A Super League?
Words by Dylan Mangan.
“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
It’s a phrase often dusted off in response to a quickfire round of news, a nice way of showing the magnitude of a situation. After years of huddled meetings and countless rumours, 12 elite football clubs - Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Inter Milan, AC Milan, and Juventus - have announced their intention to break away from the traditional European setup to form their own, closed, ‘Super League’. And so, it would be tempting to roll out the Lenin quote, make it nice and big, no bigger, and lead with that, but the truth is that a lot has happened in the last decade, with most of it gearing us up for this very moment.
For those not in the know: the 12 clubs mentioned above want to create their own competition, where they would control all rules, formats, and most importantly finances. They have designed the Super League (ESL) so that they can never be relegated from it, meaning they will make endless profits from it. It’s a move which disregards years of European club history, and is a naked attempt at guaranteeing the majority of money in football goes to a select few. You’ve been in the world recently, you know how it goes.
Football’s big clubs have never been confident in their ability to remain on top, and so have resorted to various money making schemes in order to solidify their advantage over smaller teams. In 1987, AC Milan’s former owner, Silvio Berlusconi, watched on in horror as Napoli faced off against Real Madrid in the first round of the European Cup. His disgust was based on the idea that, as two of Europe’s best teams, Napoli vs Madrid was a game fit only for the latter stages of the competition. It was from this game that UEFA rebranded and reformatted the competition into the Champions League that we all know and some love today. At the same time, the Premier League was formed out of the old English First Division, with Sky pumping money into the top league in the name of spectacle. The longer you’ve been around the top, the more money you’ll have in principle.
The same people who set up these money making competitions - UEFA and the Premier League - are now the most vociferous of opponents to the proposed European Super League. UEFA in particular have spent the last decade consistently appeasing these self-appointed big clubs with regular rule changes to their competitions, and a refusal to properly implement any regulations on club spending, despite setting up the optimistically named Financial Fair Play - a charade if ever you’ve seen one. UEFA themselves are no strangers to the smell of money - this very week was supposed to herald the announcement of a new format for the Champions League, ensuring more games for the big teams alongside more financial security, effectively tightening their grasp at the top even further. While this change is slated to still go ahead, owners at the 12 clubs who want to leave obviously didn’t feel that this was enough.
Why the outrage now? Why not at seemingly any point in the last 20 years? There have been various warning shots and red flags, dodgy finances and shady figures. We cannot comment on this moment as if we didn’t know it was coming, or pretend not to know that if this particular effort fails, another group of bandits will do it better. If art mirrors life then sport is a photo of it, and we’ve had this one on our bedside locker for years. We’ve been looking, but not seeing.
So, in a tale as old as late-stage capitalism itself, it is up to us the people to defend the honour of one set of self-interested, rich rule breakers against the scourge of another set of even more self-interested, richer rule breakers. Pretty grim. In many ways, the game is already gone - siphoned off into the pockets of petrostates, hedge funds, and oligarchs - and has been for some time. We have collectively looked away as money has corrupted a sport, turning it into yet another playground for the rich. The problem with trying to stop a European Super League is that it’s where the money is, and the moment football opened itself to the kind of money that is ungovernable; the billionaires, the oligarchs, the royalty that are used to controlling everything, it opened itself up to this.
There’s also no getting away from the fact that for many, the ESL will be exactly what they want. Football has been selling itself as content instead of sport in recent years, and the ESL would potentially be full of content. The majority of the younger, teenage generation are used to speaking about football in FIFA ratings and memes, and football has been having a crisis of confidence regarding how to keep their attention in a world where everyone is fighting for some. Andrea Agnelli, Juventus owner and football’s very own Monorail salesman, is one of the minds behind the move to an ESL, and has been at the front of this panic. “We could imagine a subscription for the last 15 minutes of a specific game,” he said. “The attention span of today’s kids and tomorrow’s spenders is completely different to the one I had when I was their age. If you take golf, if it’s interesting at all, it’s only the last six holes on the final day. You are not going to watch the whole thing on the TV unless you are a hardcore fan.” Proof, if ever it was needed, that the ESL is a business decision over anything else.
Any sound footballing business decision has to (in theory) have the approval of the fans. Boycotts, walkouts, and protests have all managed to change the mind of owners in the past when they’ve been trying to raise the price of tickets, and is one of the only realistic ways to enforce any change. Official supporter groups have unanimously condemned the plans, and if fans can hit owners where it hurts - their pockets - it could make a difference, but the pandemic has shown that football without fans for the biggest clubs is not the same death toll that it is for smaller ones. These clubs are not too big to fail, but are trying to rig the game so they become just that. They are the Amazon and Walmart of the sporting world, and for every person who morally boycotts, there will be another who doesn't, to step in and take their place.
Where to from here? Who knows. There are a number of ways things could pan out. Previous postering from these clubs has brought change to existing competitions, much in the same way you’d threaten to quit to get a pay rise, but this does feel different, and is crucially a lot more public than past examples of the same idea. We could all be sitting here next year saying the same as another few percentages of football’s money goes to quell the threat of a breakaway, and that seems most likely at the moment, but if nobody blinks then the change could actually happen. To that I say let them go. The team may go, but the people make a club, as Bobby Robson wrote, “What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.”
