I haven’t watched the BEIN coverage tonight, just in case they aren’t involved. Can’t bear Keys and Gray’s moral outrage tonight...
European Super League
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I haven’t watched the BEIN coverage tonight, just in case they aren’t involved. Can’t bear Keys and Gray’s moral outrage tonight...
And the premier league too. For any future European competitions, use last years league positions.
"IF" your were young player, let's say 18 Brazilain RB and at a club like Man City, and you had two or three players a head of you for that position in the National side all playing in The Super League and Fifa goes a head with their treat to band players in the Super League playing for their National sides, do you
a) stick with Man City and hope that five years down the line you are their number 1 RB
b) sign for let's say Bolton Wanderers and take your place as the Brazil's first choice RB
We have an aging team. If we go a head and join this SL who would want to sign for us or any of the other teams for that matter.
a) stick with Man City and hope that five years down the line you are their number 1 RB
b) sign for let's say Bolton Wanderers and take your place as the Brazil's first choice RB
We have an aging team. If we go a head and join this SL who would want to sign for us or any of the other teams for that matter.
Are you alright man?
You can't be serious.
Footballers 1st loyalty is to their back pocket. The ESL (if it starts) will draw players without a doubt just because of the money.
The problem now is the only people in favour of it are the 12 owners. With so much opposition from governing bodies, influencers, fans and now national governments, I just don't think this thing has legs.
JPM is not giving these clubs money, its giving them a repayable loan. Sponsors will worry about being affiliated with the ESL brand (at the moment) because it's viewed so negatively.
He is. The only (very, very small) silver lining to the death of SCM and imminent Super League arrival, is that you will have to read less of the tripe that he spews forth when he pootles off to support Shanghai Red Wings Utd
Yep, I think it might be time, too. I'll always watch and follow Liverpool, but the days of supporting with any real passion are probably coming to an end. Signing up to the ESL is a step too far, and the games already been stripped away from the local fan. When FSG does sell, it will be to another gang of lizards or an oil baron, who will want to do exactly the same thing. Any fight now is just putting off the inevitable, and if it wins, we are then still at the mercy of UEFA and FIFA, who are a corrupt gang of thieves themselves. The new revamped CL is fucking shite as well, aiming to milk the game dry for all it's worth.
A huge opportunity was collectively missed for the fans to buy the club when we were on the cheap. Fan ownership across the board is the only way to prevent corporate greed from ruining the game further. Elite football has been taken over by a mafia of families, utilising the heritage and value of football clubs to purchase another super-yacht, whilst fans stand by mostly powerless to change the course of events.
I realised it all when Le Bron became a share-holder a few months back. I was reading across various forums how happy our fans have had a guy I've never barely heard of promoting our brand across the world like this was a huge win for the club. Their happiness contrasting with my bemusement and general indifference was memorable. It highlighted that football has just become a side-show to the circus that follows it.
Then you've got VAR taking away the fans right to celebrate goals, which was one of the few remaining pleasures in the game...Tickets will be impossible to come by for years... You have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Probably not.
Tranmere is a 10-minute train ride from the city centre with season tickets at 15 quid a game a decent(ish) stadium. That's looking increasingly attractive proposition to get away from all this shite. I genuinely hope they sell out every game next season, and many fans manage to reconnect with the game that has been so stripped away from them.
A huge opportunity was collectively missed for the fans to buy the club when we were on the cheap. Fan ownership across the board is the only way to prevent corporate greed from ruining the game further. Elite football has been taken over by a mafia of families, utilising the heritage and value of football clubs to purchase another super-yacht, whilst fans stand by mostly powerless to change the course of events.
I realised it all when Le Bron became a share-holder a few months back. I was reading across various forums how happy our fans have had a guy I've never barely heard of promoting our brand across the world like this was a huge win for the club. Their happiness contrasting with my bemusement and general indifference was memorable. It highlighted that football has just become a side-show to the circus that follows it.
Then you've got VAR taking away the fans right to celebrate goals, which was one of the few remaining pleasures in the game...Tickets will be impossible to come by for years... You have to ask yourself, is it worth it? Probably not.
Tranmere is a 10-minute train ride from the city centre with season tickets at 15 quid a game a decent(ish) stadium. That's looking increasingly attractive proposition to get away from all this shite. I genuinely hope they sell out every game next season, and many fans manage to reconnect with the game that has been so stripped away from them.
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European Super League explained: the contracts, plots and threats that shook football to its core
Adam Crafton and more Apr 18, 2021
756
European football is at war after the continent absorbed the staggering news that the sport’s most famous football clubs are prepared to break away from UEFA competitions and establish a new European Super League.
The Premier League’s self-styled “Big Six” clubs have all agreed in principle to support proposals backed by Italian clubs Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan, in addition to Spain’s Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid. England is the country with the most sign-ups so far, as Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham have conspired with their European counterparts and are committed to the plan. It is a move that has led to UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin describing two of the men running those clubs as snakes.
Late on Sunday evening, the “Super League” published a statement. The release read: “Twelve of Europe’s leading football clubs have today come together to announce they have agreed to establish a new mid-week competition, the Super League, governed by its Founding Clubs.” Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli, Manchester United’s co-chairman Joel Glazer and Real Madrid chairman Florentino Perez subsequently released statements supporting the launch.
The clubs have hired InHouse Communications as a British public affairs agency to promote the launch. Katie Perrior, the chair of InHouse, was formerly head of communications for Theresa May during her period as prime minister, while she also worked on Boris Johnson’s 2008 mayoral campaign.
The 12 clubs outlined an ambition to bring three more clubs on board, and these are thought to be Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain. However, as of Sunday evening, those three clubs had not been convinced by the proposal.
The idea is to have 15 founding members who will compete every season in the competition, irrespective of their performance in their domestic league, while five places among the 20 will be made available to other teams to qualify. The clubs did not, as of Sunday night, have a settled plan for how those five places would be awarded. Players are confused and angry too.
The tournament, which would start in August, would feature two groups of ten, playing home and away fixtures, with the top three automatically qualifying for the quarter-finals. Those who finish fourth and fifth then compete for the remaining quarter-final places, before a two-legged knockout format is employed for the final eight, ahead of a single fixture final at a neutral venue. To be clear, the clubs committed to the Super League do not intend to compete in UEFA competitions such as the Champions League if the plan comes to fruition.
Additionally, the founding clubs said in a joint statement that “as soon as practicable after the start of the men’s competition, a correspondent women’s league will also be launched”. No further details were supplied on the impact of the women’s game and Liverpool’s women’s team — who would, presumably, be parachuted into a women’s equivalent of the Super League — are currently in the second tier of English football. Lyon, the winners of the women’s Champions League in the past five seasons, are not among the founding clubs.
Today, UEFA had been scheduled to sign off a revamped format for its flagship competition, the Champions League, which would be due to come into effect from 2024. This new format would eliminate the 32-team group stage and instead have a 36-team “Swiss model” league, where each club play 10 matches: five at home, five away. The fixtures would be based on seedings and teams will be ranked from one to 36. The top eight would advance automatically to a 16-team knockout round, and the next 16 teams go into a play-off round to decide those final eight slots.
A meeting of UEFA’s executive committee had been expected to rubber-stamp the new format at the end of March but talks were postponed after the European Club Association, the organisation that represents Europe’s leading clubs, failed to agree a unified position.
It was originally believed that the sticking point had not been a collision over the format changes. Rather, Europe’s leading clubs wanted a far more substantial level of control over how the Champions League’s broadcast and commercial deals are secured and marketed. Yet UEFA’s hopes of sealing the deal are in tatters following revelations that 12 European clubs have made a commitment to break away into a Super League.
Late on Sunday evening, sources close to the Super League revealed that the clubs are also now opposed to the “Swiss model” format, as they consider the plan to represent quantity over quality. Sources close to several clubs say their research shows that younger supporters want to see more games between the world’s most famous clubs and players and the clubs are responding to the trends.
The founding clubs will receive €3.5 billion, shared between the 15 clubs upon joining, and this would be targeted at offsetting the losses sustained during the global pandemic and to support infrastructure investment plans. The clubs also argued that this would not constitute a selfish pursuit, as they have pledged €10 billion in solidarity to the European football pyramid over 23 years, which they claim is substantially higher than the current offering under UEFA.
Sources said that the paperwork distributed between clubs are “agreements of principles” and “memorandums of understanding” at this stage, rather than contractually binding. They are, however, significant statements of intent. Owing to the pandemic, much of the groundwork in recent months has been through secret WhatsApp groups and Zoom calls between the billionaires who run major European clubs.
The New York Times reported that projections shared between the clubs early this year suggested each club could earn $400 million each for taking part, which would be four times as much as the winner of last season’s Champions League. The project is sufficiently advanced that the clubs have held discussions with the American investment bank JP Morgan, which would underwrite the league by debt financing and set it against future broadcast revenue. Coincidentally, JP Morgan has a longstanding relationship with the Glazer family, the owners of Manchester United and they are former employers of executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward.
It is unclear, at this stage, who would be the main broadcast partner of the tournament after DAZN distanced themselves on Sunday following reports linking the network to the competition. There were suggestions from sources on Sunday evening that one of the global tech streaming giants could yet emerge as a partner.
The response has been explosive. Almost immediately, the breakaway plan appeared fraught with peril. The Athletic revealed on Sunday lunchtime that PSG are, for now, significantly opposed to the plans, while German clubs Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund are also yet to sign up. In the circles of football politics, the knives were out on Sunday, with various sources alleging that Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli and Manchester United’s executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward have lost the trust of their counterparts across Europe. On Sunday night, Agnelli quit his roles with both UEFA and the European Club Association.
Agnelli has quit his ECA role and angered many fellow executives (Getty Images)
UEFA joined forces with the English Football Association, the Premier League, the Royal Spanish Football Federation, La Liga, the Italian Football Federation and Serie A to condemn the breakaway movement. They pledged sporting sanctions and legal action against clubs who press on with the plans. This could include a ban from competing in domestic leagues and forbidding the founding club’s players from competing in UEFA tournaments for their national teams.
The Premier League wrote to all 20 Premier League clubs on Sunday and chief executive Richard Masters urged the “Big Six” to “walk away immediately before irreparable damage is done” and he also reiterated that signing up to a new European competition would require Premier League approval.
The Premier League insists this will not be granted. Privately, many rival Premier League clubs and clubs across Europe suspect this may be extreme posturing from the founding clubs but sources close to the Super League insisted the dozen clubs are committed to the plan. Other well-placed sources suggested the Super League model may be the starting point of a negotiation for more UEFA concessions or a more inclusive Super League, rather than the final version.
Elsewhere, The Athletic can reveal that major broadcasters are prepared to enact legal action against clubs who break away or devalue national competitions, as the broadcasters believe the product they’ve invested in would be fundamentally different without the involvement of leading sides.
Manchester United icon Gary Neville, in his capacity as a pundit on Sky Sports, called the plans “an absolute scandal.” Sir Alex Ferguson, the former United manager and a member of the club’s football board, added his voice to the opposition. He described it as “a move away from 70 years of European club football.” It is the first time he has spoken out on a sensitive club matter since retiring as manager of United in 2013. British prime minister Boris Johnson tweeted: “Plans for a European Super League would be very damaging for football and we support football authorities in taking action. They would strike at the heart of the domestic game, and will concern fans across the country.”
Here The Athletic explains the details of a staggering development, what those in the game are saying — and what comes next.
Why do Europe’s leading clubs want to break away?
They want it for the same reason the major clubs in England wanted to break away from the Football League and the major clubs in Europe forced UEFA to swap the European Cup’s quarter-finals for two groups of four: money.
And if you agree with those who believe the European Super League is a crime against sport, the ability, motive and opportunity today are similar to those that existed in 1992, when the Premier League was created and the European Cup stopped being a straightforward knockout competition.
Football’s richest clubs can, in theory, form their own competition, attract broadcast and/or streaming partners, bring in sponsors and still play to packed stadiums, because they are the most popular clubs, with the best players and the biggest brands. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to fully exploit those assets? Why should they let less attractive brands dilute their value?
Adam Crafton and more Apr 18, 2021
European football is at war after the continent absorbed the staggering news that the sport’s most famous football clubs are prepared to break away from UEFA competitions and establish a new European Super League.
The Premier League’s self-styled “Big Six” clubs have all agreed in principle to support proposals backed by Italian clubs Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan, in addition to Spain’s Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid. England is the country with the most sign-ups so far, as Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham have conspired with their European counterparts and are committed to the plan. It is a move that has led to UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin describing two of the men running those clubs as snakes.
Late on Sunday evening, the “Super League” published a statement. The release read: “Twelve of Europe’s leading football clubs have today come together to announce they have agreed to establish a new mid-week competition, the Super League, governed by its Founding Clubs.” Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli, Manchester United’s co-chairman Joel Glazer and Real Madrid chairman Florentino Perez subsequently released statements supporting the launch.
The clubs have hired InHouse Communications as a British public affairs agency to promote the launch. Katie Perrior, the chair of InHouse, was formerly head of communications for Theresa May during her period as prime minister, while she also worked on Boris Johnson’s 2008 mayoral campaign.
The 12 clubs outlined an ambition to bring three more clubs on board, and these are thought to be Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain. However, as of Sunday evening, those three clubs had not been convinced by the proposal.
The idea is to have 15 founding members who will compete every season in the competition, irrespective of their performance in their domestic league, while five places among the 20 will be made available to other teams to qualify. The clubs did not, as of Sunday night, have a settled plan for how those five places would be awarded. Players are confused and angry too.
The tournament, which would start in August, would feature two groups of ten, playing home and away fixtures, with the top three automatically qualifying for the quarter-finals. Those who finish fourth and fifth then compete for the remaining quarter-final places, before a two-legged knockout format is employed for the final eight, ahead of a single fixture final at a neutral venue. To be clear, the clubs committed to the Super League do not intend to compete in UEFA competitions such as the Champions League if the plan comes to fruition.
Additionally, the founding clubs said in a joint statement that “as soon as practicable after the start of the men’s competition, a correspondent women’s league will also be launched”. No further details were supplied on the impact of the women’s game and Liverpool’s women’s team — who would, presumably, be parachuted into a women’s equivalent of the Super League — are currently in the second tier of English football. Lyon, the winners of the women’s Champions League in the past five seasons, are not among the founding clubs.
Today, UEFA had been scheduled to sign off a revamped format for its flagship competition, the Champions League, which would be due to come into effect from 2024. This new format would eliminate the 32-team group stage and instead have a 36-team “Swiss model” league, where each club play 10 matches: five at home, five away. The fixtures would be based on seedings and teams will be ranked from one to 36. The top eight would advance automatically to a 16-team knockout round, and the next 16 teams go into a play-off round to decide those final eight slots.
A meeting of UEFA’s executive committee had been expected to rubber-stamp the new format at the end of March but talks were postponed after the European Club Association, the organisation that represents Europe’s leading clubs, failed to agree a unified position.
It was originally believed that the sticking point had not been a collision over the format changes. Rather, Europe’s leading clubs wanted a far more substantial level of control over how the Champions League’s broadcast and commercial deals are secured and marketed. Yet UEFA’s hopes of sealing the deal are in tatters following revelations that 12 European clubs have made a commitment to break away into a Super League.
Late on Sunday evening, sources close to the Super League revealed that the clubs are also now opposed to the “Swiss model” format, as they consider the plan to represent quantity over quality. Sources close to several clubs say their research shows that younger supporters want to see more games between the world’s most famous clubs and players and the clubs are responding to the trends.
The founding clubs will receive €3.5 billion, shared between the 15 clubs upon joining, and this would be targeted at offsetting the losses sustained during the global pandemic and to support infrastructure investment plans. The clubs also argued that this would not constitute a selfish pursuit, as they have pledged €10 billion in solidarity to the European football pyramid over 23 years, which they claim is substantially higher than the current offering under UEFA.
Sources said that the paperwork distributed between clubs are “agreements of principles” and “memorandums of understanding” at this stage, rather than contractually binding. They are, however, significant statements of intent. Owing to the pandemic, much of the groundwork in recent months has been through secret WhatsApp groups and Zoom calls between the billionaires who run major European clubs.
The New York Times reported that projections shared between the clubs early this year suggested each club could earn $400 million each for taking part, which would be four times as much as the winner of last season’s Champions League. The project is sufficiently advanced that the clubs have held discussions with the American investment bank JP Morgan, which would underwrite the league by debt financing and set it against future broadcast revenue. Coincidentally, JP Morgan has a longstanding relationship with the Glazer family, the owners of Manchester United and they are former employers of executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward.
