mid-season club tours to commercial markets that, on football’s traditional calendar, would have been the players’ rest period.
In December 2023, the European Court of Justice ruled in case C-333/21 that FIFA and UEFA’s rules requiring prior approval of new continental competitions were contrary to EU competition law — that the governing bodies, having a dominant position in the market for organising such competitions, could not block alternative tournaments without a transparent and proportionate framework. The ruling did not authorise the European Super League. It did remove the principal legal mechanism by which UEFA had previously prevented one. The Super League promoters, A22 Sports Management, have spent the period since reformulating their proposal under various names and various structures. The legal headroom for some version of a breakaway competition is, on the public record, larger than it was before December 2023.
These three developments — the UCL expansion, the Club World Cup, the post-ECJ legal landscape — are not separate events. They are, taken together, the architecture of a continental football economy in which the elite clubs play more matches against each other, accumulate more revenue from those matches, and depend less and less on the domestic leagues that nominally provide their structural home. Each development, on its own, is defensible. Their cumulative effect is the slow-motion conversion of football’s elite tier into a closed system whose connection to the domestic leagues below it is increasingly extractive.
What “Feeder League” Actually Means
The phrase “feeder league” gets used loosely. Let me try to use it precisely. A feeder league, in the structural sense I mean, is a competition whose primary economic and sporting function is the production of talent that will be sold to a higher-tier league before that talent has the chance to define the lower league’s identity.
By this definition, the Eredivisie has been a feeder league for at least fifteen years. PSV, Ajax, and Feyenoord — Dutch football’s traditional giants, three of European football’s most historically significant clubs — now operate, in the present economic configuration, on the same business model: identify a player at sixteen, develop him to twenty-two or twenty-three, sell him for a fee that funds the next two transfer windows. Ajax’s most expensive sales of the past decade — Frenkie de Jong, Matthijs de Ligt, Antony — left for fees north of €70m apiece. The clubs they left for were, in every case, in one of the Big Five leagues. The pattern is so consistent that the Dutch football media now treats every breakthrough season by an Eredivisie player as the prelude to a transfer window that will end in a Premier League announcement video.
The Liga Portuguesa is the same story with a slightly different revenue ceiling. Benfica, Porto, and Sporting have, between them, sold José Mourinho’s idea of a sustainable elite-level Portuguese game to a market that has no interest in sustaining it. Bruno Fernandes left Sporting for Manchester United for a fee that briefly broke the Premier League’s January-window record. Luís Díaz left Porto for Liverpool. Darwin Núñez left Benfica for Liverpool. Enzo Fernández left Benfica for Chelsea for £107m, six months after Benfica had bought him from River Plate. The Portuguese clubs are, in revenue terms, increasingly indistinguishable from the South American clubs whose role in the global market they were once a step above. They develop the player. They get a fee. They start again.
The Belgian Pro League has been openly described — by the league’s own clubs, in their own commercial documents — as a development competition. Club Brugge, Anderlecht, Genk, and Royal Antwerp have, over the past five years, made selling players to bigger leagues an explicit part of their business model. The league’s coaches talk about it without embarrassment, because the alternative would be pretending the structural reality is something it isn’t. A young player who emerges at Genk knows, at the point of his first-team breakthrough, that the realistic ceiling of his Belgian career is two strong seasons before the buying clubs arrive.
The Scottish Premiership is the most painful case, because it has the longest cultural history of any of these leagues and the most depleted competitive content in the present moment. Celtic and Rangers, in the 1960s and 1970s, were European powers — Celtic won the European Cup in 1967, Rangers won the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1972. The two clubs together now operate at a revenue level approximately a tenth of the average Premier League club’s. Their best players leave at twenty-three for prices that, in the modern transfer market, are not even noteworthy. The league’s competitive content has been reduced to a two-club race that the rest of Scottish football is structurally excluded from contesting.
Even Serie A — a Big Five league, on most accountings — has become a two-tier competition whose mid-table is, in functional terms, a feeder for the Premier League’s recruitment departments. Atalanta have spent the past decade developing players they then sold to English clubs at a substantial mark-up. Bologna’s 2023–24 Champions League qualification was followed by a transfer window in which most of the squad that achieved it was dismantled. The line between “Big Five” and “feeder league” is, on present trajectory, thinner than the institutional class wants to admit.
The Cultural Argument
The economic argument against the feeder-league dynamic is straightforward and has been made many times. The cultural argument is the one I think gets less attention than it deserves, partly because it is harder to articulate, and partly because the institutional class that benefits from the existing system has no incentive to articulate it.
Football is not, principally, a continental sport. It is a regional and national sport that uses continental competition as a periodic showcase. The Eredivisie’s cultural meaning, for Dutch supporters, is not derived from PSV’s Champions League performances. It is derived from the rhythm of a league season in which Ajax, PSV, Feyenoord, Twente, AZ, and Utrecht play each other across nine months, accumulate stories, sustain rivalries, hold the attention of a national audience that organises its weekends around the fixtures. When the league becomes structurally incapable of retaining the players who define those stories — when the breakthrough talent is gone before he has played thirty league matches — the cultural meaning of the league itself begins to erode.
This erosion is not theoretical. Eredivisie attendance figures, league-level television revenues, and supporter-survey data on the perceived quality of domestic football all show, over the past decade, the slow leakage of cultural weight from the league. The pattern is identical in Portugal. It is identical in Belgium. It is identical, with allowances for the different scale, in Scotland. The supporters know what is happening. The clubs know what is happening. The institutional class — UEFA, FIFA, the broadcasters whose rights fees prefer the elite-club product — has no interest in pretending otherwise, because the existing trajectory suits them.
