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 The images of Chelsea fans celebrating on Fulham Road as word spread the club had withdrawn from the European Super League?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,...
The last, short-lived rebel-league experiment seven decades ago in Columbia tells us much about why breakaways happenBogotá, Colombia: 9 April 1948. Before the 2pm meeting he had scheduled with a young Cuban lawyer called Fidel Castro, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, leader of the Liberal Party, decided to go for lunch at the Hotel Continental, five minutes’ walk from his office on Carrera Séptima. He never got to the restaurant. An assassin walked up to him, shot him four times and, five minutes before he had been due to meet Castro, Gaitán was pronounced dead in a local hospital.Violence was inevitable. The Colombian government knew what was coming and desperately sought a way to calm tensions. What could they do to distract...
European football’s dirty dozen must not be allowed to slip back into their routines. Now is the time to get vindictiveThose of you with a taste for these things will have noted the irony: a competition designed to eliminate promotion and relegation in perpetuity somehow managed to shed half its teams in a single evening. One by one the scions of the European Super League fell, like spurned pastry chefs in a televised baking competition: first the prize flans of Chelsea and Manchester City, then the rest of the English clubs late on Tuesday night, then Atlético Madrid and the two Milan clubs on Wednesday morning. Farewell then, Super League. You promised a leaner, more tightly-focused vision of football, and...
The energy of football’s outrage over the Super League has been heartening, but were the clubs only posturing after all?As the sun dipped below the roof-line of Stamford Bridge something strange began to happen. The birds flew backwards through the sky, the cats barked, the trees turned a tangerine hue, and Roman Abramovich became, at a stroke, the protector of the people’s game, enemy of the elites, the oligarch of the masses.What world is this we have now entered? How far have we travelled through the looking glass? What powerful hallucinogenic drugs have been administered to lead us in the space of three days to a place where the hordes of football supporters on the Fulham Road can proclaim English...