It is unclear, at this stage, who would be the main broadcast partner of the tournament after DAZN distanced themselves on Sunday following reports linking the network to the competition. There were suggestions from sources on Sunday evening that one of the global tech streaming giants could yet emerge as a partner.
The response has been explosive. Almost immediately, the breakaway plan appeared fraught with peril. The Athletic revealed on Sunday lunchtime that PSG are, for now, significantly opposed to the plans, while German clubs Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund are also yet to sign up. In the circles of football politics, the knives were out on Sunday, with various sources alleging that Juventus chairman Andrea Agnelli and Manchester United’s executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward have lost the trust of their counterparts across Europe. On Sunday night, Agnelli quit his roles with both UEFA and the European Club Association.
Agnelli has quit his ECA role and angered many fellow executives (Getty Images)
UEFA joined forces with the English Football Association, the Premier League, the Royal Spanish Football Federation, La Liga, the Italian Football Federation and Serie A to condemn the breakaway movement. They pledged sporting sanctions and legal action against clubs who press on with the plans. This could include a ban from competing in domestic leagues and forbidding the founding club’s players from competing in UEFA tournaments for their national teams.
The Premier League wrote to all 20 Premier League clubs on Sunday and chief executive Richard Masters urged the “Big Six” to “walk away immediately before irreparable damage is done” and he also reiterated that signing up to a new European competition would require Premier League approval.
The Premier League insists this will not be granted. Privately, many rival Premier League clubs and clubs across Europe suspect this may be extreme posturing from the founding clubs but sources close to the Super League insisted the dozen clubs are committed to the plan. Other well-placed sources suggested the Super League model may be the starting point of a negotiation for more UEFA concessions or a more inclusive Super League, rather than the final version.
Elsewhere, The Athletic can reveal that major broadcasters are prepared to enact legal action against clubs who break away or devalue national competitions, as the broadcasters believe the product they’ve invested in would be fundamentally different without the involvement of leading sides.
Manchester United icon Gary Neville, in his capacity as a pundit on Sky Sports, called the plans “an absolute scandal.” Sir Alex Ferguson, the former United manager and a member of the club’s football board, added his voice to the opposition. He described it as “a move away from 70 years of European club football.” It is the first time he has spoken out on a sensitive club matter since retiring as manager of United in 2013. British prime minister Boris Johnson tweeted: “Plans for a European Super League would be very damaging for football and we support football authorities in taking action. They would strike at the heart of the domestic game, and will concern fans across the country.”
Here The Athletic explains the details of a staggering development, what those in the game are saying — and what comes next.
Why do Europe’s leading clubs want to break away?
They want it for the same reason the major clubs in England wanted to break away from the Football League and the major clubs in Europe forced UEFA to swap the European Cup’s quarter-finals for two groups of four: money.
And if you agree with those who believe the European Super League is a crime against sport, the ability, motive and opportunity today are similar to those that existed in 1992, when the Premier League was created and the European Cup stopped being a straightforward knockout competition.
Football’s richest clubs can, in theory, form their own competition, attract broadcast and/or streaming partners, bring in sponsors and still play to packed stadiums, because they are the most popular clubs, with the best players and the biggest brands. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to fully exploit those assets? Why should they let less attractive brands dilute their value?
These were the same arguments England’s top teams made 30 years ago. With interest rates now near zero, there should be no problem persuading a bank or private equity firm to put up the guarantees they need to compensate for lost UEFA income until they can secure a new, game-changing relationship with whichever internet giant or media conglomerate is willing to take a punt on this competition being a bigger watch than the Champions League.
In regard to motive, the cynical view is to say it is the same as the scorpion’s when he stung the frog who was ferrying him across the river: it is in their nature. No matter how much money you offer them, how easy you make it for them to qualify to tournaments or how many games you let them play before they are knocked out, they will always want more. But that impulse has sharpened over the last year or so, when the pandemic has cost these clubs billions of dollars, euros and pounds in lost revenue. They now have an itch and a grudge. Throw in some jealousy about the amount of money North American sports franchises — in their closed leagues — are swapping hands for these days and the motivation could become irresistible.
But, as every investor knows, one man’s crisis is another’s opportunity. The virus has weakened everyone but because the Deloitte Money League gang were stronger when it first hit, the damage is relative. When the Champions League and Premier League were created, football had spent a decade dealing with disasters and hooliganism. Back then, the game’s obvious problems created the perfect conditions for change. The landscape looks just momentous now.
Why has it got to this point now?
The big clubs have been playing the European Super League card twice a decade for half a century and it has nearly always resulted in UEFA granting them more of what they want. The sensible money is still on that being the outcome this time but the rich know they might never have a hand this strong again.
Despite the popular cries to just “let them go”, UEFA knows that will hurt everyone else, too. For example, some of Europe’s smaller footballing nations are kept afloat by the money the governing body earns from its most lucrative annual competition. Even the Premier League, the game’s richest domestic league, understands that size really does matter when it comes to TV contracts, so you cannot just wave your biggest draws off and expect the world to continue like before.
The elite know this, so they will push for that little bit more. They have got the changes to the competition format they wanted and they have even carved out two extra invites for anyone in their peer group who suffers the indignity of not qualifying via performances at home the previous season. But now they want to run the competition, too.
During the 2018-19 season, the live match audience for Champions League football dropped from an average of two billion during the previous three-year cycle to 1.3 billion in the last campaign. In a single year under the current operators, therefore, the Champions League experienced a traditional television audience fall of 35 per cent. The Europa League also experienced a 17 per cent drop.
The elite clubs want to sell the broadcast rights, do the sponsorship deals and shape the next iteration of the competition’s development. And they do not want to share.
Who is driving the concept?
As far back as 2009, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez had his eyes set on establishing a new European competition. He said then: “We have to agree to a new European Super League which guarantees that the best always play the best — something that does not happen in the Champions League.”
This is at the heart of the plan. One former Manchester United board member, who worked with the Glazer family, tells The Athletic: “When the Glazers came in, they had the realisation that football at the highest level is a European game and to maximise the value of the asset, it must be maximised on the European stage.
In regard to motive, the cynical view is to say it is the same as the scorpion’s when he stung the frog who was ferrying him across the river: it is in their nature. No matter how much money you offer them, how easy you make it for them to qualify to tournaments or how many games you let them play before they are knocked out, they will always want more. But that impulse has sharpened over the last year or so, when the pandemic has cost these clubs billions of dollars, euros and pounds in lost revenue. They now have an itch and a grudge. Throw in some jealousy about the amount of money North American sports franchises — in their closed leagues — are swapping hands for these days and the motivation could become irresistible.
But, as every investor knows, one man’s crisis is another’s opportunity. The virus has weakened everyone but because the Deloitte Money League gang were stronger when it first hit, the damage is relative. When the Champions League and Premier League were created, football had spent a decade dealing with disasters and hooliganism. Back then, the game’s obvious problems created the perfect conditions for change. The landscape looks just momentous now.
Why has it got to this point now?
The big clubs have been playing the European Super League card twice a decade for half a century and it has nearly always resulted in UEFA granting them more of what they want. The sensible money is still on that being the outcome this time but the rich know they might never have a hand this strong again.
Despite the popular cries to just “let them go”, UEFA knows that will hurt everyone else, too. For example, some of Europe’s smaller footballing nations are kept afloat by the money the governing body earns from its most lucrative annual competition. Even the Premier League, the game’s richest domestic league, understands that size really does matter when it comes to TV contracts, so you cannot just wave your biggest draws off and expect the world to continue like before.
The elite know this, so they will push for that little bit more. They have got the changes to the competition format they wanted and they have even carved out two extra invites for anyone in their peer group who suffers the indignity of not qualifying via performances at home the previous season. But now they want to run the competition, too.
During the 2018-19 season, the live match audience for Champions League football dropped from an average of two billion during the previous three-year cycle to 1.3 billion in the last campaign. In a single year under the current operators, therefore, the Champions League experienced a traditional television audience fall of 35 per cent. The Europa League also experienced a 17 per cent drop.
The elite clubs want to sell the broadcast rights, do the sponsorship deals and shape the next iteration of the competition’s development. And they do not want to share.
Who is driving the concept?
As far back as 2009, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez had his eyes set on establishing a new European competition. He said then: “We have to agree to a new European Super League which guarantees that the best always play the best — something that does not happen in the Champions League.”
This is at the heart of the plan. One former Manchester United board member, who worked with the Glazer family, tells The Athletic: “When the Glazers came in, they had the realisation that football at the highest level is a European game and to maximise the value of the asset, it must be maximised on the European stage.
The Glazers with Ferguson, whose protest appear to have fallen on deaf ears (Getty Images)
“This, therefore, means more games against high-calibre European opponents. It was clear from the conversations that the value, the growth and the future was to be found in more games such as Liverpool v Barcelona, which is sexier than Watford v Burnley, which will eventually run its course. This can’t be unexpected from American owners, to attempt to move the English football model to the American sports model. They would argue we do need to tip a wink to where the value is being created.”
The biggest drivers of the current Super League proposals are, according to multiple sources, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal. The clubs’ statement said that Perez would be the chairman of the league, while Manchester United’s Joel Glazer and Agnelli, the Juventus chairman, would be vice-presidents. It was reported that Liverpool’s John W Henry and Arsenal’s Stan Kroenke would also have vice-chairman roles.
Support elsewhere has come from Tottenham who, despite winning only two significant trophies since 1991, are seen to be commercially appealing. The club’s impressive new stadium, combined with their exposure through an Amazon Prime documentary and positive performances in the Champions League in recent years, has secured a place among the elite. The celebrity status of former manager Jose Mourinho, who was sacked on Monday, also improved the club’s commercial profile.
Several sources suggested a club such as Tottenham would be keen to sign up to the Super League as any breakaway would likely see the value of a club instantly rise. This is because elite-level European football would be guaranteed as part of Super League membership and this, therefore, would enable the owners to sell the club at a higher price. Tottenham insist the club is not for sale.
Manchester City and Chelsea were later subscribers to the plan and City’s positioning is particularly ironic as the club have long complained that the majority of “super clubs” in Europe have conspired to limit the club’s spending and squeeze them out of the established elite. The possible participation of Chelsea and City has been described by sources as more out of a desire not to be left behind, than a fervent desire to lead the charge. City chief executive Ferran Soriano emailed staff late on Sunday night, telling them they will have the chance to ask questions at the club’s next staff meeting and that “the objective is to improve the quality and intensity of competition”.
In Spain, Barcelona’s debt is in excess of €1 billion while Real Madrid’s is in excess of €900 million. In a COVID-19 world that has decimated growth and revenue streams, the windfall of the Super League has an obvious pull.
The Italian trio of clubs are later on the trail and sources in Italy explained on Sunday that their position has been informed by the struggles experienced by Serie A in negotiating their latest domestic television deal. After much wrangling, Serie A signed with DAZN, the sport streaming service owned by billionaire Leonard Blavatnik. However, the €2.5 billion deal, worth €840 million per season to broadcast the majority of games between 2021 and 2024, represented a drop on previous TV deals.
However, the stance of Juventus chairman Agnelli has stunned European football this weekend. Until his explosive resignation on Sunday night, Agnelli was a member of UEFA’s Executive Committee and he was the chairman of the European Club Association (ECA). The ECA is a body made of 246 clubs but these range from HJK Helsinki to Barcelona. As chairman of the ECA, it was his responsibility to defend the interests of member clubs. As such, it is remarkable that Agnelli appears to have sided with a breakaway set that threatens the future of established European competitions such as the Champions League, Europa League, as well as the UEFA Conference League, which had been due to begin next season.
Manchester United’s Woodward is also on the ECA board, along with Arsenal’s Vinai Venkatesham and AC Milan’s Ivan Gazidis. All are expected to resign or be removed for the perceived treachery. Gazidis was formerly the CEO of Arsenal and on Sunday, several sources suggested that Arsenal’s former head of football Raul Sanllehi had been involved as an intermediary between discussions. He did not comment when approached.
On Sunday evening, the ECA held an emergency meeting but representatives of Super League clubs did not join the call. Ajax’s Edwin van der Sar hosted the meeting and they were joined by PSG and Bayern Munich. UEFA had publicly thanked the French and German clubs earlier in the day for resisting the temptation to join the rebels.
Within the ECA, there is fury at Agnelli and Woodward’s perceived betrayal and many clubs feel let down after the ECA decided only on Friday to support the UEFA proposals at Monday’s meeting. Indeed, on a call with investors in October, Woodward had dismissed suggestions United may be part of a breakaway group and insisted the club were dedicated to working with UEFA on reforms to European club competitions.
Agnelli, in particular, has been the subject of scorn this weekend. Agnelli has long been seen as a close ally of UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, to the extent that the latter is the godfather of Agnelli’s daughter. Yet this weekend, multiple sources claim Ceferin has been unable to get hold of his friend. One source says: “Ceferin thought Agnelli would stand with him on the breakaway proposal and yesterday he just could not get hold of him, for all his trying.”
A second contact at a leading European club added: “This whole battle now is Ceferin v Agnelli: they are having the most public arm wrestle imaginable.”
Others have been utterly scathing of Agnelli’s approach and some club executives described the Italian as a “snake” for the manner in which he has appeared to double-cross UEFA and the ECA while joining the breakaway. Only last month, he had publicly described the Swiss-style reforms as “beautiful”.
In January, however, he had triggered concern at UEFA after hosting Madrid’s president Perez at La Continassa, the lavish 18th century building that Juventus recently renovated into their new headquarters. The two men spent three hours together and in hindsight, it feels like a seminal moment. This, after all, is Perez’s long-standing vision merging with the highly US-driven ambition of developing a fixed place in elite competitions for American-owned Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.
Perez has long held an ambition for a European Super League (Getty Images)
On Sunday, reports emerged in Italy that DAZN, which owns the domestic Italian television rights, could become the broadcast partner of the new Super League but the company distanced itself from the story. The Athletic understands that Sky Sports has not been involved with Super League plotting. An extended segment of coverage both at half-time and full-time of Manchester United’s 3-1 victory over Burnley, in which pundits Neville, Roy Keane and Micah Richards delivered a scathing assessment of the plan, would appear to reaffirm that the broadcaster has little to gain from the development of a Super League.
In addition, several major broadcasters across the world are preparing to take legal action against clubs who take steps to devalue the domestic leagues. If, for example, a broadcaster has signed a five-year contract to cover the Premier League, it has done so under the impression that access to European competition will be a compelling narrative strand of the season. As such, any measures that would reduce the jeopardy and fundamentally alter the nature of the domestic leagues, would subsequently see clubs face demands for rebates.
“Broadcasters will take legal action,” insists a well-placed source. “They demanded rebates simply for fans not being in the stadium, so if the product is different, the rebates will be huge. It’s as though you’ve bought the rights to the Premier League and you have ended up with the Championship instead.”
Why have Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain not joined the breakaway?
On the surface, a European Super League would appear to appeal to Bayern or PSG. Both have enjoyed sustained dominance of their domestic leagues and require greater exposure internationally to continue developing the brand of their respective clubs. In addition, the latest German domestic broadcast deal was five per cent down on the previous while a catastrophic television rights’ situation in France has left clubs staring at a £30-45 million black hole this summer. As such, both clubs could, in theory, use the cash on offer in a Super League.
Yet on Sunday, it emerged quickly that last season’s Champions League finalists have concerns. Bayern have been more reserved but PSG insist they have no desire or interest in the plan as things stand and there was bewilderment that the English, Spanish and Italian clubs were prepared to go public with their plans while still failing to convince several of Europe’s most famous clubs to join the Super League. PSG’s concerns are multiple. While it is true they were approached by Real Madrid and Manchester United, several sources cited their discomfort over the idea of limiting access to the elite competitions to a closed shop of clubs. One senior source at PSG warned that European football “cannot only be for the super-rich.”
PSG are also worried that the initial novelty of a Super League may wear off after a couple of seasons while sources also said the involvement of breakthrough clubs such as Atalanta or Leicester City must be protected if football’s competitive spirit is to be maintained. On a more personal level, PSG’s President, Nasser al-Khelaifi, is a member of the UEFA board and also the ECA. Sources close to the PSG president insisted on Sunday he would be reluctant to publicly knife Ceferin in the manner that Agnelli has been accused of doing by some of his peers.
Al-Khelaifi also heads up beIN Media Group, the Qatari television networks that has the rights to broadcast UEFA’s Champions League. This tournament would of course be grossly devalued should a Super League emerge independently of UEFA. “Nasser has his critics,” explains one friend of the president, “But he is a very loyal person. He is not a two-faced bastard. He is friends with Ceferin and has been on the UEFA board for a long time. If you are Nasser’s friend, he looks out for you. So, yes, there is a personal loyalty to Ceferin but also integrity to his job on the board of UEFA.”
