The looming disaster of a breakaway European football competition, the European Super League, may have been averted but the factors responsible for its genesis continue unaddressed. What the backlash from fans and critics, along with the threat of sanctions and possible lawsuits, have achieved is merely a temporary setback to the cosy coterie that was being bankrolled by the investment bank JP Morgan which just posted a five-fold increase in its net profits for the latest quarter. The US giant must have had visions of turning its reported $4 billion investment in the project into super profits even if it meant sacrificing the very ethos by which football became the world’s most popular game: equal opportunity for everyone.
To be fair though international football's problems go far deeper than just dealing with Wall Street’s patented rapacity. At their heart is greed, for power and for even more riches by club owners, associations and agents.
Perhaps it is to do with the owners, the new powerbrokers of the game who have a dilettante’s interest in the on-field action and very little off it. So, even as they plotted their devilish scheme, their clubs have been stuttering.
Thus, one of the conspirators, Tottenham Hotspur, owned by a shadowy Bahamas-based currency trader and billionaire Joe Lewis is lying in seventh place at the fag end of the 2020-21 English Premier League (EPL) while Chelsea, which last won the Champions League 10 years ago, has since 2003 been owned by Russian oil tycoon Roman Abramovich.
Then there’s the Glazer family which owns another recent underperformer, Manchester United, and is one of the architects of the European Super League. The US real estate developer has made a fortune from dabbling in sports teams but after the Alex Ferguson era has found success elusive. At Arsenal, owner Stan Kroenke has often been accused of running the club aground, such that it is languishing in ninth place in the EPL and is not even in the running for next year's European competitions.
It is safe to conclude that some of the owners saw in the proposed competition an opportunity to cast aside their on-field sporting rivalries in the larger cause of commercial returns off it, which could happen only if they ‘kept the moolah’ among themselves.
The clubs they own have been in financial trouble even before the pandemic emptied the grounds. It is no coincidence that two of the 12 clubs spearheading the avaricious plan pay for the world's two highest-paid footballers according to the Forbes ranking.
Barcelona which shelled out $220 million in wages last year — nearly a fifth of it to one Lionel Messi alone — is in deep distress with debts of over a billion dollars. Juventus, another renegade, pays Cristiano Ronaldo nearly $40 million annually and all his other teammates added together another $150 million. Both teams are struggling to dominate even their local leagues, and both are already out of the reckoning for the Champions League title this year.
Once storied AC Milan, another of the enthusiastic partners in the idea of the protected sinecure, hasn't won anything for 10 years. Taken to the cleaners by its lenders, its ownership has passed from Chinese businessman Li Yonghong to hedge fund Elliott Management. In the meantime the seven-time winner of Europe's top club title now peddles its wares in the second tier Europa League.
Meanwhile, clubs from France, the current holders of the World Cup, and Germany whose league winner Bayern Munich won a record Champions League title last year, declined to participate.
Indeed, the white-faced hypocrisy of it is that many of the clubs that were seeking a guaranteed existence in the European Super League on the basis of their past glories may never have got here had a similar system been in place even 20 years ago. Between them Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City and Tottenham have won one Champions League title. Nottingham Forest have two and yet Forest today plays in the second tier of English football. Maybe that’s why the new elite was keen to put in place rules for themselves stating that founding members could never be relegated.
Don't for a minute think that the game's governing body Fifa or UEFA, which runs it in Europe, were acting in anything but self-preservation in their spirited opposition to the European Super League. Blighted by corruption charges, these bodies are the main reason why the beautiful game now smacks of gluttony. Mathew Syd said it best in his column for The Times: "listening to Aleksander Ceferin, the Uefa president, thundering about “greed”, Gianni Infantino, his Fifa counterpart, citing “self-interest” and former players wailing on Sky Sports about an assault on football as a “community asset”, I couldn’t help but giggle."
Football hasn't been about the sport for a long time. The artful feints and the scissor kicks are geared to draw the oohs and aahs of gullible fans inside the stadiums and on television. The fans don't matter one bit. Their footfalls and their eyeballs do. For those are what can be monetised for profits or leveraged for power.
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