Super League shambles shows the focus must not be on short-term gain even as search for sustainability goes onThe European Super League saga may, for now, be over but fallout from the shambolic breakaway attempt rumbles on.“As soon as practicable 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,” the ESL launch statement proclaimed. Related: ‘It’s been a pleasure and privilege’: Fara Williams to retire at end of the season Europe's most successful women's football team, Lyon, have hired a female coach for the first time with former academy director Sonia Bompastor replacing Jean-Luc Vasseur. Continue reading...
The team’s sense of tactical trepidation is a product of the decisions made by the Glazers and Ed WoodwardAccording to reports, the high‑powered meeting between Boris Johnson and Ed Woodward at 10 Downing Street earlier this month was actually a chance encounter that occurred when the two men stumbled across each other in a corridor. Instinctively, this feels about right. After all, these are two men for whom stumbling has been their defining professional technique: over decisions and into positions of immense and unanswerable influence.Who knows what was discussed? Perhaps the prime minister and the Manchester United executive vice-chairman bonded over their apparent shared indifference towards football, and the strain of having to feign otherwise. One thing we are told...
Accusations of deceit and avarice have always been thrown at bigger clubs who want to improve and capitalise on their statusIn mid-April 12 clubs who fancied themselves to be the biggest, the most important and frankly the most potentially lucrative around made a controversial announcement. They had decided to set up a league together, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop them.Cue outrage. “A dozen clubs, who style themselves the pick of the talent, have joined hands for their own mutual benefit, apparently without a care for those unhappily shut out in the cold,” raged one newspaper. “Is it fair to the clubs thus coolly left to shift for themselves? On what principle has the selection been made?...
Florentino Pérez and co believe new fans are needed to survive but misunderstand the game’s appeal and cultural roleT he storm has receded, but after a week that threatened the greatest rupture in European football since the legalisation of professionalism in 1885 and has apparently ended with a sullen acceptance of the status quo, nobody should think everything remains the same or that the crisis is somehow over.What will history remember of the past few days? The images of Chelsea fans celebrating on Fulham Road as word spread the club had withdrawn from the European Super League? The exposed emperor Florentino Pérez desperately insisting he was wearing fine new clothes, whatever the nasty English might be insisting? More tangibly, perhaps,...
We play for the fans, not people in boardrooms, says Burnley’s captain, and this greed-fuelled idea must never be seen againI said from the start the European Super League would be dead within a week but I was not expecting it to have come and gone in 48 hours. The idea was based on pure greed and I hope we never see its like again.My first reaction was disbelief. Those who came up with the concept and those who signed up to it do not understand what football means to people. The clubs involved hid behind the pandemic and claimed it would bring stability to the sport, which I could not believe. Fans and players saw through it very quickly....