Update: Chelsea and every other English club which had signed up to the Super League have now, thankfully and somewhat inevitably, rescinded their membership. Unfortunately, the Champions League reforms, which include their own anti-competitive protections for big clubs, have received little attention and are yet to be addressed. Nevertheless, in celebration of the Super League crumbling at least, I've added a few photos to the article from the protest I attended yesterday outside Chelsea's stadium.
For those who don't follow football - or soccer, if you're Stateside - the five biggest clubs in England, and Tottenham, plus the three biggest from Italy and Spain respectively, announced plans to break away from the major European club competition, the Champions League, in order to form their own, where they, the 'founding members', would be guaranteed participants. It is a cynical attempt to consolidate their power, increase and secure their already vast income streams, and mitigate the financial and symbolic risk of failing to qualify for the top table event in any given year. To put it bluntly, it is an entirely contemptible enterprise. It is so disgraceful that recent reforms to the existing Champions League, which themselves add measures to consolidate qualification for big clubs, have been largely ignored, despite being appalling in their own right.
That several European big clubs (putting aside the strangeness that half the founding clubs of an ostensibly European league are from a country which recently departed the European Union, but I digress) feel emboldened to do this speaks to how far football has strayed from its core purpose of being a working class sport driven by fans rather than corporate interests. In principle, I find it utterly reprehensible. However, I've argued before about how seemingly negative outcomes can produce unexpectedly constructive results, and how bad things can be an opportunity to change the status quo for the better. In that spirit, I'd like to present an alternate interpretation to the current consensus that the proposed Super League will mark the end of football, when it might present the opportunity to save it.
I'm a Chelsea fan and have been for most of my life. My love for the club blossomed from witnessing the great Gianfranco Zola turn the workmanlike act of manipulating a football into feats of extraordinary grace and beauty. The club was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2003, but was bought out by a Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, who pumped billions into transforming it from a somewhat cosmopolitan domestic cup contender to one of the continent's powerhouse clubs.
I still remember the feeling of disorientation when Abramovich's takeover was announced, followed by exhilaration as big money signings started flowing in and the club became a genuine contender for national and European trophies. I also remember the nagging itch once the excitement had died down some years later that I was no longer watching a club in the sense that had drawn me to football in the late first place, but a status symbol for the rich for whom fans were of decidedly tertiary importance behind claiming the biggest sponsorships and TV contracts.
Let's not be overly romantic, however: big money has been a net positive for football. It turned the English game into a global event and massively raised its standards, largely wiped out the once-endemic hooligan element and diminished, but sadly by no means eradicated, the acceptability of vocal racism at its grounds (a significant amount of which has been reborn on social media). Not only has the quality of football improved, but standards of hygiene and the match-going experience at grounds as well. Had the Premier League never been founded, itself out of powerful clubs' commercially-driven interests, football and national culture surrounding it would be much worse off. The story of how this came to pass is told in fascinating detail in a book, The Club, co-written by a friend of mine.
Despite its considerable benefits, the transformation of football from a grungy, working-class sport into a global commercial giant planted seeds which sprouted with the Abramovich takeover of Chelsea - following by a raft of similar takeovers from foreign investors, not always as successfully and occasionally by de facto asset-strippers preying on smaller, more vulnerable clubs - and has arguably fully bloomed with the announcement of the breakaway Super League. As billionaire investors flooded the game and major clubs moved to consolidate their power and strengthen their financial bottom lines on an inherently risky investment, some predicted it well ahead of time: Arsรจne Wenger, the highly respected former Arsenal manager, said in 2009 that it would become reality in a decade.
There's every possibility that the Super League will not go ahead. The backlash has been severe - in England at least, where half the clubs involved reside - and for better and worse, the corporations and financiers upon whose involvement the venture really depends are increasingly tetchy about social media backlashes: clubs may not value their fans, but their protests do have the potential to unsettle investors. The British government has pledged to stop it in its tracks and Prince William, a devoted Aston Villa fan and advocate for using football for the national good, has voiced concern. The Super League has a lot of power behind it, but is amassing a lot of power against it as well. If it was ever more than an aggressively-played negotiating tactic for reforms favouring big clubs in the Champions League (which have, unfortunately, been at least partially secured), the level of resistance it has encountered may yet kill it at birth.
As despicable as the project is, I wonder whether allowing it to go ahead might ultimately serve football better in the long run and lead to an enforced rebalancing of the status quo, potentially humbling the sport without going so far as to return it to the dark old days of hooliganism and dangerously rickety stadia.
Sticking to the English side of the equation, let's assume the six clubs involved do indeed break away into the Super League. The domestic Premier League has threatened to ban them, though the likelihood of this happening is virtually nil no matter what. The situation we find ourselves in is that six major clubs in England (well, five plus Tottenham, but for the sake of brevity...) are still playing in their domestic league, but with top-level European football guaranteed no matter how poorly they perform.
This will almost certainly shift those clubs' interest away from the domestic league and towards the Super League. Once those clubs start believing their chances of winning the Premier League are slim, they cease to have any reason to take the competition seriously: under the current rules, clubs must finish in the top four places to qualify for the Champions League. If their places at the top table are guaranteed, nothing but the top spot matters for them. This plausibly means fielding weaker selections and giving smaller teams, many of whom are already highly competitive, a chance to make up ground and qualify for the Champions League.
The Champions League might be diminished by the absence of so many big clubs, but there are plenty who have disavowed the Super League - particularly Paris St. Germain and several German clubs - and will thus preserve a certain level of prestige and interest, particularly on the continent (the increasing number of prominent American players in the European leagues may expand that reach further). By contrast, the Super League may have the biggest clubs, but it is plausible that interest in it will wane over time: its composition is already, and will likely remain, heavily leaning towards English clubs, which will damage its credibility as a continental competition. Even if it grows to incorporate as many clubs as the current Champions League, the guaranteed involvement of at least half its clubs mean the same teams playing each other over and over again, while the Champions League would likely double down on the diversity of participating teams, one of its existing strengths.
Anyone who has watched a pre-season friendly between major clubs will know how tedious football can become when there is nothing at stake. In the sterile, repetitive environment of the Super League, the self-appointed big clubs may soon find international viewing figures dropping off, and corporate backing with it. Once the financial benefits start drying up, the Super League's founding clubs would likely do a deal with UEFA for a face-saving 'merger' back into the Champions League (assuming UEFA held their nerve and kept it running, which of course they must) to revert to the status quo. Except, having neglected their domestic competition for years and allowed a much wider net of clubs access to the lucrative field of European football, those clubs find themselves once again dependent on qualification through placing at or near the top of the Premier League table, but with a larger and strengthened field of competitors. Thus, the big clubs are suddenly just clubs again.
Is this a fantasy? Of course. Nobody can predict the future, no matter how fashionable it is to claim otherwise. However, if the announcement of the Super League is an outcome of a profoundly unhealthy status quo in football - whether in society, politics, economics, personal relationships or sport, the law of cause and effect remains unshakeable - then allowing a fundamental change to that status quo, even one motivated by the most reprehensible impulses, should not automatically be considered a bad thing so much as a necessary shake-up with the potential to ultimately lead to improved outcomes with the right direction.
Greed and arrogance have a tendency towards eventual self-destruction - 90% of inherited wealth disappears within three generations, for instance - and allowing that process to play out, even if it means persevering through short-term harm, carries the possibility of meaningful change that small, symbolic 'reforms', inevitably neutered by the Powers-That-Be, never can. The Super League is a contemptible act of cowardice and self-preservation by the powerful which goes against everything football is supposed to represent. Paradoxically, it may yet be those values' salvation.