Both PSG and Bayern are conscious of the impact on their own domestic leagues and that public opinion is firmly against a breakaway movement. One source in the United States, who has worked with both clubs, said the opposition is also rooted in a fear the Super League would not be as successful as its advocates propose. “It’s like Brexit Day,” says one critic. “The bus says ‘Look at the £350m, it will be amazing’ but it turns it is a big lie and economically, you are out of your own domestic league and you are screwed.”
The calculation from the 12 clubs who have signed up is that, if they break away from UEFA, then PSG, Bayern and Dortmund will have no choice but to eventually join them as they will be left to play in a diluted competition. Yet this would now be a substantial and controversial U-turn. In France, for example, the office of President Emmanuel Macron has praised the resistance shown by French clubs in repelling the advances of the Super League.
Yet now the 12 clubs have gone public, we will discover the extent of the resistance.
What happens to the Premier League?
The Premier League has, by now, become accustomed to the posturing of the Big Six. For several years, the six leading clubs have held their own talks, sometimes even scurrying into a huddle among themselves during Premier League meetings. Tensions surfaced last year over Manchester United and Liverpool’s Project Big Picture document but this latest development is the most severe threat to the hegemony of the Premier League as the dominant domestic league in world football.
The Premier League’s extraordinary broadcast deals have grown due to the competitive nature of the league, which currently sees Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham all residing outside of the Champions League places.
As such, it is easy to understand why underperforming clubs want a guarantee of qualification to an elite European tournament. However, clubs outside of the Big Six, particularly upwardly mobile outfits such as Leeds, West Ham, Aston Villa, Leicester and Everton, have ambitions of breaking into the top four and securing elite European football.
The Super League plan would render domestic performance as irrelevant. As such, even if Arsenal finish 10th this season, they would join the Super League if it were to begin in August whereas Leeds could, theoretically, finish second next season but not enter the Super League. The rules on qualification for the five spare places in the Super League remain a mystery.
In a letter sent out to Premier League clubs, Masters warned that Premier League rules forbid clubs from entering competitions without the prior permission of the Premier League board. Masters warned he could not envisage a situation by which this permission would be granted. On Sunday, Premier League officials were struggling to make sustained contact with representatives of the Big Six. One source close to Masters said: “This will either make him or it will break him. This isn’t his fault. But it’s become his problem. And it will be hard for him to fix.”
In a remarkable intervention on Sunday evening, Ferguson, the most successful manager in Premier League history, told Reuters: “Talk of a Super League is a move away from 70 years of European club football. Both as a player for a provincial team Dunfermline in the 1960s and as a manager at Aberdeen winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup, for a small provincial club in Scotland it was like climbing Mount Everest. Everton are spending £500 million to build a new stadium with the ambition to play in Champions League. Fans all over love the competition as it is. In my time at United, we played in four Champions League finals and they were always the most special of nights. I’m not sure Manchester United are involved in this, as I am not part of the decision making process.”
Sources close to the situation said that Ferguson’s comments did not overly trouble the decision-makers or disturb the desire of the top brass among the founding clubs on Sunday evening.
It was Ferguson’s first public intervention on a live issue affecting United since his retirement as manager in 2013. Everton manager Carlo Ancelotti has previously condemned plans for a Super League. He told The Athletic: “For me, the Super League cannot happen. We have the Champions League. It’s enough, right? The Champions League pits the best against the best already. But the future of football must value national (domestic) competitions more.”
What happens next?
Well, UEFA’s aspirations of securing its competition reforms today appear to be in ruins. UEFA had been working around the clock during the weekend to lean on clubs and get them back on side. Ceferin, a source said, is “not a panicky guy”, before adding: “This has shaken UEFA to the core.”
There will be enormous blowback. The Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust issued a statement on Sunday night in which it accused the club’s board of being “prepared to risk the club’s reputation and its future in the opportunistic pursuit of greed” and that the club risked being expelled from English league football and its players banned from international competition, “And yet the current owners — mere custodians of a 139-year-old institution — are prepared to risk it all for avarice and self-aggrandisement. We demand the board immediately disassociates itself from the breakaway league.”
The criticism is likely to follow from the media, to former players and likely current managers and players too. There will, inevitably, be a great deal of threats.
UEFA issued a joint statement with the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A in which in confirmed that “the clubs concerned will be banned from playing in any other competition at domestic, European or world level, and their players could be denied the opportunity to represent their national teams.”
FIFA reacted later and with less condemnation but did say that it “can only express its disapproval to a ‘closed European breakaway league’ outside of the international football structures.”
One source close to the situation concluded: “This is existential for UEFA. They are obsolete and they lose everything if this passes. Internally, there is still a feeling UEFA will make a deal just about good enough to get over the line. But only because that is what always happened before. If they don’t strike a deal, it is heading for one place — the courts.”
Other contributors: Matt Slater and James Horncastle
“This, therefore, means more games against high-calibre European opponents. It was clear from the conversations that the value, the growth and the future was to be found in more games such as Liverpool v Barcelona, which is sexier than Watford v Burnley, which will eventually run its course. This can’t be unexpected from American owners, to attempt to move the English football model to the American sports model. They would argue we do need to tip a wink to where the value is being created.”
The biggest drivers of the current Super League proposals are, according to multiple sources, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal. The clubs’ statement said that Perez would be the chairman of the league, while Manchester United’s Joel Glazer and Agnelli, the Juventus chairman, would be vice-presidents. It was reported that Liverpool’s John W Henry and Arsenal’s Stan Kroenke would also have vice-chairman roles.
Support elsewhere has come from Tottenham who, despite winning only two significant trophies since 1991, are seen to be commercially appealing. The club’s impressive new stadium, combined with their exposure through an Amazon Prime documentary and positive performances in the Champions League in recent years, has secured a place among the elite. The celebrity status of former manager Jose Mourinho, who was sacked on Monday, also improved the club’s commercial profile.
Several sources suggested a club such as Tottenham would be keen to sign up to the Super League as any breakaway would likely see the value of a club instantly rise. This is because elite-level European football would be guaranteed as part of Super League membership and this, therefore, would enable the owners to sell the club at a higher price. Tottenham insist the club is not for sale.
Manchester City and Chelsea were later subscribers to the plan and City’s positioning is particularly ironic as the club have long complained that the majority of “super clubs” in Europe have conspired to limit the club’s spending and squeeze them out of the established elite. The possible participation of Chelsea and City has been described by sources as more out of a desire not to be left behind, than a fervent desire to lead the charge. City chief executive Ferran Soriano emailed staff late on Sunday night, telling them they will have the chance to ask questions at the club’s next staff meeting and that “the objective is to improve the quality and intensity of competition”.
In Spain, Barcelona’s debt is in excess of €1 billion while Real Madrid’s is in excess of €900 million. In a COVID-19 world that has decimated growth and revenue streams, the windfall of the Super League has an obvious pull.
The Italian trio of clubs are later on the trail and sources in Italy explained on Sunday that their position has been informed by the struggles experienced by Serie A in negotiating their latest domestic television deal. After much wrangling, Serie A signed with DAZN, the sport streaming service owned by billionaire Leonard Blavatnik. However, the €2.5 billion deal, worth €840 million per season to broadcast the majority of games between 2021 and 2024, represented a drop on previous TV deals.
However, the stance of Juventus chairman Agnelli has stunned European football this weekend. Until his explosive resignation on Sunday night, Agnelli was a member of UEFA’s Executive Committee and he was the chairman of the European Club Association (ECA). The ECA is a body made of 246 clubs but these range from HJK Helsinki to Barcelona. As chairman of the ECA, it was his responsibility to defend the interests of member clubs. As such, it is remarkable that Agnelli appears to have sided with a breakaway set that threatens the future of established European competitions such as the Champions League, Europa League, as well as the UEFA Conference League, which had been due to begin next season.
Manchester United’s Woodward is also on the ECA board, along with Arsenal’s Vinai Venkatesham and AC Milan’s Ivan Gazidis. All are expected to resign or be removed for the perceived treachery. Gazidis was formerly the CEO of Arsenal and on Sunday, several sources suggested that Arsenal’s former head of football Raul Sanllehi had been involved as an intermediary between discussions. He did not comment when approached.
On Sunday evening, the ECA held an emergency meeting but representatives of Super League clubs did not join the call. Ajax’s Edwin van der Sar hosted the meeting and they were joined by PSG and Bayern Munich. UEFA had publicly thanked the French and German clubs earlier in the day for resisting the temptation to join the rebels.
Within the ECA, there is fury at Agnelli and Woodward’s perceived betrayal and many clubs feel let down after the ECA decided only on Friday to support the UEFA proposals at Monday’s meeting. Indeed, on a call with investors in October, Woodward had dismissed suggestions United may be part of a breakaway group and insisted the club were dedicated to working with UEFA on reforms to European club competitions.
Agnelli, in particular, has been the subject of scorn this weekend. Agnelli has long been seen as a close ally of UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, to the extent that the latter is the godfather of Agnelli’s daughter. Yet this weekend, multiple sources claim Ceferin has been unable to get hold of his friend. One source says: “Ceferin thought Agnelli would stand with him on the breakaway proposal and yesterday he just could not get hold of him, for all his trying.”
A second contact at a leading European club added: “This whole battle now is Ceferin v Agnelli: they are having the most public arm wrestle imaginable.”
Others have been utterly scathing of Agnelli’s approach and some club executives described the Italian as a “snake” for the manner in which he has appeared to double-cross UEFA and the ECA while joining the breakaway. Only last month, he had publicly described the Swiss-style reforms as “beautiful”.
In January, however, he had triggered concern at UEFA after hosting Madrid’s president Perez at La Continassa, the lavish 18th century building that Juventus recently renovated into their new headquarters. The two men spent three hours together and in hindsight, it feels like a seminal moment. This, after all, is Perez’s long-standing vision merging with the highly US-driven ambition of developing a fixed place in elite competitions for American-owned Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.
Perez has long held an ambition for a European Super League (Getty Images)
On Sunday, reports emerged in Italy that DAZN, which owns the domestic Italian television rights, could become the broadcast partner of the new Super League but the company distanced itself from the story. The Athletic understands that Sky Sports has not been involved with Super League plotting. An extended segment of coverage both at half-time and full-time of Manchester United’s 3-1 victory over Burnley, in which pundits Neville, Roy Keane and Micah Richards delivered a scathing assessment of the plan, would appear to reaffirm that the broadcaster has little to gain from the development of a Super League.
In addition, several major broadcasters across the world are preparing to take legal action against clubs who take steps to devalue the domestic leagues. If, for example, a broadcaster has signed a five-year contract to cover the Premier League, it has done so under the impression that access to European competition will be a compelling narrative strand of the season. As such, any measures that would reduce the jeopardy and fundamentally alter the nature of the domestic leagues, would subsequently see clubs face demands for rebates.
“Broadcasters will take legal action,” insists a well-placed source. “They demanded rebates simply for fans not being in the stadium, so if the product is different, the rebates will be huge. It’s as though you’ve bought the rights to the Premier League and you have ended up with the Championship instead.”
Why have Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain not joined the breakaway?
On the surface, a European Super League would appear to appeal to Bayern or PSG. Both have enjoyed sustained dominance of their domestic leagues and require greater exposure internationally to continue developing the brand of their respective clubs. In addition, the latest German domestic broadcast deal was five per cent down on the previous while a catastrophic television rights’ situation in France has left clubs staring at a £30-45 million black hole this summer. As such, both clubs could, in theory, use the cash on offer in a Super League.
Yet on Sunday, it emerged quickly that last season’s Champions League finalists have concerns. Bayern have been more reserved but PSG insist they have no desire or interest in the plan as things stand and there was bewilderment that the English, Spanish and Italian clubs were prepared to go public with their plans while still failing to convince several of Europe’s most famous clubs to join the Super League. PSG’s concerns are multiple. While it is true they were approached by Real Madrid and Manchester United, several sources cited their discomfort over the idea of limiting access to the elite competitions to a closed shop of clubs. One senior source at PSG warned that European football “cannot only be for the super-rich.”
PSG are also worried that the initial novelty of a Super League may wear off after a couple of seasons while sources also said the involvement of breakthrough clubs such as Atalanta or Leicester City must be protected if football’s competitive spirit is to be maintained. On a more personal level, PSG’s President, Nasser al-Khelaifi, is a member of the UEFA board and also the ECA. Sources close to the PSG president insisted on Sunday he would be reluctant to publicly knife Ceferin in the manner that Agnelli has been accused of doing by some of his peers.
Al-Khelaifi also heads up beIN Media Group, the Qatari television networks that has the rights to broadcast UEFA’s Champions League. This tournament would of course be grossly devalued should a Super League emerge independently of UEFA. “Nasser has his critics,” explains one friend of the president, “But he is a very loyal person. He is not a two-faced bastard. He is friends with Ceferin and has been on the UEFA board for a long time. If you are Nasser’s friend, he looks out for you. So, yes, there is a personal loyalty to Ceferin but also integrity to his job on the board of UEFA.”
Both PSG and Bayern are conscious of the impact on their own domestic leagues and that public opinion is firmly against a breakaway movement. One source in the United States, who has worked with both clubs, said the opposition is also rooted in a fear the Super League would not be as successful as its advocates propose. “It’s like Brexit Day,” says one critic. “The bus says ‘Look at the £350m, it will be amazing’ but it turns it is a big lie and economically, you are out of your own domestic league and you are screwed.”
The calculation from the 12 clubs who have signed up is that, if they break away from UEFA, then PSG, Bayern and Dortmund will have no choice but to eventually join them as they will be left to play in a diluted competition. Yet this would now be a substantial and controversial U-turn. In France, for example, the office of President Emmanuel Macron has praised the resistance shown by French clubs in repelling the advances of the Super League.
Yet now the 12 clubs have gone public, we will discover the extent of the resistance.
What happens to the Premier League?
The Premier League has, by now, become accustomed to the posturing of the Big Six. For several years, the six leading clubs have held their own talks, sometimes even scurrying into a huddle among themselves during Premier League meetings. Tensions surfaced last year over Manchester United and Liverpool’s Project Big Picture document but this latest development is the most severe threat to the hegemony of the Premier League as the dominant domestic league in world football.
The Premier League’s extraordinary broadcast deals have grown due to the competitive nature of the league, which currently sees Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham all residing outside of the Champions League places.
As such, it is easy to understand why underperforming clubs want a guarantee of qualification to an elite European tournament. However, clubs outside of the Big Six, particularly upwardly mobile outfits such as Leeds, West Ham, Aston Villa, Leicester and Everton, have ambitions of breaking into the top four and securing elite European football.
The Super League plan would render domestic performance as irrelevant. As such, even if Arsenal finish 10th this season, they would join the Super League if it were to begin in August whereas Leeds could, theoretically, finish second next season but not enter the Super League. The rules on qualification for the five spare places in the Super League remain a mystery.
In a letter sent out to Premier League clubs, Masters warned that Premier League rules forbid clubs from entering competitions without the prior permission of the Premier League board. Masters warned he could not envisage a situation by which this permission would be granted. On Sunday, Premier League officials were struggling to make sustained contact with representatives of the Big Six. One source close to Masters said: “This will either make him or it will break him. This isn’t his fault. But it’s become his problem. And it will be hard for him to fix.”
In a remarkable intervention on Sunday evening, Ferguson, the most successful manager in Premier League history, told Reuters: “Talk of a Super League is a move away from 70 years of European club football. Both as a player for a provincial team Dunfermline in the 1960s and as a manager at Aberdeen winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup, for a small provincial club in Scotland it was like climbing Mount Everest. Everton are spending £500 million to build a new stadium with the ambition to play in Champions League. Fans all over love the competition as it is. In my time at United, we played in four Champions League finals and they were always the most special of nights. I’m not sure Manchester United are involved in this, as I am not part of the decision making process.”
Sources close to the situation said that Ferguson’s comments did not overly trouble the decision-makers or disturb the desire of the top brass among the founding clubs on Sunday evening.
It was Ferguson’s first public intervention on a live issue affecting United since his retirement as manager in 2013. Everton manager Carlo Ancelotti has previously condemned plans for a Super League. He told The Athletic: “For me, the Super League cannot happen. We have the Champions League. It’s enough, right? The Champions League pits the best against the best already. But the future of football must value national (domestic) competitions more.”
What happens next?
Well, UEFA’s aspirations of securing its competition reforms today appear to be in ruins. UEFA had been working around the clock during the weekend to lean on clubs and get them back on side. Ceferin, a source said, is “not a panicky guy”, before adding: “This has shaken UEFA to the core.”
