Culture

The Audacity and Greed of the Super League


We’ve largely become inured to the valorization of greed, and yet the announcement, on Sunday, of the creation of a European Super League still managed to shock. The Super League was described as a new, closed competition consisting of many of European soccer’s biggest, wealthiest clubs, including Real Madrid and Barcelona, in Spain, and Chelsea, Liverpool, and Manchester United, in England. The idea was that these twelve “founding” clubs—along with up to eight other bankable sides—would compete in an annual tournament staged alongside their regular seasons. Unlike the Champions League, the hallowed tournament that pits the top-finishing sides of Europe’s domestic leagues against one another, the founding participants in the Super League would be guaranteed qualification, no matter how they were performing domestically.

Reaction to the Super League was almost universally scathing. On Monday, as details emerged, fans and former players decried the apparent cash grab involved: the twelve founding clubs each stood to gain around four hundred million dollars in revenue. Despite lip service that officials paid about “solidarity payments” trickling down to other, less fortunate clubs, the point of the Super League was clear: to enshrine a permanent, immovable ruling class based not on performance but on brand recognition. Nations with less visible leagues, such as the Netherlands, Portugal, or France, would forever be at a disadvantage. Ander Herrera, a passionate, hardworking Spanish midfielder who currently plays for Paris Saint-Germain, was among the first to come out against the idea. “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 wrote on Twitter. In contrast, the Super League would be “the rich stealing what the people created.” (Notably, P.S.G., a very rich club, refused to commit to the Super League. German clubs function according to a community-ownership structure, which likely explains why Bayern Munich, the reigning Champions League winner, and Borussia Dortmund allegedly spurned overtures from the Super League.)

The rollout of the Super League proposal was genuinely astounding. There were few details about how the other teams in the competition would be chosen. The talks happened in secret, and seemed to go against the expressed wishes of many fans. It appears that players, coaches, and managers weren’t consulted, either. Alex Ferguson, the former manager of Manchester United, and one of the most respected and influential figures in world football, called the Super League a “move away from seventy years of European club football.” On Monday, before Liverpool’s league match with Leeds United, the Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp reiterated his opposition to the idea of a members-only competition, admitting that news of the Super League had caught him off guard. There were stories of tense Zoom calls, as club officials explained the proposal’s rationale to unimpressed players. UEFA and FIFA, the governing bodies that oversee the Champions League and the World Cup, respectively, threatened to bar Super League participants from their competitions. Chelsea fans demonstrated outside their stadium, Stamford Bridge, letting off flares and blocking traffic. Slowly, players from Super League clubs, such as Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson, Manchester United’s Luke Shaw, and Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne, began expressing their opposition. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, Chelsea withdrew from the Super League, followed by the five other English clubs that had initially signed on as “founders.” One of the Super League’s architects, Ed Woodward, announced that he would step down from his role as Manchester United’s executive vice-chairman. Woodward’s exit seemed especially notable. He was unpopular with fans, an embodiment of the new breed of soccer executive more knowledgeable about marketing than the sport. As of Wednesday morning, the Super League had suspended its plans to move forward.

I was watching Manchester United play Burnley, on Sunday, when the plan to create the Super League was made public, shortly before halftime. I root for United, which means I have little moral authority to decry inequality in soccer. We were fielding a squad of handsomely compensated players from England, France, Portugal, Sweden, and Brazil. This is, ashamedly, one of the many reasons that I keep watching the team: it has the resources to rise and fall in spectacular fashion. United’s American owners, who also own the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, were at the center of the Super League proposal. Burnley, by comparison, is a perennial underdog. The logic of the Super League was that a globally recognized club like Manchester United will always matter, and that Burnley will absolutely, definitively never matter. But Burnley has developed a reputation for being a tough opponent, scraping by with a low payroll, driven by a gritty, collective spirit. Manchester United versus Burnley is not a glamour match. Burnley is a team that we should beat, even if we rarely do. It was a goalless draw after forty-five minutes, with United lucky not to be down a goal.

