Amid the immediate, impassioned and unrestrained outrage that greeted plans for soccer’s European Super League, a fascinating article found its way to social media. It was from a venerable and iconic British sports columnist and it gave a sensible and thoughtful account of soccer’s position, namely the need to balance athletic functionality with the realities of commerce. The headline of the article read that “Economic Reality Will Force (A) European League.” It was written 57 years ago. That’s right. The owners of 12 of the wealthiest teams in soccer might have thought they’d come across something fresh and revolutionary with the bold proposal that would have set up a continental league guaranteeing ongoing membership (with no relegation possible) to each of the founders. In truth, as Brian Glanville’s piece from the February 1964 edition of “World Soccer Magazine” shows, this is a concept that might as well be older than time, dating back to a period when everyone wore leather cleats with metal studs and when pro players would routinely drop by the local pub after training. Given that such an idea has been in the works for so long, how is it possible that when it was finally put into place – last weekend – it was done with such apparent haste and dismal execution? Within moments of the teams putting out the same statement revealing a breakaway from the existing structures of domestic soccer, the reaction was furious. The media hated it, column after column attacking the blindness and greed of the ownership groups, which included Americans Stan Kroenke (Arsenal), the Glazer family (Manchester United) and John W. Henry (Liverpool). Head coaches broke ranks, with Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola blasting the ESL’s closed shop nature. “It is not fair when one team fights, fights, fights, arrives at the top and cannot qualify because success is already guaranteed just for a few teams,” Guardiola said. “This is not sport.” Players voiced their concerns too, with Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford, Liverpool’s James Milner and Barcelona’s Gerard Pique especially outspoken. But, more than anything, what broke the ESL was that the fans detested all it stood for. John Ley, a former ”London Daily Telegraph” journalist, is a lifelong Arsenal fan who watched his first game in 1966 and was born just over a mile from the club’s former Highbury Stadium. This week, Ley was due to have the club’s crest tattooed on his right arm. As a result of his disgust at the ESL proposal, he cancelled his appointment. “A tattoo is a lifetime commitment,” Ley told me, via telephone. “If they can’t commit to their fans, why should we commit to them.” Most telling of all was that those with the greatest sense of loathing came from the clubs involved, rather than those teams that would have been excluded. Protests from Chelsea diehards blocked the roads around their Stanford Bridge Stadium before a match against Brighton, while supporter groups from each of the clubs involved released strongly worded statements. And, just like that, the ESL was dead in the water. One by one, the clubs pulled out, mostly in the same way they had announced it in the first place, behind a brief press release. Which was, perhaps, their biggest mistake. If they had reached out to fan groups, explained the situation to their players, gotten them on board and then made the announcement with clarity, transparency and explanation, maybe this thing could have gotten off the ground. Instead, they hid behind PR spin and paid the price for it. As of early Wednesday, only Liverpool’s Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group also owns the Boston Red Sox, had shown his face while taking individual responsibility. “I want to apologize to all the fans and supporters of Liverpool Football Club for the disruption I caused over the past 48 hours,” Henry said, via video address. “It goes without saying but should be said that the project put forward was never going to stand without the support of the fans. No one ever thought differently in England. Over these 48 hours, you were very clear that it would not stand. We heard you. I heard you.” It all capped an extraordinary few days, culminating in the ultimate underdog triumph, a resounding and spectacular victory for fan culture, so often underrated and forgotten in the pursuit of ever increasing profit. The strength of the collective fan reaction won the day. That was the only thing that could have caused this. Just think about what happened for a moment. A dozen clubs, each worth billions of dollars, owned by individuals worth more than that, ripped up elaborate plans to upturn the structure of modern soccer, all because the supporters showed they still have a voice and that it’s a loud and powerful one. “Gradually, hastening slowly, we are approaching that mirage, a European League,” Glanville wrote, all those decades ago. “If we get it, it will be largely because the cold blasts of European reality force it on us.” Such an enterprise came, finally. And thanks to poor organization and fan backlash, it disappeared again back into myth. May it remain there for another 57 years. A personal element, if you’ll indulge me, to the Glanville column, a photograph of which was posted on the Facebook feed of British journalist Mike Collett. On the same page of World Soccer there was a story by my father, who worked for the publication and whose name I share, writing book reviews as a then-20-year-old reporter. Proof, for me at least, that as times change some things, thankfully, remain the same. It looked for a troubled couple of days like the fans had become an irrelevance in the minds of those who control soccer. After the masses spoke strongly enough, they proved, by the force of their own conviction, that’s not the case. Here’s what others have said … Michael Baumann, The Ringer: “History will remember the European Super League as a shambolic enterprise, a supposed multibillion-dollar coup orchestrated by several of Europe’s richest soccer teams against the corrupt national and continental federations that made these clubs so rich in the first place. … It was a fun three days’ worth of discourse, though. It’s not every day that a few rich people come up with an idea that generates such visceral and universal hatred. … We’ll all laugh about in the days, months, and years to come. But the wise among us will recognize its immense value as an object lesson in the struggle between community and capital, and how the imbalance between the two brought us to a point where such an enterprise was—if only briefly—considered feasible.” James Montague, New York Times: “The Super League plan has proved to most fans that a cabal of superrich soccer club owners were willing to throw away a century of tradition to line their own pockets. This wasn’t that surprising. Over the past two decades, European soccer has been taken over by billionaires — superrich owners from home and abroad. But Sunday’s announcement was a move made in America. … Everyone from players to supporters to TV pundits to government ministers are re-evaluating how much power the game has ceded to billionaires. What is clear is that the game is being remade in America’s image. … The world’s 12 richest teams were about to blow up soccer because they were rich enough to do it. They will be back.” Mark Ogden, ESPN: “But once again, what about the fans? What about the families who have supported their club through generations, seen them succeed and fail, bought the tickets and the shirts, turned up in the cold and rain? The owners have bought their clubs, often without previous attachment or association. … And the same owners are now using historic clubs, rooted in their local communities, as bargaining chips to create a ring-fenced money-making machine that only they want. It is not the clubs that are threatening to rip up the fabric of football, it is their owners, and they have shown themselves to be oblivious to the wishes of the fans. … The owners might have misread the room. They might even have purposely put their fingers in their ears and kept their heads down, but they cannot be in any doubt now as to what the football world thinks of them and their plans.” |
