The sport that most closely resembles college football is not the NFL. It’s European soccer.

There are no drafts or real salary caps, but there is recruitment. There is shady rule-breaking, communal fan bases and, for the most part, regional dividing lines. There are transfers over money and fears of a Super League.

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And if you want to forecast the future of college football in these uncertain times, soccer might be the place to look. In 2019, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey tweeted that he’d read “The Club,” a book about the history of England’s Premier League. Reading the book, it’s not hard to see all the similarities, including frustration from the richest teams that they must abide by the same rules as smaller teams.

In the wake of Saturday’s Champions League final, won by Manchester City 1-0 over Inter Milan, The Athletic reached out to some of its most prominent European soccer writers about the state of that sport and the similarities one can see with college football. You’ll find many of the same dynamics and concerns, especially around the richest leagues. (Some answers have been edited for length.)

Here in America, the Big Ten Conference and Southeastern Conference have separated themselves financially thanks largely to television money. How has the massive increase in TV rights money for the Premier League, along with billionaire owners, impacted football in England and other countries?

Matthew Slater (senior football news reporter, U.K.): Well, it depends who you ask and when you ask them! Sometimes — normally after one of the elite clubs in Spain, Italy, Germany etc. has been outbid for a player by the 17th best team in England — you will hear that the financial might of the English Premier League is killing European football and something must be done before the European club competitions become all-English affairs every season. But other times — usually after a continental team have sold their centre forward to the 17th best team in the EPL for a record fee — you will be told that European football has always had apex predators and it is just the EPL’s turn now.

The truth, as so often happens, is somewhere in the middle. The EPL has been the richest league for about two decades, but its lead over the other big leagues — France, Germany, Italy and Spain — has grown in recent seasons, particularly after the massive shock to the system provided by the pandemic. English clubs were able to weather that storm so much better than their rivals abroad. The main reason for this is the huge popularity of the EPL overseas, especially in Asia and North America. While most European leagues have seen their media rights flatline, the EPL’s have continued to grow.

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Adam Crafton (football reporter, U.K.): The Premier League’s broadcast rights deals are far and away the most lucrative of the domestic leagues in European sport. Take, for example, the case of the Dutch champions Feyenoord, who for the 2021-22 season secured less than €10 million from the Dutch league in broadcast revenue. By comparison, in the same campaign, even the bottom-placed Premier League side received £100 million via broadcast income. This gives an idea of the disparity. It means the Premier League clubs spend the most in the transfer window — in January, for example, Premier League clubs spent £815m combined, compared to £110m in the French Ligue 1, £60m in the German Bundesliga and £25m in the Italian Serie A and Spanish La Liga.

Raphael Honigstein (Bundesliga correspondent, Germany): PL money impact is a double-edged sword. Many clubs are quite happy to sell players for big bucks to England; it helps them grow. But English money also lured away top talent such as (Erling) Haaland, (Kevin) De Bruyne or (Kai) Havertz, who would have otherwise stuck around a little longer.

College football has had the same handful of teams at the top of the sport for years, much like European football. What is considered a successful season for fans of teams that won’t win their domestic league or make a Champions League semifinal or final?

Slater: It really depends on which teams we are talking about. There can only be one winner of your domestic league and four Champions League semifinalists, but there are hundreds of clubs in the top divisions across Europe — that is a lot of potential disappointment!

However, for many of those teams, simply surviving another season in their domestic top division will be a success. For others, there could be a good run in the domestic cup. And then there are the various races to qualify for European football. Aston Villa, Brighton and Newcastle United have not won anything this season but they have all surpassed expectations by reaching Europe next season, and their fans are absolutely delighted.

So, there are ways to please your fans, and your clubs’ accountants, without actually winning silverware or competing on the biggest stages, but it really does depend on your expectations. Bayern Munich won an 11th straight Bundesliga title — on the last day of the season — but failed in the Champions League and domestic cup, so they promptly sacked their director of football and chief executive.

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Crafton: This is a difficult question to answer, because a lot depends on the history of a club, their transfer budget and the overall expectations. So if you are a Premier League club that considers itself “Big Six” — Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham — then if you are not winning trophies, the absolute aim is securing a top-four finish which provides entry into the next season’s Champions League, which brings huge revenues and prestige. Newcastle, funded by Saudi Arabia, are joining that club, but for everyone else, the objective first of all is to maintain Premier League status and then it is perhaps to develop a desirable style of football.

Honigstein: For Dortmund, a successful season is winning a trophy, Leipzig not far off. Everyone else dreams of trophies — see Frankfurt — but aims for Champions League or European places. Important to understand that to most fans, support is part of communal experience and not really contingent on sporting success. Or to put it differently: Fans of teams below Bayern Munich don’t really care about Bayern winning, they only care about their own team doing as well as possible within their constraints.

College football has always been more similar to European soccer than the NFL.

This story on a small Paris team trying to build sounds exactly like a G5 or low-P5 college football team. Finding donors and paying $100,000 😱 for recruits. https://t.co/kap5rU1kga pic.twitter.com/4QJpDabcnb

— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) May 5, 2023

How difficult has it become for European teams who aren’t at the top tier to find, recruit and retain top players?