There will be enormous blowback. The Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust issued a statement on Sunday night in which it accused the club’s board of being “prepared to risk the club’s reputation and its future in the opportunistic pursuit of greed” and that the club risked being expelled from English league football and its players banned from international competition, “And yet the current owners — mere custodians of a 139-year-old institution — are prepared to risk it all for avarice and self-aggrandisement. We demand the board immediately disassociates itself from the breakaway league.”
The criticism is likely to follow from the media, to former players and likely current managers and players too. There will, inevitably, be a great deal of threats.
UEFA issued a joint statement with the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A in which in confirmed that “the clubs concerned will be banned from playing in any other competition at domestic, European or world level, and their players could be denied the opportunity to represent their national teams.”
FIFA reacted later and with less condemnation but did say that it “can only express its disapproval to a ‘closed European breakaway league’ outside of the international football structures.”
One source close to the situation concluded: “This is existential for UEFA. They are obsolete and they lose everything if this passes. Internally, there is still a feeling UEFA will make a deal just about good enough to get over the line. But only because that is what always happened before. If they don’t strike a deal, it is heading for one place — the courts.”
Other contributors: Matt Slater and James Horncastle
European Super League: Staff email reveals Liverpool are using ‘family’ image to mask a grim reality – the owners are greedy capitalists
By Simon Hughes Apr 19, 2021
173
Come and work for Liverpool, an advert has enthusiastically told listeners on local Merseyside radio recently. It is the place to be, where a full-time contract will mean you are a significant part of an already wonderful team. In fact, scrub that — why stop there? You will instead become family…
Yuck.
Families, remember, are not always functional. Perhaps this explains why only at around 8.30 this morning, employees of LFC received an email confirming what everyone already knew.
It came from Billy Hogan, the chief executive appointed last autumn as Peter Moore’s replacement.
The Athletic can exclusively reveal what Hogan wrote and some of the more interesting points that deviate from the waffle already included in other statements are highlighted below in bold…
Dear Colleagues,
You will be aware of the announcement published late last night regarding Europe’s leading football Clubs coming together to establish a new mid-week competition, the European Super League, governed by its Founding Clubs.
It’s important as a member of our team that I share with you some of the context.
For quite some time now, Clubs, including our own, have held numerous longstanding concerns about not only the future of European football but also the way football is run by UEFA. The global pandemic has also accelerated the instability in the existing European football economic model.
We have therefore joined AC Milan, Arsenal, Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur as Founding Clubs of the Super League. It is anticipated that a further three Clubs will join ahead of the inaugural season, which is intended to commence as soon as practicable.
The Super League will be the future of European football and if we want to continue our journey of being a sustainable Club with ambition to grow and continue winning trophies then we should absolutely be part of that process and have a seat at the table rather than outside that group.
The new annual tournament will provide significantly greater economic growth and support for European football via a long-term commitment to uncapped solidarity payments which will grow in line with league revenues. These solidarity payments are expected to be roughly three times what is currently achieved from UEFA competitions. One of the core commitments of the European Super League is to vastly increase financial support for the football pyramid.
After the start of the men’s competition, a corresponding women’s league will also be launched, helping to advance and develop the women’s game.
We know that this announcement has provoked strong feelings within the game and elsewhere but we believe this decision is in the best long-term interests of Liverpool Football Club.
Importantly, this is the beginning of the journey and we can now start an engagement process with you, supporters and key stakeholders to help shape this process in the right way.
There is still much more information to come in due course.
I will keep you updated as we progress on this journey and discuss further on our Town Hall tomorrow.
Thank you for your continued support.
Now, I have long believed any football club’s sense of self-importance can be measured by whether its senior staff insist on part of the title at the institution they represent being consistently referred to with a capital C on all official correspondence even when mentioned independent from the rest of the name.
That’s one box ticked off, a minor revelation that nevertheless might help illustrate why we have reached this point.
Private or not, Hogan became the first person from Liverpool to put his signature to any of his own comments relating to where this is all heading. John W Henry, it turns out, is more comfortable with allowing Manchester United’s Joel Glazer speak for him on his own club’s website.
Staff, of course, might find out more about what will happen next if they register at the “Town Hall” — which, it is fair to say, is not the sort of dialogue anyone from Merseyside would use for what is essentially a business update.
Yet this is the way it has been at Liverpool for a long time, a club (note the small c) that permanently seems to be battling with itself because the language of local supporters is not used by the figures who run it. Here, it is sharply felt that the word “growth” masks uglier pursuits, and that the global image pushed by those who stand to eventually profit from it does not correlate with a grim reality.
It is true the commodification of LFC began long ago. Hogan, who was hired in 2012 initially as a commercial officer, had upon his appointment wanted to know exactly how much money each supporter was generating. Spreadsheets revealed the potential yield per seat inside Anfield and this reinforced the notion that more money could be made not by attendance and active participation in any live event but through a contract with a television company.
Despite the recent trophies, cringing and embarrassment have never too far away. Since becoming European champions in 2019 for a sixth time, Liverpool’s owners have unsuccessfully attempted to trademark the city’s name, backtracked on plans to take money from the public purse via the government’s furlough scheme and been outed as one of the conspirators in “Project Big Picture“. The club’s 2018 slogan devised in-house (and not embraced by the fanbase, it has to be stressed) should be amended for a more accurate representation: “We are Liverpool, this means (we think we are entitled to a lot, lot) more.”
Not so long ago, chairman Tom Werner told The Athletic that Liverpool would not back any plans that threatened to damage the domestic game. “Our first intention is to protect the inherent strength of the Premier League,” he said in the summer of 2019. “I don’t want to participate in anything that in any way harms the experience both from a Liverpool supporter’s point of view and also in the primacy of English football.”
Only a month ago, indeed, Hogan thanked the fans for their patience throughout the pandemic. There is something to be gained by saying, “It is never taken for granted but in the absence of supporters at Anfield, we have had a reminder of why we value it as much as we do”, but evidently there is less to be gained by engaging with them even though you know your superiors are busy signing their futures away.
Even if Henry did speak, how could anyone really trust what he says? When he chose to stay silent despite being at the centre of Big Picture, sources close to him were insistent that he cared about the structure of English football. Despite criticism of the plan, it was possible to see some benefits for those who needed money most but this is different. The owners, Fenway Sports Group, tend to get incredibly upset whenever they are called greedy capitalists but no other description feels appropriate at the moment.
By Simon Hughes Apr 19, 2021
Come and work for Liverpool, an advert has enthusiastically told listeners on local Merseyside radio recently. It is the place to be, where a full-time contract will mean you are a significant part of an already wonderful team. In fact, scrub that — why stop there? You will instead become family…
Yuck.
Families, remember, are not always functional. Perhaps this explains why only at around 8.30 this morning, employees of LFC received an email confirming what everyone already knew.
It came from Billy Hogan, the chief executive appointed last autumn as Peter Moore’s replacement.
The Athletic can exclusively reveal what Hogan wrote and some of the more interesting points that deviate from the waffle already included in other statements are highlighted below in bold…
Dear Colleagues,
You will be aware of the announcement published late last night regarding Europe’s leading football Clubs coming together to establish a new mid-week competition, the European Super League, governed by its Founding Clubs.
It’s important as a member of our team that I share with you some of the context.
For quite some time now, Clubs, including our own, have held numerous longstanding concerns about not only the future of European football but also the way football is run by UEFA. The global pandemic has also accelerated the instability in the existing European football economic model.
We have therefore joined AC Milan, Arsenal, Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Tottenham Hotspur as Founding Clubs of the Super League. It is anticipated that a further three Clubs will join ahead of the inaugural season, which is intended to commence as soon as practicable.
The Super League will be the future of European football and if we want to continue our journey of being a sustainable Club with ambition to grow and continue winning trophies then we should absolutely be part of that process and have a seat at the table rather than outside that group.
The new annual tournament will provide significantly greater economic growth and support for European football via a long-term commitment to uncapped solidarity payments which will grow in line with league revenues. These solidarity payments are expected to be roughly three times what is currently achieved from UEFA competitions. One of the core commitments of the European Super League is to vastly increase financial support for the football pyramid.
After the start of the men’s competition, a corresponding women’s league will also be launched, helping to advance and develop the women’s game.
We know that this announcement has provoked strong feelings within the game and elsewhere but we believe this decision is in the best long-term interests of Liverpool Football Club.
Importantly, this is the beginning of the journey and we can now start an engagement process with you, supporters and key stakeholders to help shape this process in the right way.
There is still much more information to come in due course.
I will keep you updated as we progress on this journey and discuss further on our Town Hall tomorrow.
Thank you for your continued support.
Now, I have long believed any football club’s sense of self-importance can be measured by whether its senior staff insist on part of the title at the institution they represent being consistently referred to with a capital C on all official correspondence even when mentioned independent from the rest of the name.
That’s one box ticked off, a minor revelation that nevertheless might help illustrate why we have reached this point.
Private or not, Hogan became the first person from Liverpool to put his signature to any of his own comments relating to where this is all heading. John W Henry, it turns out, is more comfortable with allowing Manchester United’s Joel Glazer speak for him on his own club’s website.
Staff, of course, might find out more about what will happen next if they register at the “Town Hall” — which, it is fair to say, is not the sort of dialogue anyone from Merseyside would use for what is essentially a business update.
Yet this is the way it has been at Liverpool for a long time, a club (note the small c) that permanently seems to be battling with itself because the language of local supporters is not used by the figures who run it. Here, it is sharply felt that the word “growth” masks uglier pursuits, and that the global image pushed by those who stand to eventually profit from it does not correlate with a grim reality.
It is true the commodification of LFC began long ago. Hogan, who was hired in 2012 initially as a commercial officer, had upon his appointment wanted to know exactly how much money each supporter was generating. Spreadsheets revealed the potential yield per seat inside Anfield and this reinforced the notion that more money could be made not by attendance and active participation in any live event but through a contract with a television company.
Despite the recent trophies, cringing and embarrassment have never too far away. Since becoming European champions in 2019 for a sixth time, Liverpool’s owners have unsuccessfully attempted to trademark the city’s name, backtracked on plans to take money from the public purse via the government’s furlough scheme and been outed as one of the conspirators in “Project Big Picture“. The club’s 2018 slogan devised in-house (and not embraced by the fanbase, it has to be stressed) should be amended for a more accurate representation: “We are Liverpool, this means (we think we are entitled to a lot, lot) more.”
Not so long ago, chairman Tom Werner told The Athletic that Liverpool would not back any plans that threatened to damage the domestic game. “Our first intention is to protect the inherent strength of the Premier League,” he said in the summer of 2019. “I don’t want to participate in anything that in any way harms the experience both from a Liverpool supporter’s point of view and also in the primacy of English football.”
Only a month ago, indeed, Hogan thanked the fans for their patience throughout the pandemic. There is something to be gained by saying, “It is never taken for granted but in the absence of supporters at Anfield, we have had a reminder of why we value it as much as we do”, but evidently there is less to be gained by engaging with them even though you know your superiors are busy signing their futures away.
Even if Henry did speak, how could anyone really trust what he says? When he chose to stay silent despite being at the centre of Big Picture, sources close to him were insistent that he cared about the structure of English football. Despite criticism of the plan, it was possible to see some benefits for those who needed money most but this is different. The owners, Fenway Sports Group, tend to get incredibly upset whenever they are called greedy capitalists but no other description feels appropriate at the moment.
Invalid contracts, secret WhatsApp messages and worries over bonuses – what players think of Super League
Laurie Whitwell and more Apr 19, 2021
238
As the Super League shockwaves reverberated around Europe, it did not take long for Premier League captains to mobilise once more.
In attempts to cut through the confusion, the WhatsApp messages between those players who wear the armbands in England’s top flight started pinging.
How much did people know? What did they think of the plans? Could international players really be barred from representing their countries? Would the six breakaway clubs – already known in some quarters as the Dirty Half Dozen – be kicked out of the Premier League?
The sentiment from one England regular went along these lines: “This is mad. I can’t believe it.”
Becoming apparent was the extent to which the announcement that Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal and Chelsea were going to war with UEFA, the European game’s governing body, had blind-sided those who will be asked to compete on the pitch.
“Now the players are paying full attention,” said one leading agent. “It’s a bombshell.”
Concerning one player at a top-six side was the potential for immediate curtailment of involvement in the Champions League, as UEFA has threatened. Frustrating others was the lack of communication from the top about fundamental changes to the football calendar.
A source close to Manchester United players said: “The boys aren’t happy. They feel exposed by the club, uninformed, and as though the club didn’t bother to fill them in or consult the players over career-influencing changes.”
One player who previously played for one of the six described the club’s owner as “shameful” to The Athletic.
Equally, with owners deciding that secrecy was paramount, managers were not briefed.
Liverpool’s John W Henry is coming under fire for the Super League plans (Photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Sources say Ed Woodward informed Ole Gunnar Solskjaer of the authenticity of the Super League reports ahead of kick-off against Burnley at Old Trafford on Sunday, once teamsheets had been handed in, but there was no time to elaborate on details given the United manager was preparing for the game. Solskjaer then having to bat away questions on the subject after the final whistle, overshadowing a spotlight he would have liked to shine on two-goal Mason Greenwood, was unedifying.
Amid the absence of internal communications, feverish chatter of the kind that happened last year during salary negotiations has started up again at Arsenal. At the time, their then head of football Raul Sanllehi talked about proposed wage cuts in an open manner with manager Mikel Arteta and the squad. This time, however, there is resentment.
“They feel this was sprung on them and not clearly communicated,” says an Arsenal insider. “The wage cuts pissed people off, but Raul is a good talker and he had Mikel onside. That was something that was put to them as a decision (for them to make). But this is completely out of their hands.”
As the Premier League threatens expulsion for those clubs jumping ship, players potentially affected are considering the repercussions. One agent said: “I’ve spoken to a few players and they think it’s an absolute joke. They like playing Premier League football. The owners think it’s a positive, but not many others do.”
The absence of novelty in facing Europe’s biggest sides is a worry voiced by one top-six player to The Athletic. Another said: “I’m quite happy to beat Burnley one week and then go and take on Liverpool. That’s what it was like when I was a kid watching. Last night, when the news was starting to break, I messaged a few of my mates (in the game), joking about it.
“It was only really when Gary Neville started talking about it on Sky that it became real. I spoke to my agent first thing and he reckons it won’t happen. He said to me that it wouldn’t be good for players either as the Super League clubs would be spending less money on players, as they wouldn’t have to qualify for the Champions League any more, and that players’ wages would actually go down.”
The flipside has been mentioned elsewhere when it comes to global stars.
Elite players at Super League teams looking at contract renegotiations this summer will be advised to pause before committing, mindful of possibly gaining a bigger slice of the proposed $3.5 billion cash pool announced in the launch press release.
Paul Pogba, for one, could add a zero or two to his demands at United given his commercial value. He could not, however, sacrifice international football. A World Cup winner with France three years ago, he and other players have a strong affection for their countries and would push back against any suggestions of bans from major tournaments.
Such an outcome would also bring close scrutiny of club terms.
Clause 6.1.1 of a standard Premier League contract relates to employer obligations and dictates the club should not do anything that stops a player featuring for his country. It also states that clubs shall observe the rules, which are defined as “the statutes and regulations of FIFA and UEFA and the FA Rules and League Rules”, meaning in theory any club leaving those competitions would be in breach of contract.
Could an unhappy player, such as Chelsea’s Kepa Arrizabalaga, rip up his contract? (Photo: Paul Childs/PA Images via Getty Images)
A number of intermediaries raised this aspect. One said: “So if the club proactively does something that stops them being an international footballer, does that invalidate the contract? Do the club then potentially have no assets on the books?”
Another agent reported how, within hours of the announcement, two texts had dropped from players about financial consequences for bonuses, which are worded with regards to UEFA competitions.
There is doubt over the suitability of transposing these clauses over to any Super League, given the difference in revenue. The agent expected a swift renegotiation should the mooted competition go ahead.
Given the opprobrium, some players have spoken out. Paris Saint-Germain’s Ander Herrera articulated his views clearly.
“I fell in love with popular football, with the football of the fans, with the dream of seeing the team of my heart compete against the greatest,” he posted on Twitter. “If this European Super League advances, those dreams are over, the illusions of the fans of the teams that are not giants of being able to win on the field competing in the best competitions will end.”
Leeds United players wore T-shirts before their Monday night game, against Liverpool, declaring teams wanting European football should, “Earn It”. But whether individuals will go further remains to be seen.
One agent expressed his personal view: “Say you’re (Aston Villa star) Jack Grealish and you have an opinion, do you dare say it? If you do, you could lose your transfer to one of those clubs. There’s a reason to stay tight-lipped.”
