No More Cups, Please

By: Greg | July 31st, 2007

cups A few days ago, officials from the Portuguese and Spanish leagues met and discussed the possibility of a cup tournament involving teams only from the Iberian Peninsula. While the concept on the surface may sound nice and the bragging rights for one of the bigger teams would be fun, this would be ridiculous. The tournament would end up being a logistical nightmare with so many games already being played between the league ties, cup ties, and international assignments, players would be burnt into submission.

If the true aim of the tournament is to see which team is the best on the peninsula, how can you determine this when teams like Benfica and Barcelona will be trotting out their B squad to save the starters for bigger European competition? It would be a nice means of getting subs time on the pitch in a “larger” game situation, but how can Porto or Sporting be expected to care when they’re contending with Euro qualification, Champions league games, and each other?

I see only three possible ways to give a tournament like this any steam whatsoever:

Have the winner qualify for some other, larger tournament. This will get the mid level teams fired up to give their all but, again, the top teams will not care about a spot in something like the UEFA Cup as they have already earned this on the pitch at home.

Another way to have the tournament be interesting would be to shut out the bottom feeder teams. Have an eight team tournament with the four top teams from each league. The top teams from each league should have relatively concurrent schedules being in the UEFA competitions and this would make scheduling easier. Also, if a team were to win the Iberian Cup, they could do it only winning three games. It solves the problem of diluting the competition and wearing the larger teams down. It also creates a potential problem that the big boys could turn this into a showcase for the sub squads, since they, again, have the UEFA tournaments to contend with.

Finally, you could essentially adopt an amalgamation of the Carlsberg Cup tournament starting this year in Portugal, but throw the Spaniards into the mix. The format of the tournament allows the big boys to sit on the sidelines while the “lower division” teams beat each other up. Then, after the scrum is complete, the big boys come in and play in a group format. If the group concept is too much, they could hypothetically just keep the knockout form and have the bigger teams come in real late.

No matter how you slice this, there’s plenty of cup competition going on in each country’s respective leagues that another tournament for silverware is really, in my opinion, unnecessary at this point. (Unless, of course, you’re one of the money grubbing clubs who want to ride these players to millions of Euros. In that case, they might as well turn football into baseball and have the players on the pitch 162 games a season)