A survey in 2020 suggested that younger fans were more open to the idea of a Super League than older ones, and some observers have speculated that the owners of the Super League’s founding clubs were betting that longtime fans weren’t worth worrying about, because they would phase out over time, anyway. The future is in global fanbases, not local ones—what critics decry as the “Americanization” of soccer. The Super League was an exercise in brand leverage, where the “best” teams are the ones with astronomical Q Scores, with the largest Twitter followings and the most Instagram likes, the ones that have pioneered the most partnerships with wines, kitchen and bath parts, and noodle brands. Here, “best” means those with the most marketable collections of superstar players, even if the players don’t always know what to do with one another on the pitch. They are “best” in the sense that they can charge their fans the highest prices at the gate but also broker additional tiers of access with their own cable channels, digital networks, and Web sites translated into multiple languages. They are “best” in terms of being able to claim credibly to have the most fans worldwide, particularly in emerging markets such as China and the United States.

The fans won on Tuesday, an indication of how their sense of ownership over clubs and their traditions can be mobilized in ways that might seem quaint and provincial in the American context. But the Super League is an idea that will return, probably with savvier salesmanship. Relationships between the mutinous clubs and those left behind will be repaired, at least for now. There was a bitter irony to the fact that opposition to the Super League meant aligning with UEFA and FIFA, organizations that have been guilty of corruption and mismanagement. It seemed a question of whether you believe that a cabal of breakway billionaires could ever truly regulate themselves. Nobody believes that the current iteration of professional soccer is as fair as it might have been decades ago, before the lucrative leveraging of broadcast rights established England’s Premier League, bringing hundreds of millions of dollars into the game. My own fandom reflects the game’s increasingly global reach. Nowadays, the biggest clubs routinely have leverage over the future of their leagues, and their perceived stature is rarely challenged. As brands, they are often too big to fail. But they must still sometimes suffer the shame of not being very good on the pitch. For all the system’s flaws, it still allows for romance and unlikely victors, such as Leicester City’s 2016 Premier League title. Outrage against the Super League was about more than sentiment and tradition. It was the fact that these clubs were insulating themselves from risk. It went against the very idea of competition.

Risking one’s heart is what makes sports worth watching. My strongest memories of soccer fandom include moments of both glory and shocking disappointment. (Full disclosure: I once bought a few shares of stock in Manchester United for the purposes of a joke.) I remember beating Chelsea in the Champions League final, in 2008. I used a screenshot of the Chelsea captain John Terry crying as my screen saver for a while. But I also remember the humiliating loss to the third-tier side M.K. Dons, in 2014, and the Champions League finals in 2009 and 2011, when United was annihilated by Barcelona. I first came to admire Herrera, the midfielder, when he was starring for Athletic Bilbao, a Spanish club in Basque country that prioritizes the recruitment of Basque players. When United faced Bilbao in the knockout stages of the 2012 Europa League, it was a battle of recruitment philosophies: United was bound only by its pocketbook; Bilbao was bound by principle. Being run off the pitch by Herrera and his countrymen that spring was especially humbling. In other words, there is no such thing as the “best teams,” only whoever is best on any given day.

On Sunday, Manchester United eventually beat Burnley, thanks to a deflected shot by a talented teen-ager named Mason Greenwood. Arsenal and Tottenham drew in their matches this past weekend. Liverpool drew on Monday, to the delight of Leeds’s social-media manager. The next day, hours after its fans’ demonstration, Chelsea drew with sixteenth-placed Brighton. It seemed to underline the arbitrariness of calling these teams the best. Soccer fans watch the game because anything might happen. You might see a goal that stretches the bounds of reason, or a rich team brought to its knees. As you watch some unlikely hero score a winning goal, bringing glory to some small, obscure club and town, you might even come to feel that, just because someone is on top right now doesn’t that mean things will stay that way forever. That’s what Tuesday felt like for fans around the world.





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