Those within the game noted Herrera was backed in his stance by his club PSG, who have themselves been criticised for using sovereign wealth to dominate French football.
Leeds midfielder Mateusz Klich inadvertently underlined the contradiction by posting a picture of fans at Tunisian side Club Africain during a friendly against PSG in 2017. They held up a banner reading: “Created by the poor, stolen by the rich.”
Everton’s Richarlison posted a series of emoji claps in response to a video of Gary Neville’s outburst on Sky Sports at Old Trafford. Daniel Podence, the Wolves forward, argued “there are some things we just can’t really pay for” when writing on social media in relation to his favourite memories of the Champions League.
Bruno Fernandes of Manchester United, Podence’s Portugal team-mate, replied: “Dreams can’t be (bought).”
It will be interesting if Fernandes or any other Premier League player talks at length in opposition.
“Whether you agree or disagree, you’re contracted,” said an agent. “If you don’t pay the price straight away, you might pay it later. These owners could sell you in 18 months.”
One Premier League player was happy to be quoted anonymously.
“It’s a shambles,” he told The Athletic. “It’s the rich getting richer. I can understand why the clubs are doing it – if you can’t beat them, join them. But for the rest of the Premier League, the implications of that will be serious and long-lasting and it’s not going to be what we know it as now.
“We’ve been talking about it. Someone said Rangers and Celtic could come in and four teams will come in from the Championship (to make it 20 clubs again). But the Sky deals, and the stuff like that, they’re only doing that because of the big teams. People don’t realise the implications. There’s not a chance that Sky would carry on paying that money. It’s not just about the top six leaving, it impacts on the rest of the division and the lower divisions as well.
“Those clubs (the top six) are laughing, they’ll make more money than they’ve ever made before. The best thing is you play Brighton one week and Barcelona at the Nou Camp the next. But the novelty of that, playing Barcelona, will wear off if that becomes the norm.”
The player believes voicing these concerns publicly will be very difficult, however.
“So hard. If you’re at one of those clubs, getting paid by them, it’s nigh on impossible to come out and say anything. It’s like the managers. I heard (Chelsea boss) Thomas Tuchel saying, ‘I trust my club’. They can’t say anything. If you do, you’ll get fired and they’ll get someone else in who will do that job. It’s the same for the players. Unless you have 90 per cent of the dressing room willing to do it, there’s not a chance anything happens.”
Another player insisted strike action would not work.
“I don’t think they will. They may voice their opinions, but ultimately the clubs hold their registration.”
The original Premier League player speculated as to the type of player who would take such dramatic action. He said: “Maybe only the players who are coming towards the end of their career and have made so much money that they have nothing to lose, and they care that much about the game. But that’s very minimal.”
A Premier League without the six clubs involved would lose significant appeal, he added: “As a player, you work your whole life to play at Old Trafford and Anfield, and you’ve completely lost that. For me, it just wouldn’t be the same. I’ve spoken to boys here and at higher clubs and they’ve said the same – they’re not supporting it, but they can’t do anything about it. They feel powerless.
“Last night, I thought it was just threats and bargaining tactics. Then I woke up this morning and thought, ‘There’s not a chance that they would go through this, the damage that it has caused, to go back now to the normal’.
“I think they’re genuinely serious about it.”
Laurie Whitwell and more Apr 19, 2021
As the Super League shockwaves reverberated around Europe, it did not take long for Premier League captains to mobilise once more.
In attempts to cut through the confusion, the WhatsApp messages between those players who wear the armbands in England’s top flight started pinging.
How much did people know? What did they think of the plans? Could international players really be barred from representing their countries? Would the six breakaway clubs – already known in some quarters as the Dirty Half Dozen – be kicked out of the Premier League?
The sentiment from one England regular went along these lines: “This is mad. I can’t believe it.”
Becoming apparent was the extent to which the announcement that Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal and Chelsea were going to war with UEFA, the European game’s governing body, had blind-sided those who will be asked to compete on the pitch.
“Now the players are paying full attention,” said one leading agent. “It’s a bombshell.”
Concerning one player at a top-six side was the potential for immediate curtailment of involvement in the Champions League, as UEFA has threatened. Frustrating others was the lack of communication from the top about fundamental changes to the football calendar.
A source close to Manchester United players said: “The boys aren’t happy. They feel exposed by the club, uninformed, and as though the club didn’t bother to fill them in or consult the players over career-influencing changes.”
One player who previously played for one of the six described the club’s owner as “shameful” to The Athletic.
Equally, with owners deciding that secrecy was paramount, managers were not briefed.
Liverpool’s John W Henry is coming under fire for the Super League plans (Photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Sources say Ed Woodward informed Ole Gunnar Solskjaer of the authenticity of the Super League reports ahead of kick-off against Burnley at Old Trafford on Sunday, once teamsheets had been handed in, but there was no time to elaborate on details given the United manager was preparing for the game. Solskjaer then having to bat away questions on the subject after the final whistle, overshadowing a spotlight he would have liked to shine on two-goal Mason Greenwood, was unedifying.
Amid the absence of internal communications, feverish chatter of the kind that happened last year during salary negotiations has started up again at Arsenal. At the time, their then head of football Raul Sanllehi talked about proposed wage cuts in an open manner with manager Mikel Arteta and the squad. This time, however, there is resentment.
“They feel this was sprung on them and not clearly communicated,” says an Arsenal insider. “The wage cuts pissed people off, but Raul is a good talker and he had Mikel onside. That was something that was put to them as a decision (for them to make). But this is completely out of their hands.”
As the Premier League threatens expulsion for those clubs jumping ship, players potentially affected are considering the repercussions. One agent said: “I’ve spoken to a few players and they think it’s an absolute joke. They like playing Premier League football. The owners think it’s a positive, but not many others do.”
The absence of novelty in facing Europe’s biggest sides is a worry voiced by one top-six player to The Athletic. Another said: “I’m quite happy to beat Burnley one week and then go and take on Liverpool. That’s what it was like when I was a kid watching. Last night, when the news was starting to break, I messaged a few of my mates (in the game), joking about it.
“It was only really when Gary Neville started talking about it on Sky that it became real. I spoke to my agent first thing and he reckons it won’t happen. He said to me that it wouldn’t be good for players either as the Super League clubs would be spending less money on players, as they wouldn’t have to qualify for the Champions League any more, and that players’ wages would actually go down.”
The flipside has been mentioned elsewhere when it comes to global stars.
Elite players at Super League teams looking at contract renegotiations this summer will be advised to pause before committing, mindful of possibly gaining a bigger slice of the proposed $3.5 billion cash pool announced in the launch press release.
Paul Pogba, for one, could add a zero or two to his demands at United given his commercial value. He could not, however, sacrifice international football. A World Cup winner with France three years ago, he and other players have a strong affection for their countries and would push back against any suggestions of bans from major tournaments.
Such an outcome would also bring close scrutiny of club terms.
Clause 6.1.1 of a standard Premier League contract relates to employer obligations and dictates the club should not do anything that stops a player featuring for his country. It also states that clubs shall observe the rules, which are defined as “the statutes and regulations of FIFA and UEFA and the FA Rules and League Rules”, meaning in theory any club leaving those competitions would be in breach of contract.
Could an unhappy player, such as Chelsea’s Kepa Arrizabalaga, rip up his contract? (Photo: Paul Childs/PA Images via Getty Images)
A number of intermediaries raised this aspect. One said: “So if the club proactively does something that stops them being an international footballer, does that invalidate the contract? Do the club then potentially have no assets on the books?”
Another agent reported how, within hours of the announcement, two texts had dropped from players about financial consequences for bonuses, which are worded with regards to UEFA competitions.
There is doubt over the suitability of transposing these clauses over to any Super League, given the difference in revenue. The agent expected a swift renegotiation should the mooted competition go ahead.
Given the opprobrium, some players have spoken out. Paris Saint-Germain’s Ander Herrera articulated his views clearly.
“I fell in love with popular football, with the football of the fans, with the dream of seeing the team of my heart compete against the greatest,” he posted on Twitter. “If this European Super League advances, those dreams are over, the illusions of the fans of the teams that are not giants of being able to win on the field competing in the best competitions will end.”
Leeds United players wore T-shirts before their Monday night game, against Liverpool, declaring teams wanting European football should, “Earn It”. But whether individuals will go further remains to be seen.
One agent expressed his personal view: “Say you’re (Aston Villa star) Jack Grealish and you have an opinion, do you dare say it? If you do, you could lose your transfer to one of those clubs. There’s a reason to stay tight-lipped.”
Those within the game noted Herrera was backed in his stance by his club PSG, who have themselves been criticised for using sovereign wealth to dominate French football.
Leeds midfielder Mateusz Klich inadvertently underlined the contradiction by posting a picture of fans at Tunisian side Club Africain during a friendly against PSG in 2017. They held up a banner reading: “Created by the poor, stolen by the rich.”
Everton’s Richarlison posted a series of emoji claps in response to a video of Gary Neville’s outburst on Sky Sports at Old Trafford. Daniel Podence, the Wolves forward, argued “there are some things we just can’t really pay for” when writing on social media in relation to his favourite memories of the Champions League.
Bruno Fernandes of Manchester United, Podence’s Portugal team-mate, replied: “Dreams can’t be (bought).”
It will be interesting if Fernandes or any other Premier League player talks at length in opposition.
“Whether you agree or disagree, you’re contracted,” said an agent. “If you don’t pay the price straight away, you might pay it later. These owners could sell you in 18 months.”
One Premier League player was happy to be quoted anonymously.
“It’s a shambles,” he told The Athletic. “It’s the rich getting richer. I can understand why the clubs are doing it – if you can’t beat them, join them. But for the rest of the Premier League, the implications of that will be serious and long-lasting and it’s not going to be what we know it as now.
“We’ve been talking about it. Someone said Rangers and Celtic could come in and four teams will come in from the Championship (to make it 20 clubs again). But the Sky deals, and the stuff like that, they’re only doing that because of the big teams. People don’t realise the implications. There’s not a chance that Sky would carry on paying that money. It’s not just about the top six leaving, it impacts on the rest of the division and the lower divisions as well.
“Those clubs (the top six) are laughing, they’ll make more money than they’ve ever made before. The best thing is you play Brighton one week and Barcelona at the Nou Camp the next. But the novelty of that, playing Barcelona, will wear off if that becomes the norm.”
The player believes voicing these concerns publicly will be very difficult, however.
“So hard. If you’re at one of those clubs, getting paid by them, it’s nigh on impossible to come out and say anything. It’s like the managers. I heard (Chelsea boss) Thomas Tuchel saying, ‘I trust my club’. They can’t say anything. If you do, you’ll get fired and they’ll get someone else in who will do that job. It’s the same for the players. Unless you have 90 per cent of the dressing room willing to do it, there’s not a chance anything happens.”
Another player insisted strike action would not work.
“I don’t think they will. They may voice their opinions, but ultimately the clubs hold their registration.”
The original Premier League player speculated as to the type of player who would take such dramatic action. He said: “Maybe only the players who are coming towards the end of their career and have made so much money that they have nothing to lose, and they care that much about the game. But that’s very minimal.”
A Premier League without the six clubs involved would lose significant appeal, he added: “As a player, you work your whole life to play at Old Trafford and Anfield, and you’ve completely lost that. For me, it just wouldn’t be the same. I’ve spoken to boys here and at higher clubs and they’ve said the same – they’re not supporting it, but they can’t do anything about it. They feel powerless.
“Last night, I thought it was just threats and bargaining tactics. Then I woke up this morning and thought, ‘There’s not a chance that they would go through this, the damage that it has caused, to go back now to the normal’.
“I think they’re genuinely serious about it.”
Klopp furious at FSG over Super League and Liverpool players and staff stunned by abuse at Leeds
By James Pearce 4h ago
66
“I will try to help and sort it somehow,” vowed an exasperated Jurgen Klopp.
It was an uncomfortable evening for the Liverpool manager at Elland Road. Verbally abused by angry locals, he then watched his team wilt late on and was hung out to dry by his bosses.
What a shoddy way for the Fenway Sports Group (FSG) trio of John W Henry, Tom Werner and Mike Gordon to treat the man who has given them so much glory to bask in and enhanced the value of their asset so greatly.
Those who should have been in front of the TV cameras answering the difficult questions over Liverpool’s controversial commitment to join a European Super League (ESL) remained shamefully silent. Instead, it was left to Klopp to try to navigate his way through a minefield.
He reiterated his opposition to the creation of a breakaway closed-shop league: “I don’t think it’s a great idea. I like the fact West Ham might play Champions League next year. No problem. I don’t want them to, because we want to do that, but I like that they have that chance.”
But Klopp stopped short of openly condemning the blatant show of avarice from FSG which has angered so many supporters. He picked his words carefully. He wasn’t prepared to declare war on his paymasters. He denied feeling let down by the club’s owners – despite playing no part in the discussions and only being informed about Liverpool signing up to the ESL shortly before Sunday’s announcement.
“I don’t think that, I don’t feel that,” he insisted. “I am 20-something years in football. I’ve been used to owners making decisions without asking me.
“I know the owners, they are reasonable, serious people who care about us. I’m not sure if I’ve been more exposed than usual. The English system is like this — pretty much there’s one voice in the club and that’s the manager. It’s different to Germany. I’ve had enough time to get used to it. It’s not new but there will be a moment for sure when our owners say what they have to say.”
There was plenty of lip biting going on. The Athletic understands Klopp was furious over both FSG’s willingness to join the ESL and the timing of the announcement so close to a pivotal fixture against Leeds.
It’s a concept completely out of keeping with the manager’s values and principles. He described himself as “a football romantic” when he took over at Anfield in 2015. He was attracted by the challenge of reviving the fortunes of a club that valued history and tradition. He felt Liverpool were a better fit for him than Manchester United, in the belief that the motivation of the club hierarchy wasn’t just making money.
It’s worth remembering that before Klopp led Liverpool back into the Champions League in 2017, the club had been outside Europe’s elite for six of the previous seven seasons. Now they are in danger of missing out again, FSG wants to pull the drawbridge up. It doesn’t want drama, it wants certainty and guaranteed windfalls.
Klopp spoke to his squad about the fallout at a team meeting on Monday morning and urged them not to be distracted by the furore and to retain focus on achieving a top-four finish.
However, preparations for Monday night’s trip to Elland Road were undoubtedly affected. Klopp had to spend part of the day preparing for how he was going to handle the inevitable barrage of questions from the media in the absence of anyone from FSG fronting up.
With little clarity about what happens next, there was a hollow feeling to the game and after a bright start, Liverpool lost their way alarmingly as they squandered the opportunity to climb back up to that once-precious fourth place.
Vice-captain James Milner gave his blunt verdict on the ESL plans after Diego Llorente’s late header had cancelled out Sadio Mane’s opener to force a 1-1 draw that leaves Liverpool sixth: “There are a lot of questions. I can only say my personal opinion, I don’t like it and I hope it doesn’t happen.”
Players and staff were stunned by the abuse and vitriol they encountered on a pre-game walk in Leeds and then again when the Liverpool team coach arrived at the ground around 90 minutes before kick-off. They were booed by hundreds of Leeds fans who chanted “Scum” and labelled them “greedy bastards”. A Liverpool shirt was burned.
“The team has nothing to do with it, I have nothing to do with it, but people treat us like we do,” said Klopp. “We are employees of the club. I feel responsible for a lot of things at this club. When I am involved in things, I take the criticism easily; when the boys are involved, they take criticism as well. But we are not involved in the process or the decision making. No one knows what will happen.
“The Leeds fans were shouting at us like I’d said, ‘Let’s go to the Super League’. We are talking about human beings. With all the things that are written, people should not forget that. It’s an emotional situation.”
Klopp had a point but again it comes down to FSG’s abject failure to take responsibility. A vacuum was created and those in the public eye with the liver bird on their chest were always going to bear the brunt of the backlash from rival fans.
The manager’s criticism of Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville was an unnecessary sideshow: “He talks about You’ll Never Walk Alone, that should be for the bin already, to be honest. It’s our anthem, not his anthem and he doesn’t understand it anyway. It’s not fair.”
But Klopp’s real error was questioning the decision of Liverpool supporters’ groups to have the flags and banners removed from the Kop ahead of Saturday’s home game against Newcastle United.
In the continued absence of fans from games, it’s a powerful way to make their feelings known to the owners. If supporters were allowed in on Saturday there would be protests and a mass walkout, like the one which forced FSG into a U-turn over planned ticket price increases in February 2016.
“Yes, I understand that they are angry. My problem is that the banners are there for the team. That’s why I think I’d leave them there,” said Klopp.