Slater: Finding them, if you are clever and well-run, is not a huge problem, as football is played almost everywhere and there are lots and lots of good players out there. Retaining them, on the other hand, has always been difficult for smaller clubs and that is not changing anytime soon. … In European football, there are very obvious tiers of teams and while it is possible to move between these tiers, it takes time and money (or a lack of money, if you are going in the wrong direction). In reality, there are only a handful of teams that never have to sell a player to a rival because it makes financial sense.

Once upon a time, the main difference between clubs was the size of your stadium, so big-city clubs used to be able to poach good players from clubs in towns, as clubs lived on what they could earn on match days. But television changed that. First, it was all about how big your national market was, so clubs in England, Germany and Italy started to earn more than ones in Belgium and Scotland. But then it became how popular your league is around the world, and that is when the Premier League started to motor away.

Crafton: The great thing about football is that it is incredibly accessible and played all over the world, so the talent pool is vast and networks of scouts operate on every continent. There are a very small number of clubs who can retain all the players they desire — it is probably only the top five or six Premier League clubs and Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, with the rest currently at the mercy of market forces where lower revenues or mounting debt can force sales. Take Borussia Dortmund, the second biggest club in Germany but very much recognised as a club that develops talent such as Jude Bellingham and Erling Haaland before they are picked off by wealthier clubs, while even Barcelona have been unable to retain Lionel Messi and Neymar in recent years.

Honigstein: Top players can always be found and or developed. Look at Napoli this year, or Brighton, their recruitment is superb. Holding on to them beyond a couple of years is all but impossible, though — you can’t stop market dynamics if someone is prepared to double or treble your wages.

Can teams outside the EPL keep up the arms race or do they risk spending themselves into oblivion?

Slater: Until relatively recently, the richest clubs in the other big leagues could and did compete financially with the EPL clubs. In fact, if you looked at a list of the biggest transfer fees ever paid, the list was dominated by PSG, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid and Juventus. That has started to change, though, with the EPL being the only league with big money to spend in recent transfer windows. For clubs outside that top bracket in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and everywhere else in Europe, they simply cannot go head-to-head with EPL clubs for transfer fees or wages. That is where the gap is becoming a gulf.

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Crafton: The reality of European football’s Financial Fair Play rules means, in theory, and I’m simply icing it here, that a club should roughly aim to spend in line with what it brings in revenue wise, but this brings obvious limitations when the media revenues are so heavily skewed towards the Premier League, or state-backed clubs simply blow their competitors out of the market. It means famous clubs such as Dutch side Ajax, or Italian club AC Milan, must now run smartly and sustainably, selling their best talent and reinvesting wisely.

In America, conference realignment has universities angling to get a spot in the Big Ten or SEC. European soccer teams obviously can’t change countries, but is there a concern that the concentration of wealth in one league and a handful of teams will bring the Super League back and that those top wealthy teams will eventually leave everyone else behind? And what can fans do about it?

Slater: The fear of missing out on EPL broadcast revenues is the emotion that is keeping the European Super League dream/nightmare alive. But it is no longer being marketed as a competition that would ensure the world’s best teams play each other every season. No, it is now being sold to fans as the only way Barca, Juve, Real and whoever else they can persuade to join them can keep apace with the EPL. It has become a hedge, a reaction, a defence mechanism.

It is not the only idea in town, though. While European teams cannot change countries, their borders between their leagues could evaporate. The idea of cross-border leagues to create larger TV markets is as old as the European Super League concept. People have wondered why Celtic and Rangers do not join the English league to make it a British league for decades, and there have been plans floated for cross-border competitions in Benelux, central Europe and Scandinavia. One of the more interesting ideas was an Atlantic League made up of the best sides from Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal, Scandinavia and Scotland.

So far, none of these ideas has taken off. Football is a conservative industry, and all these concepts would require huge leaps of faith for the clubs involved. They would almost certainly upset fans at home, with the rewards being uncertain. The flip side is that doing nothing will just see the EPL consolidate its position as the de facto Super League in Europe. By almost every metric it is already the most popular, richest and strongest domestic league. What will the global landscape look like after another decade of English teams buying the best players, hiring the top coaches and playing to the biggest audiences?

English fans were the loudest in their opposition to the European Super League, but there are many in Europe who think that was because the status quo is working for them. What will fans in France, Germany, Italy and Spain (and fans of clubs in those countries who live in Africa, Asia and the Americas) say next time a proposal comes along to create a cross-border competition to rival the EPL?

Crafton: There is always a strong fear that the Super League project could return, mostly because the clubs that signed up to it have not been overly fast in withdrawing legally from the project while court cases are pending which may give further legitimacy to the idea. But the short- to medium-term reality is that the English clubs are key to the project and the response from the British government and English football supporters was so strident that it would appear highly unlikely those clubs would dare to attempt this again anytime soon. And besides, they have now woken up to the fact that Premier League media revenues mean the sport is already heavily skewed in their favour, so it would only be a frankly obscene level of greed that could drag them back in. Which we should never rule out.

Honigstein: The Super League is dead, at least for a few good years. After the original concept contained six(!) English clubs, it’s now been repackaged as a way to challenge the Premier League but that’s just gaslighting. There is no mechanism by which continental sides can make up the gap — unless they completely open themselves up for takeovers (not the case in Germany and for Real Madrid and Barcelona).

(Photo: Alex Grimm / Getty Images)