European Super League shambles

The Eu­ro­pean Super League, or ESL, was an­nounced to the wide­spread be­muse­ment of the foot­balling world on Sun­day April 18. By Wednes­day 21 the pro­ject ap­peared to be dead in the water, de­spite Real Madrid and erst­while ESL pres­i­dent Flo­rentino Pérez claim­ing oth­er­wise.

Her­alded as an al­ter­na­tive to the Cham­pi­ons League by its twelve found­ing mem­bers – AC Milan, Ar­se­nal, Atlético Madrid, FC Barcelona, Chelsea, Inter Milan, Ju­ven­tus, Liv­er­pool, Man­ches­ter City, Man­ches­ter United, Real Madrid and Tot­ten­ham – the pro­ject was sub­jected to such ve­he­ment crit­i­cism from all sides, from apoplec­tic fans of both the found­ing and all other clubs, to angry for­mer play­ers and dis­be­liev­ing media pun­dits, that ten of the twelve had of­fi­cially with­drawn their sup­port within days. Amid all the hul­la­baloo, one word stood out: greed.

The six Eng­lish clubs in­volved de­cided to step back and aban­don the pro­ject on Tues­day 20, and the fol­low­ing day the Milan clubs and Atlético Madrid did the same. That left only Real Madrid, Juve and Barça. The rea­sons the Cata­lan media and the club it­self have cited for Barça to stay are that they see changes to Eu­ro­pean com­pe­ti­tions and the way in which money is dis­trib­uted as un­avoid­able. Al­though new Barça pres­i­dent Joan La­porta sees the ESL as dead, the club be­lieves that after a pe­riod of re­flec­tion the founders will be able to ne­go­ti­ate fu­ture com­pe­ti­tions with UEFA. La­porta has said he is will­ing to act as me­di­a­tor be­tween of­fi­cial bod­ies and clubs that are com­mit­ted to change, while Barça have also in­sisted that they will aban­don the pro­ject if the mem­bers do not sup­port it.

Most of the clubs that re­signed from the ESL apol­o­gised to their fans in the fol­low­ing days, and Span­ish teams that had been left out of the pro­ject took to the field with shirts bear­ing slo­gans de­nounc­ing the new com­pe­ti­tion. Javier Tebas, pres­i­dent of La Liga, took ad­van­tage of the pro­ject’s fail­ure to at­tack its founders, and es­pe­cially Flo­rentino Pérez. “The Super League has made its pro­mot­ers look like fools. They have shown a great ig­no­rance of what the in­dus­try and foot­ball fans are all about. I don’t feel be­trayed be­cause I’ve been in this world for years and I know the self­ish­ness of some clubs. Will I call Flo­rentino? He’s the one who has to call and give ex­pla­na­tions to the other clubs. He’s the one who has dis­re­spected La Liga by doing things in se­cret. Should the pres­i­dents in­volved re­sign? They will have to con­sider it.”

Mean­while, seem­ingly obliv­i­ous to the venom his com­ments were at­tract­ing in the world of foot­ball, and es­pe­cially from what have now come to be called “legacy fans”, as op­posed to “fans of the fu­ture”, Pérez said, “We’re going to con­tinue work­ing on it. The pro­ject is on standby,” re­it­er­at­ing his view that the ESL was cre­ated “to save foot­ball”. The Real Madrid pres­i­dent also pre­vi­ously said the move had been made be­cause young peo­ple were “no longer in­ter­ested in foot­ball” due to there being “a lot of poor qual­ity games”, adding that he was “sad and dis­ap­pointed” by the re­ac­tion to the pro­ject, which the clubs had been work­ing on “for around three years.”

Alek­sander Ce­ferin, UEFA pres­i­dent, crit­i­cised Pérez and ex­on­er­ated La­porta with re­gard to the ini­tia­tive. “Every­one has dis­ap­pointed me to a cer­tain ex­tent, but I have to say that per­haps Barcelona is the one that has dis­ap­pointed me the least,” he said. “La­porta was under a lot of pres­sure due to the fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion the club was in after Bar­tomeu left,” Ce­ferin ar­gued.

Note:

This ar­ti­cle re­places Bar­ney’s usual up­date on Cat­alo­nia’s lead­ing foot­ball clubs, which will re­turn next month.

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