The battle is won but not the war – football fans must fight on against the gall and greed among the game’s elite
Protest turned to jubilation in west London on Tuesday night as Chelsea fans learned their club was pulling out of the European Super League. Not long afterwards, Manchester City confirmed they were walking away, sheepishly followed by the rest of England’s disgraced ‘Big Six’ as the rebels turned their backs and fled.
Over in Spain, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez – the beleaguered Super League chairman – sifted through the ruins of a project he had disingenuously proclaimed to be ‘the saviour of football’. Barely 48 hours after it had entered the world, Perez was left cradling his stillborn with little hope of breathing life back into the project.
This was a spectacularly brazen power-grab from Europe’s Dirty Dozen, brought crashing down by myriad forces: from the supporters on the streets to the keyboard warriors on social media; from the TV diatribes by Gary Neville to the misgivings by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola; from the open recalcitrance of Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson to the more subtle swipe from Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford. All played a part, and it all proved too much to stomach for bosses at Manchester City and Chelsea as they precipitated the English exodus.
As fiercely tribal as football is, this was a rare moment of solidarity when fans of all stripes could rejoice and revel in the feeling that – so often scorned – they had actually made a difference.
The Super League was a project so incredibly ill-conceived that it begs the question: what were those behind it thinking? Why now, and why with such scant regard for the forces underpinning the game? Could they really have been so amateurish and out of touch as to fail to anticipate the fire and fury that would follow?
Rather than failing to read the room, they hadn’t even even bothered to enter it in the first place. Managers were hung out to dry while owners hunkered down, in keeping with how many of these distant billionaires have run their clubs since getting their hands on them.