Goatseye said:
Yeah, and it makes them more money. All the teams are multi-billion dollar franchises. Fifa's not a free market, it's an anarchy where shady deals go on with any one that has capital. Look at how hedge funds are using smaller teams in Europe to make deals with billionaires from Russia and Emirates states. |
and look how many American teams are purely artificial and change their name and home location or go completely out of business.
It makes them more money since it's just one country and thus only one major professional league for each kind of sport and they all share a very similar taste. If the team is unsuccessful or not profitable enough, it will disappear, thus only leaving the big clubs alive.
In Europe there's only one major sport and that is football. The top clubs there can compete with the American teams in terms of value. After all Real Madrid is the most valuable sports team in the world.
Aside from football each country has another form of sport that is rather big there, but not on a worldwide or even European-wide scale.
Cricket (England), Handball (Germany), Basketball (Spain), Hockey (Russia), Rugby (Britain), Volleyball (Russia)
(countries in brackets are IMO the most influential in that kind of sport. Didn't want to mention more than one country.)
With European football most people only care about the domestic league (national interest) and how these teams do in Champions League (national pride). If there was a single country of 300m people in Europe, expect much more clubs to be multi-billion dollar franchises in that country.
Much higher potential to sell merchandise products, build bigger stadiums and everyone could watch the games there because they all have access to the same channels.