“We still have a lot to go for in this season. Over the past six years, we created a great relationship between the team and the supporters. I understand that they want to act and show their anger, but we shouldn’t forget that the team had nothing to do with it. In these moments they take their support away from the team, nobody else.
“People are angry, disappointed, frustrated, I get that, but the team didn’t do anything wrong apart from not winning enough football games this season. The most important part of a football club is the supporters and the team. We have to make sure that really nothing gets in between that.”
That’s exactly why fans are making a stand and there’s currently a torrent of fury being unleashed towards FSG HQ across the Atlantic in Boston.
Liverpool’s club website usually carries a full transcript of Klopp’s post-match press conference but tellingly not a single word he said about the ESL was published on there. When will someone at FSG emerge from the shadows?
Klopp intends to seek urgent discussions with the owners in the coming days, but says he isn’t considering his position:
“I don’t run away when there are problems, I never did that. When times get even tougher that makes me more determined to stay here. I feel responsible for the team, for the club and for the relationship we have with our fans.”
That bond that Klopp holds so dear and helped propel Liverpool to cherished European and domestic triumphs has been broken.
Having seen his Anfield reign derailed by a global pandemic and an unprecedented injury crisis over the past 12 months, this is another painful slap in the face.
But if anyone can make FSG see sense and row back from the brink, it’s him.
By James Pearce 4h ago
“I will try to help and sort it somehow,” vowed an exasperated Jurgen Klopp.
It was an uncomfortable evening for the Liverpool manager at Elland Road. Verbally abused by angry locals, he then watched his team wilt late on and was hung out to dry by his bosses.
What a shoddy way for the Fenway Sports Group (FSG) trio of John W Henry, Tom Werner and Mike Gordon to treat the man who has given them so much glory to bask in and enhanced the value of their asset so greatly.
Those who should have been in front of the TV cameras answering the difficult questions over Liverpool’s controversial commitment to join a European Super League (ESL) remained shamefully silent. Instead, it was left to Klopp to try to navigate his way through a minefield.
He reiterated his opposition to the creation of a breakaway closed-shop league: “I don’t think it’s a great idea. I like the fact West Ham might play Champions League next year. No problem. I don’t want them to, because we want to do that, but I like that they have that chance.”
But Klopp stopped short of openly condemning the blatant show of avarice from FSG which has angered so many supporters. He picked his words carefully. He wasn’t prepared to declare war on his paymasters. He denied feeling let down by the club’s owners – despite playing no part in the discussions and only being informed about Liverpool signing up to the ESL shortly before Sunday’s announcement.
“I don’t think that, I don’t feel that,” he insisted. “I am 20-something years in football. I’ve been used to owners making decisions without asking me.
“I know the owners, they are reasonable, serious people who care about us. I’m not sure if I’ve been more exposed than usual. The English system is like this — pretty much there’s one voice in the club and that’s the manager. It’s different to Germany. I’ve had enough time to get used to it. It’s not new but there will be a moment for sure when our owners say what they have to say.”
There was plenty of lip biting going on. The Athletic understands Klopp was furious over both FSG’s willingness to join the ESL and the timing of the announcement so close to a pivotal fixture against Leeds.
It’s a concept completely out of keeping with the manager’s values and principles. He described himself as “a football romantic” when he took over at Anfield in 2015. He was attracted by the challenge of reviving the fortunes of a club that valued history and tradition. He felt Liverpool were a better fit for him than Manchester United, in the belief that the motivation of the club hierarchy wasn’t just making money.
It’s worth remembering that before Klopp led Liverpool back into the Champions League in 2017, the club had been outside Europe’s elite for six of the previous seven seasons. Now they are in danger of missing out again, FSG wants to pull the drawbridge up. It doesn’t want drama, it wants certainty and guaranteed windfalls.
Klopp spoke to his squad about the fallout at a team meeting on Monday morning and urged them not to be distracted by the furore and to retain focus on achieving a top-four finish.
However, preparations for Monday night’s trip to Elland Road were undoubtedly affected. Klopp had to spend part of the day preparing for how he was going to handle the inevitable barrage of questions from the media in the absence of anyone from FSG fronting up.
With little clarity about what happens next, there was a hollow feeling to the game and after a bright start, Liverpool lost their way alarmingly as they squandered the opportunity to climb back up to that once-precious fourth place.
Vice-captain James Milner gave his blunt verdict on the ESL plans after Diego Llorente’s late header had cancelled out Sadio Mane’s opener to force a 1-1 draw that leaves Liverpool sixth: “There are a lot of questions. I can only say my personal opinion, I don’t like it and I hope it doesn’t happen.”
Players and staff were stunned by the abuse and vitriol they encountered on a pre-game walk in Leeds and then again when the Liverpool team coach arrived at the ground around 90 minutes before kick-off. They were booed by hundreds of Leeds fans who chanted “Scum” and labelled them “greedy bastards”. A Liverpool shirt was burned.
“The team has nothing to do with it, I have nothing to do with it, but people treat us like we do,” said Klopp. “We are employees of the club. I feel responsible for a lot of things at this club. When I am involved in things, I take the criticism easily; when the boys are involved, they take criticism as well. But we are not involved in the process or the decision making. No one knows what will happen.
“The Leeds fans were shouting at us like I’d said, ‘Let’s go to the Super League’. We are talking about human beings. With all the things that are written, people should not forget that. It’s an emotional situation.”
Klopp had a point but again it comes down to FSG’s abject failure to take responsibility. A vacuum was created and those in the public eye with the liver bird on their chest were always going to bear the brunt of the backlash from rival fans.
The manager’s criticism of Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville was an unnecessary sideshow: “He talks about You’ll Never Walk Alone, that should be for the bin already, to be honest. It’s our anthem, not his anthem and he doesn’t understand it anyway. It’s not fair.”
But Klopp’s real error was questioning the decision of Liverpool supporters’ groups to have the flags and banners removed from the Kop ahead of Saturday’s home game against Newcastle United.
In the continued absence of fans from games, it’s a powerful way to make their feelings known to the owners. If supporters were allowed in on Saturday there would be protests and a mass walkout, like the one which forced FSG into a U-turn over planned ticket price increases in February 2016.
“Yes, I understand that they are angry. My problem is that the banners are there for the team. That’s why I think I’d leave them there,” said Klopp.
“We still have a lot to go for in this season. Over the past six years, we created a great relationship between the team and the supporters. I understand that they want to act and show their anger, but we shouldn’t forget that the team had nothing to do with it. In these moments they take their support away from the team, nobody else.
“People are angry, disappointed, frustrated, I get that, but the team didn’t do anything wrong apart from not winning enough football games this season. The most important part of a football club is the supporters and the team. We have to make sure that really nothing gets in between that.”
That’s exactly why fans are making a stand and there’s currently a torrent of fury being unleashed towards FSG HQ across the Atlantic in Boston.
Liverpool’s club website usually carries a full transcript of Klopp’s post-match press conference but tellingly not a single word he said about the ESL was published on there. When will someone at FSG emerge from the shadows?
Klopp intends to seek urgent discussions with the owners in the coming days, but says he isn’t considering his position:
“I don’t run away when there are problems, I never did that. When times get even tougher that makes me more determined to stay here. I feel responsible for the team, for the club and for the relationship we have with our fans.”
That bond that Klopp holds so dear and helped propel Liverpool to cherished European and domestic triumphs has been broken.
Having seen his Anfield reign derailed by a global pandemic and an unprecedented injury crisis over the past 12 months, this is another painful slap in the face.
But if anyone can make FSG see sense and row back from the brink, it’s him.
European Super League: How does football get out of this mess?
Matt Slater 2h ago
76
If Twitter is to be trusted, half of the UK population went to bed on Sunday thinking about a conspiracy of breathtaking scale, that has been years in the making, involves a dizzying number of acronyms, and threatens to turn heroes into villains.
The other half was still talking about that evening’s episode of Line Of Duty.
News that 12 of Europe’s richest clubs, including the Premier League’s ‘big six’, want to create a Super League from which they can never be relegated was as shocking to most fans, football administrators, politicians, snubbed leagues and uninvited clubs as the idea that Ted Hastings might himself be a bent copper.
Why would they risk it? Don’t they have enough already? Do they really think Tottenham’s new stadium will be full when they host AC Milan in the inaugural Super League, whenever that might be? How about when they do it 23 seasons in a row, with neither side ever having to justify their status among the elite during that time?
Despite a flurry of words and fresh revelations on Monday, the picture is not much clearer.
We know the clubs that UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin says he does not want to call “the dirty dozen” (but clearly does not mind if everybody else does) are more serious about quitting the Champions League than many seasoned observers of football politics had ever imagined. They also deny their proposed competition would be a closed shop and say they want to keep playing in their domestic leagues. They have even promised to send three times as much “solidarity money” as UEFA do down the chute every season.
Sure, they think they will earn three times as much as they currently get for a good Champions League campaign — without the inconvenience of having to qualify for it or actually win any games in it — but that is their money, right? Money their brands have generated. Money they will begrudgingly share with those left behind as a form of luxury tax.
And facing this threat down is an unlikely coalition that includes British prime minister Boris Johnson, the European Commission and French premier Emmanuel Macron. Johnson will no doubt enjoy the irony that Brussels and Paris finally agree with him that ever-closer European union is a bad idea.
But British TV references and Brexit jokes aside, how is football going to get out of this mess?
The Athletic has spoken to dozens of sources in the game and the short answer is that nobody has all the answers. Things have only got to this point because plans have gone awry, expectations have not been met and trust has broken down.
Putting all that back together will not be easy.
There are really only two possible outcomes to this crisis, although myriad further ones would flow from each of the two choices: the Super League happens, or it does not.
Let’s start by pretending there is no way back for the would-be Super Leaguers, that they have lost faith in UEFA’s ability to meet their needs and will be joining a 20-team competition that plays in the same midweek-evening slots as the existing European competitions.
Sources close to the Super League have made it clear they will not do so without regulatory approval from world football’s governing body, FIFA. This is vital for several reasons.
One, rogue leagues do not have a great track record of surviving for very long. For every Euroleague Basketball, created in 2000 after the top clubs fell out with the sport’s international federation, there are several more World Series Crickets, a made-for-TV event that took place in Australia in the late 1970s, probably 30 years ahead of its time.
Two, the Premier League’s Rule L9 states clubs need the permission of the board to play in any competition apart from the Premier League, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Community Shield, one run by their County FA or UEFA’s club competitions. In short, they need to be recognised by one of football’s regulatory bodies. FIFA’s imprimatur should be enough to satisfy that requirement.
And finally, FIFA backing would make UEFA’s threat to ban the rebel clubs, and their players, from any of their competitions, including international tournaments, look as limp as lettuce. This explains why some cynical souls have detected a caveat in FIFA’s “disapproval” of the Super League plan on Sunday, when its statement said it will always oppose a “closed European breakaway league”.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino is expected to state his opposition to the Super League in firmer tones at UEFA’s annual congress on Tuesday but the wording of the global governing body’s statement does seem to leave a little bit of wiggle room for the rebels.
Is a league with 15 “founding clubs” and a “qualifying mechanism for a further five teams to qualify annually based on achievements in the prior season” a closed league?
To go back to the basketball precedent, that sounds a lot like Euroleague’s current structure of 11 clubs with 10-year season-tickets and seven more that qualify on an annual basis. Would you be shocked if we told you the basketball teams connected to Barcelona and Real Madrid are in the gang?
And on the “breakaway “issue, the Super League could not be clearer: the clubs are breaking away from UEFA — their executives have already resigned from any European-level positions they recently held — but not from their domestic leagues. They say that is why they have committed to playing their 18 to 23 games (there would be play-offs to decide each season’s title winners) midweek, leaving the more broadcast-friendly weekend slots to La Liga, Serie A, Premier League and any other league that wants to send forth a champion or two.
For what it’s worth, the Super League says it does not really want a bust-up with UEFA, either, although a bust-up is what it has got.
Repeatedly describing the wantaway clubs as selfish, Ceferin said on Monday they had “spat in the face” of football’s traditions and were only motivated by “what’s in their pockets”.
He was speaking during a press conference that was arranged last week to announce changes to the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League he has been negotiating with the European Club Association (ECA) for two years. The Super League dozen left the ECA on Sunday, despite seeming to get every concession they had been demanding from UEFA.
If Ceferin had failed to unmute his microphone, you might have thought he was taking the news calmly. He was not on mute, though, so we all heard him call the former ECA members, who have sat on UEFA panels including its executive committee, liars and snakes.
He was particularly scathing about Juventus chairman and now former ECA chairman Andrea Agnelli. They were meant to make a joint statement about the move to chess-style league formats for UEFA competitions from 2024 onwards, the first step in a choreographed roll-out of the much-trumpeted “Swiss model” plans, but Agnelli turned his phone off.
Agnelli has been called a snake by Ceferin (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
Ceferin, who is godfather to Agnelli’s daughter, called Mrs Agnelli to try to locate her husband but to no avail. The next time the world would hear from the Italian was on Sunday, when he quit his ECA and UEFA posts and announced he was now a Super League vice-chairman.
A former criminal lawyer in Slovenia, Ceferin told reporters he has never met somebody as dishonest as Agnelli and while the door was still open to anyone who wants to rejoin the UEFA fold as he knows these disputes are not “personal”, with Agnelli it is.
According to the Super League, its preferred way forward is to work with FIFA and UEFA to “minimise disruption”. This means two things: avoid litigation and co-ordinate calendars.
Of those two, the first is the most pressing but the second is more important, as FIFA is desperate to carve out more room for a revamped Club World Cup every year, featuring a dozen of Europe’s finest, although not necessarily this dozen, while protecting international football’s right to co-exist with the all-consuming club game.
As The Athletic has pointed out several times before, the rich have been threatening to form Super Leagues for half a century and these threats have often coincided with dates for renegotiating broadcast contracts and, as a result, deciding new formulae for distributing the money throughout the game.
To cut what some still believe is an empty threat short, they moaned about getting knocked out of the European Cup too quickly, so UEFA swapped knockout rounds for group stages. Then they complained about how hard it was to qualify for the new Champions League, so UEFA let non-champions in. Then they whined that they were the main attractions, so should be given more slots and more of the money.
It is a plan that has worked so well for so long, nobody was surprised to see it getting wheeled out again in 2019, when the post-2024 iteration of the Champions League was first debated. It was then wheeled out of the shed again last year to concentrate minds at UEFA about the need to not do anything silly, such as miss the opportunity to grow the Champions League or reverse the 2016 decision to give non-participants a bigger share of the pie.
And, as of Saturday evening, almost everybody involved in football believed it was another case of mission accomplished for Operation Super League Threat. A Champions League with 36 teams, not 32; 10 guaranteed games, not six; a scalable league table, not groups; a first phase that eliminates only 12 teams; a backdoor into the competition for two teams that fail to qualify via their domestic-league finishes but do have good European pedigrees: for Agnelli and co, Monday’s UEFA press conference sounded like so much winning, if you discounted the personal insults.
But COVID-19 changed everything. First, it has cost the industry billions of pounds, with the richest clubs losing the most in real terms.
Second, with interest rates in most countries close to record lows, there is a lot of money looking for a better return, no matter how speculative. Football clubs, particularly popular European ones, cannot see why they should not be valued at similar multiples of turnover to North American baseball, basketball or soccer teams, not to mention tech stocks.
And third, while they are hurting, so is everybody else, including UEFA. When will they get a crisis this good again?
So the battle about the Swiss model that the domestic leagues, fans groups and some national federations thought they could still win as of a month ago, became a mere skirmish that UEFA fled from at the first whiff of grapeshot. The real action was around “governance” — UEFA/ECA code for control — and that fight has been fought to a standstill.
Fed up with seeing more than 20 per cent of the club competitions’ turnover swallowed by UEFA’s licensing fee, overheads and solidarity payments, and convinced they could do a better job of selling the commercial and media rights than TEAM, the agency UEFA has been using for more than 25 years, the ECA’s most powerful clubs, most of whom have now quit, wanted a much bigger say in running the Champions League.
Matt Slater 2h ago
If Twitter is to be trusted, half of the UK population went to bed on Sunday thinking about a conspiracy of breathtaking scale, that has been years in the making, involves a dizzying number of acronyms, and threatens to turn heroes into villains.
The other half was still talking about that evening’s episode of Line Of Duty.
News that 12 of Europe’s richest clubs, including the Premier League’s ‘big six’, want to create a Super League from which they can never be relegated was as shocking to most fans, football administrators, politicians, snubbed leagues and uninvited clubs as the idea that Ted Hastings might himself be a bent copper.
Why would they risk it? Don’t they have enough already? Do they really think Tottenham’s new stadium will be full when they host AC Milan in the inaugural Super League, whenever that might be? How about when they do it 23 seasons in a row, with neither side ever having to justify their status among the elite during that time?
