Well, that didn’t last long, did it? Less than 48 hours after the launch of the European Super League, a proposed midweek tournament for 20 of the continent’s biggest clubs, 15 of whom would be permanent participants, the project collapsed amid a cacophony of condemnation from across the football world.
Europe’s governing authority, UEFA, immediately threatened to expel said clubs from this season’s Champions and Europa Leagues, domestic bodies warned they’d be barred from their own competitions and there was even the suggestion players would be unable to feature in the forthcoming Euros.
Players and managers spoke out, fans protested outside stadia and pundits spat vitriol from whichever platform they were offered.
The u-turns were almost immediate. Chelsea were the first to withdraw on Tuesday evening as supporters blocked the roads around Stamford Bridge, Manchester City soon followed and then it became a footrace to see who could leave the building the quickest. Atletico Madrid, Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur… the vanguard of this new footballing revolution, financed with a $3.5 billion loan from JP Morgan Chase, had scattered before it had developed a functioning website, never mind secured a broadcast partner.
For football fans, it was a moment to savour. The European Super League offered a ghost of football’s future, a franchise model in which the richest clubs play each other in a closed-shop format that eliminated the risk of relegation, guaranteed millions in revenue from a global TV audience and established a footballing monarchy of unchallengeable, cross-generational privilege. It’s what, we were told, everyone wanted.
Thankfully, very few did. In fact, the project laboured under so many misunderstandings about football, about sport and its enduring, tribal appeal that, in retrospect, it’s perhaps no surprise it withered on the vine so quickly.
Spirit of the game?
Firstly was the idea, floated by Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, one of the only public defenders of the project over the last two days, that football was in a financial crisis that the ESL alone could fix. Covid-19, he suggested, had pushed many clubs to the brink.
That is undeniably true, but Barcelona’s current debt of $1.3 billion isn’t down to a pandemic, it’s down to their own largesse. If they can’t balance their books with annual revenues in excess of $800 million, the highest turnover in the game, that isn’t a problem the enttire football pyramid ought to sacrifice itself to solve.
Barcelona’s current debt of $1.3 billion isn’t down to a pandemic, it’s down to their own largesse
The same goes for the self-created debt mountains at Real Madrid and Manchester United. They don’t have to spend $100 million on a 29-year-old with a patchy injury record. They don’t have to inflate their wage bills to 120 percent of turnover. They don’t have to pay interest on a leveraged buyout. They don’t have to keep paying off managers they sack for coming second.
In fact, instead of a creating a new league to exaggerate these inflationary pressures – while reducing the money available for smaller clubs in lesser leagues – maybe we first need to fix these clubs’ sense of entitlement. And then their access to credit.
The second is the idea that football as a product will be enhanced by pairing Europe’s mega-teams together on an endless loop. No one, the argument ran, wants to see Juventus against CFR Cluj or even against local rivals Torino. Juve-Barca every other week is where the fun is.
But when you consider the 12 founder clubs come from just seven cities in three leagues, they’re hardly strangers to each other. Does the game really need another two Classicos to add to their league and domestic cup encounters? Is there a demand for more Manchester, Milan or North London derbies than we have at present? And just ask Arsenal fans about the prospect of yet more games against Barcelona. I assume the novelty of that encounter wore off after a fourth defeat in six seasons.
Special games need to remain special. What might seem a mouth-watering prospect now will soon become a tedious grind as the same handful of fixtures pop up year after year. Indeed, you could argue the Champions League is a monotonous clique of the same clubs already – what we really need is new blood, new challengers, not lifetime membership.
This brings us to perhaps the most important failing of the ESL model. Supporters, whether they’re “legacy fans” packing out an away end at Anfield or watching on a stream in Amman, crave one magic ingredient: uncertainty. The unique combination of hope, fear and anxiety that live sport stimulates will soon be diluted if relegation, giant-killings or fairy-tale cup runs are removed from the equation.
No one wants foregone conclusions, no one wants games without meaning, no one wants chocolate cake for every meal.
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola
Fixing football
If the European Super League achieved anything it has been to underscore that, yes, the game needs reform. The remedy, though, would appear to be in exactly the opposite direction of what the ESL proposed.
Any sport flourishes with competition and it’s clear the financial disparities between the haves and the have-nots have created a miserably uneven playing field, resulting in monopolies in Germany (Bayern Munich) and Italy (Juventus), a duopoly in Spain (Barca, Real Madrid) and a handful of challengers in England that Leicester City’s miracle of 2015/16 merely serves to underline.
Hopefully, the clubs and governing bodies can look at the aftermath of the European Super League and address the issues of ownership, debt, financial fair play, wage-to-revenue limits and academy quotas to help reduce the gap between those invited to super leagues and those struggling to stay afloat. Ultimately, a league in which Real Madrid can occasionally come 17th and Sporting Gijon rule the roost is a far more appealing prospect than the current status quo.
Sport, as Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said so eloquently, is about merit. Or, in the words carried on the t-shirts of Leeds United’s players before their game with Liverpool, whatever you want to achieve in football, you have to earn it. Football needs more Leicester Cities not a bigger trophy cabinet at the Camp Nou.
Let’s hope we can rebuild a sport in which effort, talent and dedication are the measures of success, not brand value in global TV markets.
Eddie Taylor, General Manager of Arabian Business – and lifelong fan of Leeds United
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