The cultural argument matters because football’s reach, its grip on national imagination, is a function of competitive integrity at the league level. A league that has stopped being the genuine destination for its own best players has stopped, in any meaningful sense, being a top-tier sporting competition. It has become a development pipeline that happens to be staged in front of a paying audience. The audience can see that, and over time the audience adjusts its emotional investment accordingly. You cannot maintain cultural depth in a competition whose participants are openly auditioning for the exit.
What Would Actually Help
The reforms that would protect domestic leagues from continued extraction are not technically difficult. They are politically obstructed by exactly the institutional class that built the current architecture. I will list them anyway, because the conversation has to happen somewhere and because the legal landscape post-ECJ is more permissive of structural reform than it has been at any point in the previous decade.
The first reform is a meaningful redistribution of continental prize money downward through national federations to non-elite domestic clubs. UEFA already operates a solidarity-payment mechanism — a small fraction of Champions League revenue is, in theory, distributed to clubs not participating in the competition. The fraction is wholly inadequate to the scale of the revenue gap it is meant to compensate for. Increasing the solidarity pool to, say, fifteen per cent of total Champions League revenue, distributed via national federations to clubs in the lower domestic divisions, would meaningfully change the structural calculation. The political resistance to this from the participating elite clubs would be ferocious. The legal grounding for it, post-ECJ, is firmer than it was. The reform is technically simple. It requires only the political will that UEFA’s current leadership has, on the public record, shown no sign of possessing.
The second reform is a calendar protection: a hard cap on continental fixtures per club per season, enforced via UEFA licensing, designed to prevent the continued expansion of the elite-club fixture list at the expense of the domestic season. The current trajectory — with the 36-club UCL, the four-yearly Club World Cup, and the various commercial tours — has elite clubs playing seventy-plus competitive matches a season, with the domestic league increasingly treated as a mid-week obligation between the games that pay. A regulatory cap would force the elite clubs to choose, and the choice would necessarily restore some weight to the domestic competition.
The third reform is a structural transfer-fee solidarity contribution — a percentage of every fee paid by a Big Five club to a non-Big-Five club, held in escrow by FIFA and distributed to clubs at the lower end of the selling league’s pyramid. The mechanism is the same as the existing solidarity contribution that funds youth development; the scale needs to be large enough to matter. Five per cent of every transfer above twenty million euros, mandatorily contributed and mandatorily distributed, would re-route a meaningful share of the extracted value back into the league it was extracted from.
The fourth reform — the one with the strongest political headwind and the strongest sporting case — is the closure, by treaty among UEFA and the major national federations, of any path to a closed-membership Super League. Post-ECJ, this requires an affirmative regulatory framework rather than a prohibition; the framework would need to be transparent, proportionate, and grounded in articulable competitive-integrity principles. It is not impossible. It would require a level of institutional cooperation that football’s governance bodies have rarely demonstrated. The alternative — accepting that the December 2023 ruling makes some form of breakaway competition increasingly likely — is the alternative the institutional class is, in practice, currently choosing by inaction.
The Position
I want to end with a clear position, because the editorial brief asked for one and because the analysis above does not, on its own, settle the question.
Domestic football is not negotiable. It is the foundation on which everything else — the continental competitions, the international tournaments, the global commercial reach — is built. Treating the domestic leagues as a development pipeline for five or six superclubs is, in the medium term, an act of structural vandalism against the sport. The continental architecture that has been built since 2024 — the 36-club Champions League, the Club World Cup, the looming post-ECJ legal landscape — is not, by itself, the cause of the domestic-league hollowing-out. But it has accelerated a trajectory that was already a problem, and it has done so in a way that benefits the smallest possible constituency at the largest possible cost.
The Eredivisie, Liga Portuguesa, Belgian Pro League, and Scottish Premiership are not minor leagues whose decline is an acceptable trade for the continental product. They are the leagues that produced Cruyff and Eusébio and Dalglish and the football culture out of which the modern game was made. Treating them as a development tier — extracting their best talent at twenty-three, monetising it through the Big Five — destroys, slowly, what made football worth caring about in the first place. The cultural value of a league cannot be reconstituted once it is gone. The infrastructure of identity that surrounds Sporting Lisbon, that surrounded Celtic in their European Cup–winning years, that still surrounds Ajax even in the present diminishment, is built across decades and is not replaceable by additional Champions League matches.
I am not optimistic that this argument will land in the institutional places that need to hear it. The constituency for protecting domestic football is the same constituency that has been arguing, for years, against the various extractive reforms — and it is the constituency without political weight in the rooms where the decisions get made. UEFA’s executive structure, FIFA’s commercial priorities, and the elite clubs’ revenue trajectories all point in the opposite direction.
But the argument needs making anyway. The 36-club Champions League is not a neutral expansion. The Club World Cup is not a neutral addition. The post-ECJ legal landscape is not a neutral development. They are, taken together, the architecture of a football economy in which the domestic leagues that built the sport are increasingly servants of the continental tier, and the continental tier is increasingly the property of a closed group of clubs whose interests are not aligned with the sport’s. Some of the reform proposals above will eventually be implemented, in some form, by some institution, in some moment of regulatory or political crisis. The question is how much of the domestic ecosystem survives until then. On the present trajectory, less than there ought to be. Less than the supporters who built this game deserve.
The leagues are the sport. Not the trophies, not the global tournaments, not the broadcast rights. The leagues. Protect them, or lose what made the rest of it matter.