Despite a flurry of words and fresh revelations on Monday, the picture is not much clearer.
We know the clubs that UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin says he does not want to call “the dirty dozen” (but clearly does not mind if everybody else does) are more serious about quitting the Champions League than many seasoned observers of football politics had ever imagined. They also deny their proposed competition would be a closed shop and say they want to keep playing in their domestic leagues. They have even promised to send three times as much “solidarity money” as UEFA do down the chute every season.
Sure, they think they will earn three times as much as they currently get for a good Champions League campaign — without the inconvenience of having to qualify for it or actually win any games in it — but that is their money, right? Money their brands have generated. Money they will begrudgingly share with those left behind as a form of luxury tax.
And facing this threat down is an unlikely coalition that includes British prime minister Boris Johnson, the European Commission and French premier Emmanuel Macron. Johnson will no doubt enjoy the irony that Brussels and Paris finally agree with him that ever-closer European union is a bad idea.
But British TV references and Brexit jokes aside, how is football going to get out of this mess?
The Athletic has spoken to dozens of sources in the game and the short answer is that nobody has all the answers. Things have only got to this point because plans have gone awry, expectations have not been met and trust has broken down.
Putting all that back together will not be easy.
There are really only two possible outcomes to this crisis, although myriad further ones would flow from each of the two choices: the Super League happens, or it does not.
Let’s start by pretending there is no way back for the would-be Super Leaguers, that they have lost faith in UEFA’s ability to meet their needs and will be joining a 20-team competition that plays in the same midweek-evening slots as the existing European competitions.
Sources close to the Super League have made it clear they will not do so without regulatory approval from world football’s governing body, FIFA. This is vital for several reasons.
One, rogue leagues do not have a great track record of surviving for very long. For every Euroleague Basketball, created in 2000 after the top clubs fell out with the sport’s international federation, there are several more World Series Crickets, a made-for-TV event that took place in Australia in the late 1970s, probably 30 years ahead of its time.
Two, the Premier League’s Rule L9 states clubs need the permission of the board to play in any competition apart from the Premier League, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the Community Shield, one run by their County FA or UEFA’s club competitions. In short, they need to be recognised by one of football’s regulatory bodies. FIFA’s imprimatur should be enough to satisfy that requirement.
And finally, FIFA backing would make UEFA’s threat to ban the rebel clubs, and their players, from any of their competitions, including international tournaments, look as limp as lettuce. This explains why some cynical souls have detected a caveat in FIFA’s “disapproval” of the Super League plan on Sunday, when its statement said it will always oppose a “closed European breakaway league”.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino is expected to state his opposition to the Super League in firmer tones at UEFA’s annual congress on Tuesday but the wording of the global governing body’s statement does seem to leave a little bit of wiggle room for the rebels.
Is a league with 15 “founding clubs” and a “qualifying mechanism for a further five teams to qualify annually based on achievements in the prior season” a closed league?
To go back to the basketball precedent, that sounds a lot like Euroleague’s current structure of 11 clubs with 10-year season-tickets and seven more that qualify on an annual basis. Would you be shocked if we told you the basketball teams connected to Barcelona and Real Madrid are in the gang?
And on the “breakaway “issue, the Super League could not be clearer: the clubs are breaking away from UEFA — their executives have already resigned from any European-level positions they recently held — but not from their domestic leagues. They say that is why they have committed to playing their 18 to 23 games (there would be play-offs to decide each season’s title winners) midweek, leaving the more broadcast-friendly weekend slots to La Liga, Serie A, Premier League and any other league that wants to send forth a champion or two.
For what it’s worth, the Super League says it does not really want a bust-up with UEFA, either, although a bust-up is what it has got.
Repeatedly describing the wantaway clubs as selfish, Ceferin said on Monday they had “spat in the face” of football’s traditions and were only motivated by “what’s in their pockets”.
He was speaking during a press conference that was arranged last week to announce changes to the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League he has been negotiating with the European Club Association (ECA) for two years. The Super League dozen left the ECA on Sunday, despite seeming to get every concession they had been demanding from UEFA.
If Ceferin had failed to unmute his microphone, you might have thought he was taking the news calmly. He was not on mute, though, so we all heard him call the former ECA members, who have sat on UEFA panels including its executive committee, liars and snakes.
He was particularly scathing about Juventus chairman and now former ECA chairman Andrea Agnelli. They were meant to make a joint statement about the move to chess-style league formats for UEFA competitions from 2024 onwards, the first step in a choreographed roll-out of the much-trumpeted “Swiss model” plans, but Agnelli turned his phone off.
Agnelli has been called a snake by Ceferin (Photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
Ceferin, who is godfather to Agnelli’s daughter, called Mrs Agnelli to try to locate her husband but to no avail. The next time the world would hear from the Italian was on Sunday, when he quit his ECA and UEFA posts and announced he was now a Super League vice-chairman.
A former criminal lawyer in Slovenia, Ceferin told reporters he has never met somebody as dishonest as Agnelli and while the door was still open to anyone who wants to rejoin the UEFA fold as he knows these disputes are not “personal”, with Agnelli it is.
According to the Super League, its preferred way forward is to work with FIFA and UEFA to “minimise disruption”. This means two things: avoid litigation and co-ordinate calendars.
Of those two, the first is the most pressing but the second is more important, as FIFA is desperate to carve out more room for a revamped Club World Cup every year, featuring a dozen of Europe’s finest, although not necessarily this dozen, while protecting international football’s right to co-exist with the all-consuming club game.
As The Athletic has pointed out several times before, the rich have been threatening to form Super Leagues for half a century and these threats have often coincided with dates for renegotiating broadcast contracts and, as a result, deciding new formulae for distributing the money throughout the game.
To cut what some still believe is an empty threat short, they moaned about getting knocked out of the European Cup too quickly, so UEFA swapped knockout rounds for group stages. Then they complained about how hard it was to qualify for the new Champions League, so UEFA let non-champions in. Then they whined that they were the main attractions, so should be given more slots and more of the money.
It is a plan that has worked so well for so long, nobody was surprised to see it getting wheeled out again in 2019, when the post-2024 iteration of the Champions League was first debated. It was then wheeled out of the shed again last year to concentrate minds at UEFA about the need to not do anything silly, such as miss the opportunity to grow the Champions League or reverse the 2016 decision to give non-participants a bigger share of the pie.
And, as of Saturday evening, almost everybody involved in football believed it was another case of mission accomplished for Operation Super League Threat. A Champions League with 36 teams, not 32; 10 guaranteed games, not six; a scalable league table, not groups; a first phase that eliminates only 12 teams; a backdoor into the competition for two teams that fail to qualify via their domestic-league finishes but do have good European pedigrees: for Agnelli and co, Monday’s UEFA press conference sounded like so much winning, if you discounted the personal insults.
But COVID-19 changed everything. First, it has cost the industry billions of pounds, with the richest clubs losing the most in real terms.
Second, with interest rates in most countries close to record lows, there is a lot of money looking for a better return, no matter how speculative. Football clubs, particularly popular European ones, cannot see why they should not be valued at similar multiples of turnover to North American baseball, basketball or soccer teams, not to mention tech stocks.
And third, while they are hurting, so is everybody else, including UEFA. When will they get a crisis this good again?
So the battle about the Swiss model that the domestic leagues, fans groups and some national federations thought they could still win as of a month ago, became a mere skirmish that UEFA fled from at the first whiff of grapeshot. The real action was around “governance” — UEFA/ECA code for control — and that fight has been fought to a standstill.
Fed up with seeing more than 20 per cent of the club competitions’ turnover swallowed by UEFA’s licensing fee, overheads and solidarity payments, and convinced they could do a better job of selling the commercial and media rights than TEAM, the agency UEFA has been using for more than 25 years, the ECA’s most powerful clubs, most of whom have now quit, wanted a much bigger say in running the Champions League.
Bayern Munich, the current champions, are not yet in the plans (Photo: Michael Regan / UEFA / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
For them, that meant being in charge but, for UEFA, this was a concession too far. If it loses control over its most lucrative asset, what is the point of UEFA? It must retain the majority share in whatever joint venture the two parties agreed.
Even so, Ceferin believed they had nearly agreed something — certainly enough to proceed with this week’s format-change announcement, which would create the momentum needed to iron out all the other details.
But it seems both he and Agnelli underestimated just how important the control issue is to real drivers of the Super League conspiracy: Real Madrid, a rapacious beast that feels constrained by its domestic league, and the three Premier League giants owned by US sports entrepreneurs who want to start making US sports-style profits, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.
Real’s president Florentino Perez has been at the centre of every Super League rumour for a decade and his services to the cause have been rewarded with the chairmanship of the new group. Stan Kroenke, John W Henry and Joel Glazer, the three principal American shareholders at the English clubs, and Agnelli, the European elite’s spokesman for so long, are the vice-chairmen.
There are two significant downsides to deploying your most terrifying weapon, though: one, you can only do it once, and two, the other side will deploy theirs, too. Which is why Ceferin opened his press conference by reminding everyone that both FIFA and UEFA, in a rare display of agreement, have both pledged to ban all participants in non-sanctioned competitions. This is what cricket did for World Series Cricket, too, which even had to use slightly different rules, as the international authorities owned those. That, in theory, could happen to the Super League, too.
But the potential sanctions that will really worry the fans, players and staff of Super League clubs are their possible expulsion from this season’s domestic and European competitions, including Euro 2020.
Sunday night’s public statement to announce the Super League was full of friendly language about “best outcomes”, “headline fixtures” and “financial support”, there was even one sentence about launching a “corresponding women’s league” as soon as possible. But on Monday, more threatening letters from the Super Leagues’ board arrived at the FIFA and UEFA headquarters to say it had already started to seek legal injunctions against any attempt by the governing bodies to either block the league’s creation or go through with their threats to ban players from this summer’s tournament, Qatar 2022 or any future international competitions.
Such was the strength of Ceferin’s defiance, coupled with the universal public opposition to the Super League news, some have wondered if UEFA would even expel Chelsea, Manchester City and Real Madrid from this season’s Champions League, the ultimate reward for Paris Saint-Germain’s refusal to join the rebel alliance (a move some believe is more motivated by a desire to ensure Qatar’s World Cup goes swimmingly than any commitment to European football’s traditions, while others have claimed PSG’s boss Nasser Al-Khelaifi is a man of his word who genuinely believes he can help fix this crisis).
Expelling three semi-finalists — five including Arsenal and United in the Europa League — seems very unlikely, as the clubs have not actually done anything wrong yet, apart from ruin lots of weekends, and even if they had, there is the potential for a long and expensive legal fight to be had on the issues of proportionality and how strongly courts want to apply European competition law to something as culturally sensitive as sport.
The Super League clubs, encouraged by recent European rulings against sports federations, most notably one involving the International Skating Union’s clumsy attempt to quash a new series of events created by a private company, believe the law is on their side.
But, after politicians across Europe have rushed out to make damning statements about the Super League, UEFA is also feeling chipper about its chances, particularly as the Super League’s structure would appear to raise monopoly concerns of its own.
Talk of competition brings us to the most contentious issue that would arise from the start of a Super League this August or any other August: can its clubs play in that and their domestic league?
With global bank JP Morgan providing the initial funding, the 15 founding members — Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and PSG have declined the invite, for the time being, at least — would be offered just over £300 million for committing to the competition’s 23-year plan. That sum is intended to compensate for pandemic-related costs and help with infrastructure improvements.
The increased annual payments would then kick in once the games started, with the 20 teams divided into two groups of 10 that play each other home and away. No details have been released on who will broadcast and/or stream these games, and therefore provide most of the Super League’s promised riches, but it is understood all the usual suspects have been sounded out, although none seems willing to talk about it. One possibility, of course, is these clubs would eventually set up their own channel and streaming service, although that would require huge up-front investment.
It would also probably mean the competition cannot stay as just a midweek affair, as evening slots in Europe are in the middle of the night in Asia and lunchtime in California. The reason these big clubs believe they are undervalued at home is because they think they are the only clubs anyone beyond Europe wants to watch, so confining themselves to daytime and graveyards slots seems counter-productive.
But any talk of taking a bigger share of the broadcast cake, weekend slots or the amount of money these clubs believe they are going to earn in the Super League, will annoy domestic rivals and it is no exaggeration to say Sunday’s announcement has been greeted with fury by the 14 Premier League clubs not invited to the party.
In fact, the Premier League is chairing a meeting of these clubs on Tuesday. Pitchforks and torches are not obligatory but the mood is expected to be vengeful, particularly as it is felt the Big Six have not only trashed the Premier League’s chances of getting decent money for the next three-year cycle of broadcast rights this summer but will damage the league’s value going forward.
When you talk to club executives and broadcast experts, the word you hear again and again is “jeopardy”. Because it has at least six clubs trying to squeeze into four Champions League places, some of the richest clubs in the world chasing silverware and well-stocked squads battling relegation, the Premier League arguably has more jeopardy than any other domestic league in the world.
That is the narrative the league has sold so well for nearly three decades and turned Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham into Super League candidates. Yes, they are the biggest attractions, but only United could honestly say it has always been one of the league’s biggest attractions. Aston Villa have been champions of Europe more times than Arsenal, City and Tottenham; Nottingham Forest have won more than all bar Liverpool and United. Tottenham have won one League Cup in 22 years.
Half of the 92 clubs in the English Football League have had at least one season in the top flight since 1992. Things change. Or, at least, they are meant to.
Many would count Tottenham as lucky to be part of the talks (Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC/Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
But the sense of injustice sparked by a Super League selection cut-off date goes even deeper than arguments about one team’s good luck to be relevant at just the right moment. The Premier League loses a third of its value to broadcasters if there is no race for Europe. How motivated will those Super League teams be at home if they are chasing a more lucrative prize in their own competition? And how can the Premier League pretend to be one of the world’s most competitive leagues if six of the clubs have decided earning at least twice as much as the division average is not enough and that the advantage should be more like three, four or five times average turnover?
This is why several sources have spelled it out to The Athletic: clubs cannot play in a Super League and the Premier League.
Which brings us to what still remains the most logical conclusion. The Super League is a phantom, a bogeyman, a button never to be fully pressed.
And the good news is there are still enough experienced, sensible voices around the table — like former Premier League executive chairman Richard Scudamore, now a consultant advisor to the league’s board — to drag football back from a schism that will hurt the competitions deprived of the game’s most famous names, loyal fans of clubs they no longer like very much and players and coaches caught in the crossfire.
That said, and this is both heartening in that it shows a determination not to be bullied but worrying in that it suggests a hardening of positions, there is a growing body of opinion that these clubs, most of them owned by absentee landlords, will never stop wanting more. Even if they climb down this time, it will not be long before they are back agitating for changes to the league’s constitution, sale of overseas rights, loan system, cup formats and on and on.
On a less momentous day in English football, the headline news on Tuesday might have been that the Premier League and English Football League held their first meeting as part of the strategic review promised after the last coup d’etat the American owners of Liverpool and Manchester United tried to stage.
Project Big Picture seems like a made-for-TV production compared to their latest scheme but there are some who believe English football, perhaps even British football, would not just cope without the Big Six but thrive. Less TV money to go around, for sure, but there would be a rebalancing of the competition and a chance to properly address the pyramid’s structure and revenue distribution.
That, of course, could take place with the Big Six, too. Or is that as far-fetched a premise as half of an English city’s police force working for a crime lord who controls their empire via a message board?
For them, that meant being in charge but, for UEFA, this was a concession too far. If it loses control over its most lucrative asset, what is the point of UEFA? It must retain the majority share in whatever joint venture the two parties agreed.
Even so, Ceferin believed they had nearly agreed something — certainly enough to proceed with this week’s format-change announcement, which would create the momentum needed to iron out all the other details.
But it seems both he and Agnelli underestimated just how important the control issue is to real drivers of the Super League conspiracy: Real Madrid, a rapacious beast that feels constrained by its domestic league, and the three Premier League giants owned by US sports entrepreneurs who want to start making US sports-style profits, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.
Real’s president Florentino Perez has been at the centre of every Super League rumour for a decade and his services to the cause have been rewarded with the chairmanship of the new group. Stan Kroenke, John W Henry and Joel Glazer, the three principal American shareholders at the English clubs, and Agnelli, the European elite’s spokesman for so long, are the vice-chairmen.
There are two significant downsides to deploying your most terrifying weapon, though: one, you can only do it once, and two, the other side will deploy theirs, too. Which is why Ceferin opened his press conference by reminding everyone that both FIFA and UEFA, in a rare display of agreement, have both pledged to ban all participants in non-sanctioned competitions. This is what cricket did for World Series Cricket, too, which even had to use slightly different rules, as the international authorities owned those. That, in theory, could happen to the Super League, too.
