Doomed European Super League would have cut out football’s bloated middlemen

The “Super League” was dead in the water long before Chelsea and Manchester City felt their feet get cold on Tuesday night, followed shortly after by the rest of the English rebels. If the clubs proposing the breakaway competition played football as well as they played politics, they would be lucky to be kicking an old, battered Mitre around a muddy field somewhere at the bottom of a Sunday league. Didn’t they realise that every revolution needs a figurehead, not a bland statement of intent posted across corporate websites?

The lack of a Che Guevara (Joel Glazer doesn’t count) meant the debacle had already escalated to an opportunity missed long before the retreat. English (and arguably European and world) football has been broken for the best part of a decade, if not longer. At one time, the Premiership was the embodiment of good customer-oriented business and simple market economics. Yet if Sky offered a new way of consuming football back in 1992, it has hardly moved with the times.

For a start, the game is badly overpriced and under-delivers. The official streaming services range from dire (Sky via NOW TV, and Virgin’s constantly changing apps) to the excellent but problematic Amazon Prime (problematic because… well, it’s Amazon). They often fail to match even the quality and reliability offered by their illegal rivals, whilst fans in the UK are increasingly criminalised simply for wanting to watch their teams at the times they play. Even though most Premiership matches are broadcast live across the world, in the UK, they are still protected for the increasingly irrelevant and outdated BBC Match of the Day. But, of course, it must be the clubs which are in the wrong for wanting to move with the times and broadcast their matches on their own streaming service…

We also have a shamelessly fragmented market, with no reasonable way to watch a single match except pay inflated prices – £9.99 to watch a day (who needs a day?) of Sky Sports or £25 to watch a month of sport on BT. So, if BT broadcasts only one of your team’s matches a month, it works out as £25 a match, unless you happen to enjoy days of fishing coverage or, worse, WWE “wrestling”. Most damning of all are the numbers. Between 2015/15 and 2019/20 the price of matchday tickets rose by 14 per cent but TV subscriptions rose by 40 per cent.

As for the game itself: it continues to suffer from gross mismanagement. Every week, managers complain to no effect about the overcrowded schedules and players subjected to unnecessary risk by playing without adequate rest. If they are not injured in pointless friendlies, top players get to spend their summers on international duty, with the insanity of the Qatar World Cup still looming. We needn’t even dwell how the bidding process was won or the human rights concerns around the construction of the new stadia.

Even the reasonable imposition of VAR has descended into farce: the equivalent of teaching your Uncle Cyril how to use a spreadsheet. Pixel peeping has become a national pastime as technically incompetent referees make absolute decisions about the continuum of space and time based on the arbitrary division of both into discrete frames and pixels. They draw lines between dots on a screen and make decisions about what would lie in the empty space.

So, who is at fault? Is it the big clubs who thought they might leverage their power to demand a say in the stewardship of the game? Or is it the anonymous powerbrokers in the various associations and federations which have made such a mess of things for so long?

Fans mumble that both are at fault and that the real problem is the money in the game. Yet how many object to the money in movies, music, or video games? Why is it just football that’s somehow “tainted” because those who create the product want a proper cut of the profits? At times, it seems to be a problem of perceptions, as if we all struggle to understand what a “billion” means and that the word is somehow pornographic. The idea that a football club could be worth that much is incongruous with our naïve idealisms about the teams we support. We want everything to be parochial, comforting, and benign. So, when the clubs announced they were quitting the Champion’s League, fans assumed it was all about money, as though sport can exist in a world without investment. And none of this is helped by pundits like Gary Neville on Sky Sports, talking about corporate greed (though he does make some valid points), without recognising that part of the problem of football is the problem of Sky Sports (which they’ll never admit).

Instead, old problems were soon conflated with the new. Neville bemoaned the Glazer family allowing Old Trafford to become a “dump”. He had a point, as did Liverpool fans who complained about the lack of investment in the team this season (which contributed to their defensive problems when Virgil van Dijk got injured in the derby with Everton). Arsenal fans complained about the same (even though the money was used to pay off a wonderful new stadium) whilst Spurs blew another fortune on a manager who “failed” by leading them to a tough battle for fourth place in a weird COVID-ravaged season.

But this is the nature of fandom. Fans complain about there being “too much money in the game” yet are profligate when it comes to spending it. Liverpool fans who complain about the money in sport shouldn’t then demand that the owners buy Kylian Mbappé in the summer. Yet we all know (even those of us who are Liverpool supporters) that they/we will.

Money, then, might well be the headline, but the real battle here had been about power. The big clubs had tried negotiating with UEFA for years about the format of the Champion’s League (among other things), which was already bloated and made too many demands on players. UEFA didn’t listen. On Monday, they instead moved to announce an even larger Champions League (containing fewer champions), which is why the clubs decided to act.

It leaves us with a standoff that backfired spectacularly on the clubs and then rapidly collapsed. They had a chance to highlight the inadequacies of UEFA, FIFA, and even the English FA. Instead, they made it look like they’re all bad actors out to screw the fans of every penny and undermine the competitive nature of the sport. (A fair point, certainly, but it also seemed reasonable, in the short term at least, that clubs breaking free from UEFA were guaranteed income for a time and weren’t going to be kicked from one league to find themselves unable to rejoin the other.)

Meanwhile, the real culprits continue to act like members of SPECTRE, the organisation of villains usually thwarted by James Bond or, in this case, the veteran journalist Andrew Jennings, who seemed to spend the entire 80s and 90s standing outside chalet gates in European holiday resorts shouting questions to shadowy figures climbing out of limousines. What would a European cup final be like without the long shots of the potentates of European and world football in the executive seats? Where would fans be if they could buy a proper allocation of tickets for finals instead of seeing the bulk of tickets going to the UEFA club?

Those men in the executive boxes (one is tempted to add women but this is a mess largely made by men) have been doing a terrible job of running the sport and the corruption didn’t start or end with Blatter and Platini, the former the conveniently cartoonish clown; the latter a sporting idol who went bad. Those exposés of a few years ago were merely chinks of light momentarily cast across one of the dark businesses of the world.

Instead, football has become the metonym of a world that is increasingly dominated by those in the middle: the industry “players” who “grease” the wheels. This, after all, is one of the chief sins of Lex Greensill (surely the name of a great Bond villain!) It wasn’t just that David Cameron used his connections but that he did so to aid a man who wanted to increase the burden on the state by offering a form of pay-day loan to public sector workers. The only difference was that his cut was coming out of the government’s coffers.

UEFA, FIFA, Greensill… Middlemen who never truly create. It is a global trend; the malign imbalance that underlies cheap business models, such as social media where we all work for free to fill the space with content. In Australia, recently, the government forced Google and Facebook to start paying news providers for the content they provide. An outcry ensued but, on this point, Rupert Murdoch was always right. Just because Google has the technology to scrape content from websites, does not mean it should have the right to become the medium through which that content is consumed. To do so denies those websites the ad revenue that makes that content possible. That way, journalism dies.

The same is true of football. UEFA is no more than a content aggregator; the middlemen who stamp their logo onto other people’s product and claim it as their own. Clubs take the risks, produce the players, often take the hits when legs get broken, teams fail to win, or when COVID strikes. The “Super League” was portrayed as a snub to the traditions of the game and ordinary fans but this is just a delusion about a sport that has long since lost its innocence. This could have been a chance to empower supporters and to revitalise the game. It could have been the revolution or, if you prefer, the reformation that the game so desperately needs. Now power has been passed back into the hands of the Eurobuffoons and shameless administrators already in charge and therein, surely, lies the real imminent threat to football.