But the potential sanctions that will really worry the fans, players and staff of Super League clubs are their possible expulsion from this season’s domestic and European competitions, including Euro 2020.
Sunday night’s public statement to announce the Super League was full of friendly language about “best outcomes”, “headline fixtures” and “financial support”, there was even one sentence about launching a “corresponding women’s league” as soon as possible. But on Monday, more threatening letters from the Super Leagues’ board arrived at the FIFA and UEFA headquarters to say it had already started to seek legal injunctions against any attempt by the governing bodies to either block the league’s creation or go through with their threats to ban players from this summer’s tournament, Qatar 2022 or any future international competitions.
Such was the strength of Ceferin’s defiance, coupled with the universal public opposition to the Super League news, some have wondered if UEFA would even expel Chelsea, Manchester City and Real Madrid from this season’s Champions League, the ultimate reward for Paris Saint-Germain’s refusal to join the rebel alliance (a move some believe is more motivated by a desire to ensure Qatar’s World Cup goes swimmingly than any commitment to European football’s traditions, while others have claimed PSG’s boss Nasser Al-Khelaifi is a man of his word who genuinely believes he can help fix this crisis).
Expelling three semi-finalists — five including Arsenal and United in the Europa League — seems very unlikely, as the clubs have not actually done anything wrong yet, apart from ruin lots of weekends, and even if they had, there is the potential for a long and expensive legal fight to be had on the issues of proportionality and how strongly courts want to apply European competition law to something as culturally sensitive as sport.
The Super League clubs, encouraged by recent European rulings against sports federations, most notably one involving the International Skating Union’s clumsy attempt to quash a new series of events created by a private company, believe the law is on their side.
But, after politicians across Europe have rushed out to make damning statements about the Super League, UEFA is also feeling chipper about its chances, particularly as the Super League’s structure would appear to raise monopoly concerns of its own.
Talk of competition brings us to the most contentious issue that would arise from the start of a Super League this August or any other August: can its clubs play in that and their domestic league?
With global bank JP Morgan providing the initial funding, the 15 founding members — Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and PSG have declined the invite, for the time being, at least — would be offered just over £300 million for committing to the competition’s 23-year plan. That sum is intended to compensate for pandemic-related costs and help with infrastructure improvements.
The increased annual payments would then kick in once the games started, with the 20 teams divided into two groups of 10 that play each other home and away. No details have been released on who will broadcast and/or stream these games, and therefore provide most of the Super League’s promised riches, but it is understood all the usual suspects have been sounded out, although none seems willing to talk about it. One possibility, of course, is these clubs would eventually set up their own channel and streaming service, although that would require huge up-front investment.
It would also probably mean the competition cannot stay as just a midweek affair, as evening slots in Europe are in the middle of the night in Asia and lunchtime in California. The reason these big clubs believe they are undervalued at home is because they think they are the only clubs anyone beyond Europe wants to watch, so confining themselves to daytime and graveyards slots seems counter-productive.
But any talk of taking a bigger share of the broadcast cake, weekend slots or the amount of money these clubs believe they are going to earn in the Super League, will annoy domestic rivals and it is no exaggeration to say Sunday’s announcement has been greeted with fury by the 14 Premier League clubs not invited to the party.
In fact, the Premier League is chairing a meeting of these clubs on Tuesday. Pitchforks and torches are not obligatory but the mood is expected to be vengeful, particularly as it is felt the Big Six have not only trashed the Premier League’s chances of getting decent money for the next three-year cycle of broadcast rights this summer but will damage the league’s value going forward.
When you talk to club executives and broadcast experts, the word you hear again and again is “jeopardy”. Because it has at least six clubs trying to squeeze into four Champions League places, some of the richest clubs in the world chasing silverware and well-stocked squads battling relegation, the Premier League arguably has more jeopardy than any other domestic league in the world.
That is the narrative the league has sold so well for nearly three decades and turned Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham into Super League candidates. Yes, they are the biggest attractions, but only United could honestly say it has always been one of the league’s biggest attractions. Aston Villa have been champions of Europe more times than Arsenal, City and Tottenham; Nottingham Forest have won more than all bar Liverpool and United. Tottenham have won one League Cup in 22 years.
Half of the 92 clubs in the English Football League have had at least one season in the top flight since 1992. Things change. Or, at least, they are meant to.
Many would count Tottenham as lucky to be part of the talks (Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC/Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
But the sense of injustice sparked by a Super League selection cut-off date goes even deeper than arguments about one team’s good luck to be relevant at just the right moment. The Premier League loses a third of its value to broadcasters if there is no race for Europe. How motivated will those Super League teams be at home if they are chasing a more lucrative prize in their own competition? And how can the Premier League pretend to be one of the world’s most competitive leagues if six of the clubs have decided earning at least twice as much as the division average is not enough and that the advantage should be more like three, four or five times average turnover?
This is why several sources have spelled it out to The Athletic: clubs cannot play in a Super League and the Premier League.
Which brings us to what still remains the most logical conclusion. The Super League is a phantom, a bogeyman, a button never to be fully pressed.
And the good news is there are still enough experienced, sensible voices around the table — like former Premier League executive chairman Richard Scudamore, now a consultant advisor to the league’s board — to drag football back from a schism that will hurt the competitions deprived of the game’s most famous names, loyal fans of clubs they no longer like very much and players and coaches caught in the crossfire.
That said, and this is both heartening in that it shows a determination not to be bullied but worrying in that it suggests a hardening of positions, there is a growing body of opinion that these clubs, most of them owned by absentee landlords, will never stop wanting more. Even if they climb down this time, it will not be long before they are back agitating for changes to the league’s constitution, sale of overseas rights, loan system, cup formats and on and on.
On a less momentous day in English football, the headline news on Tuesday might have been that the Premier League and English Football League held their first meeting as part of the strategic review promised after the last coup d’etat the American owners of Liverpool and Manchester United tried to stage.
Project Big Picture seems like a made-for-TV production compared to their latest scheme but there are some who believe English football, perhaps even British football, would not just cope without the Big Six but thrive. Less TV money to go around, for sure, but there would be a rebalancing of the competition and a chance to properly address the pyramid’s structure and revenue distribution.
That, of course, could take place with the Big Six, too. Or is that as far-fetched a premise as half of an English city’s police force working for a crime lord who controls their empire via a message board?
Bayern Munich, the current champions, are not yet in the plans (Photo: Michael Regan / UEFA / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
For them, that meant being in charge but, for UEFA, this was a concession too far. If it loses control over its most lucrative asset, what is the point of UEFA? It must retain the majority share in whatever joint venture the two parties agreed.
Even so, Ceferin believed they had nearly agreed something — certainly enough to proceed with this week’s format-change announcement, which would create the momentum needed to iron out all the other details.
But it seems both he and Agnelli underestimated just how important the control issue is to real drivers of the Super League conspiracy: Real Madrid, a rapacious beast that feels constrained by its domestic league, and the three Premier League giants owned by US sports entrepreneurs who want to start making US sports-style profits, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United.
Real’s president Florentino Perez has been at the centre of every Super League rumour for a decade and his services to the cause have been rewarded with the chairmanship of the new group. Stan Kroenke, John W Henry and Joel Glazer, the three principal American shareholders at the English clubs, and Agnelli, the European elite’s spokesman for so long, are the vice-chairmen.
There are two significant downsides to deploying your most terrifying weapon, though: one, you can only do it once, and two, the other side will deploy theirs, too. Which is why Ceferin opened his press conference by reminding everyone that both FIFA and UEFA, in a rare display of agreement, have both pledged to ban all participants in non-sanctioned competitions. This is what cricket did for World Series Cricket, too, which even had to use slightly different rules, as the international authorities owned those. That, in theory, could happen to the Super League, too.
But the potential sanctions that will really worry the fans, players and staff of Super League clubs are their possible expulsion from this season’s domestic and European competitions, including Euro 2020.
Sunday night’s public statement to announce the Super League was full of friendly language about “best outcomes”, “headline fixtures” and “financial support”, there was even one sentence about launching a “corresponding women’s league” as soon as possible. But on Monday, more threatening letters from the Super Leagues’ board arrived at the FIFA and UEFA headquarters to say it had already started to seek legal injunctions against any attempt by the governing bodies to either block the league’s creation or go through with their threats to ban players from this summer’s tournament, Qatar 2022 or any future international competitions.
Such was the strength of Ceferin’s defiance, coupled with the universal public opposition to the Super League news, some have wondered if UEFA would even expel Chelsea, Manchester City and Real Madrid from this season’s Champions League, the ultimate reward for Paris Saint-Germain’s refusal to join the rebel alliance (a move some believe is more motivated by a desire to ensure Qatar’s World Cup goes swimmingly than any commitment to European football’s traditions, while others have claimed PSG’s boss Nasser Al-Khelaifi is a man of his word who genuinely believes he can help fix this crisis).
Expelling three semi-finalists — five including Arsenal and United in the Europa League — seems very unlikely, as the clubs have not actually done anything wrong yet, apart from ruin lots of weekends, and even if they had, there is the potential for a long and expensive legal fight to be had on the issues of proportionality and how strongly courts want to apply European competition law to something as culturally sensitive as sport.
The Super League clubs, encouraged by recent European rulings against sports federations, most notably one involving the International Skating Union’s clumsy attempt to quash a new series of events created by a private company, believe the law is on their side.
But, after politicians across Europe have rushed out to make damning statements about the Super League, UEFA is also feeling chipper about its chances, particularly as the Super League’s structure would appear to raise monopoly concerns of its own.
Talk of competition brings us to the most contentious issue that would arise from the start of a Super League this August or any other August: can its clubs play in that and their domestic league?
With global bank JP Morgan providing the initial funding, the 15 founding members — Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and PSG have declined the invite, for the time being, at least — would be offered just over £300 million for committing to the competition’s 23-year plan. That sum is intended to compensate for pandemic-related costs and help with infrastructure improvements.
The increased annual payments would then kick in once the games started, with the 20 teams divided into two groups of 10 that play each other home and away. No details have been released on who will broadcast and/or stream these games, and therefore provide most of the Super League’s promised riches, but it is understood all the usual suspects have been sounded out, although none seems willing to talk about it. One possibility, of course, is these clubs would eventually set up their own channel and streaming service, although that would require huge up-front investment.
It would also probably mean the competition cannot stay as just a midweek affair, as evening slots in Europe are in the middle of the night in Asia and lunchtime in California. The reason these big clubs believe they are undervalued at home is because they think they are the only clubs anyone beyond Europe wants to watch, so confining themselves to daytime and graveyards slots seems counter-productive.
But any talk of taking a bigger share of the broadcast cake, weekend slots or the amount of money these clubs believe they are going to earn in the Super League, will annoy domestic rivals and it is no exaggeration to say Sunday’s announcement has been greeted with fury by the 14 Premier League clubs not invited to the party.
In fact, the Premier League is chairing a meeting of these clubs on Tuesday. Pitchforks and torches are not obligatory but the mood is expected to be vengeful, particularly as it is felt the Big Six have not only trashed the Premier League’s chances of getting decent money for the next three-year cycle of broadcast rights this summer but will damage the league’s value going forward.
When you talk to club executives and broadcast experts, the word you hear again and again is “jeopardy”. Because it has at least six clubs trying to squeeze into four Champions League places, some of the richest clubs in the world chasing silverware and well-stocked squads battling relegation, the Premier League arguably has more jeopardy than any other domestic league in the world.
That is the narrative the league has sold so well for nearly three decades and turned Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham into Super League candidates. Yes, they are the biggest attractions, but only United could honestly say it has always been one of the league’s biggest attractions. Aston Villa have been champions of Europe more times than Arsenal, City and Tottenham; Nottingham Forest have won more than all bar Liverpool and United. Tottenham have won one League Cup in 22 years.
Half of the 92 clubs in the English Football League have had at least one season in the top flight since 1992. Things change. Or, at least, they are meant to.
Many would count Tottenham as lucky to be part of the talks (Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC/Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
But the sense of injustice sparked by a Super League selection cut-off date goes even deeper than arguments about one team’s good luck to be relevant at just the right moment. The Premier League loses a third of its value to broadcasters if there is no race for Europe. How motivated will those Super League teams be at home if they are chasing a more lucrative prize in their own competition? And how can the Premier League pretend to be one of the world’s most competitive leagues if six of the clubs have decided earning at least twice as much as the division average is not enough and that the advantage should be more like three, four or five times average turnover?
This is why several sources have spelled it out to The Athletic: clubs cannot play in a Super League and the Premier League.
Which brings us to what still remains the most logical conclusion. The Super League is a phantom, a bogeyman, a button never to be fully pressed.
And the good news is there are still enough experienced, sensible voices around the table — like former Premier League executive chairman Richard Scudamore, now a consultant advisor to the league’s board — to drag football back from a schism that will hurt the competitions deprived of the game’s most famous names, loyal fans of clubs they no longer like very much and players and coaches caught in the crossfire.
That said, and this is both heartening in that it shows a determination not to be bullied but worrying in that it suggests a hardening of positions, there is a growing body of opinion that these clubs, most of them owned by absentee landlords, will never stop wanting more. Even if they climb down this time, it will not be long before they are back agitating for changes to the league’s constitution, sale of overseas rights, loan system, cup formats and on and on.
On a less momentous day in English football, the headline news on Tuesday might have been that the Premier League and English Football League held their first meeting as part of the strategic review promised after the last coup d’etat the American owners of Liverpool and Manchester United tried to stage.
Project Big Picture seems like a made-for-TV production compared to their latest scheme but there are some who believe English football, perhaps even British football, would not just cope without the Big Six but thrive. Less TV money to go around, for sure, but there would be a rebalancing of the competition and a chance to properly address the pyramid’s structure and revenue distribution.
That, of course, could take place with the Big Six, too. Or is that as far-fetched a premise as half of an English city’s police force working for a crime lord who controls their empire via a message board?
That Ceferin can fuck off too. Typical lying lawyer cunt. Banging on about how UEFA invests the money in football. Does it ? I looked at the accounts. After prize monies and stuff there's about 750m over. Off that about 47m goes to associations, 8m of that to womens football. Making a big thing about womens football yesterday yet you spend about 0.2% of your £3.8bn revenue on it. So anyway 47m goes on footy associations yet pretty much 100m goes on "employee salaries and benefits" One hundred million. There's about 500 employees of UEFA so an average of about 200k per employee. Nice work if you can get it. So they spend twice as much money paying their own salaries as they do "investing in football". They spend more (60m) on "other expenses" i.e. wining and dining themselves than they do on "investing in football". Corrupt as fuck
https://editorial.uefa.com/resource...b24e1d-1000/2018_19_uefa_financial_report.pdf
Yes. it a legitimate question...
If Fifa,Uefa, and the Fa band all players from their tournaments would players be content playing in just the ESL knowing that they will never be able to play in the Euros or the World Cup two of the worlds biggest tournaments.
If you are someone like Harvey Elliott do you stick around?
If there's one thing I can't stand about this whole debacle it's Uefa and Sky trying to claim the moral high ground. Uefa are fucked because they had a nice little monopoly until people realized they don't actually add any value other than licensing their name to a competition. It would be like if the WBA took 50% of the gate for a boxing match and let the fighters keep 10%. They a cunts and they can get fucked.
As for Sky, don't make me laugh, if they were the proposed rights holders for this Rupert would have every news outlet in the world marching to his beat singing about progress and the modern age of sophistication this would usher in.
Don't be fooled by these cunts. Sky are looking are the value of their organisation becoming fraction of what it was. And for Uefa this is like standing on the deck of the Titanic just as the world's biggest ice cube comes along to freshen your drink.
FSG you can fuck off back to Boston, the fans will defeat this. It may take a year, it may take 10. But this will not stand.
They are all the same, theiving shite the lot of them.
As for Sky, don't make me laugh, if they were the proposed rights holders for this Rupert would have every news outlet in the world marching to his beat singing about progress and the modern age of sophistication this would usher in.
Don't be fooled by these cunts. Sky are looking are the value of their organisation becoming fraction of what it was. And for Uefa this is like standing on the deck of the Titanic just as the world's biggest ice cube comes along to freshen your drink.
FSG you can fuck off back to Boston, the fans will defeat this. It may take a year, it may take 10. But this will not stand.
They are all the same, theiving shite the lot of them.
Of course they would because there wouldn’t be any money to be made at a non-ESL team. Players don’t give a toss. They just want money and glamour.
No worries mate. I've gone through the Athletic thread and posted the most interesting ones. I got slack. Weathers good for a pint. I'd join you if i could. Maybe in July
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