Football fans and players dismiss the almighty euro
Crikey, the story of how the billionaires tried to bollocks the beautiful game — and failed — is one that will go down in football history, won’t it?
An attempt by the owners of some of Europe’s top football clubs to form a Super League — a breakaway from the Champions League and a poke in the eye to UEFA — came like a bolt from the blue last Sunday night in Britain.
The UEFA president’s shock and sense of betrayal were evident following the announcement of the Super League. Aleksander Ceferin denounced the 12 clubs that had signed up for the League as the “dirty dozen”, called them snakes and said that when greed is so strong, all human values evaporate.
You can understand his fury. Some of the owners who’d signed up for the new competition had supported his reforms of the Champions League only to walk away hours before the reforms were due to be passed.
However, Ceferin’s fury was nothing compared to the incendiary anger from fans and footballers, past and present.
In the hours after the announcement,
Liverpool, one of the founding members of the League, turned up to play Leeds and the players were jeered and verbally abused as they arrived. The Leeds players, whose club had not signed for the new league, wore T-shirts with “Football is for the fans” writ large across their backs.
Fans were burning their team shirts in the street, Prince William weighed in and even Boris Johnson said he would look at legislation to prevent the clubs essentially leaving Britain — and their fan base.
Why would the owners destroy friendships, lose their credibility and betray fans? It’s all about the money, honey. The big boys behind the breakaway league are already billionaires but the oligarchs, the dime-a-dozen Saudi princes, the hedge funds, the tax exiles, want more — much more. Although most of them have the highest earning clubs through playing in domestic leagues and selling global sponsorships, and although most of them see their incomes topped up with about €100 million annually from prize money in the Champions League, it’s not enough.
Covid has hit clubs hard and topperforming, competition-winning players are expensive. As one of the “dirty dozen”, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez said this week, “Audiences are decreasing. Television rights are decreasing. We are all ruined.” That would be the Florentino Perez with the net worth of US$2.2 billion.
Many of the clubs have enormous debt, though, and a Super League — where they call the shots and they don’t have to share the television revenue with piddling little suburban clubs or countries that struggle to field teams — must have seemed enormously attractive. All that glorious filthy lucre just for them and their pet players: they could smell the euros from Britain. So what if their legacy fans couldn’t afford to travel overseas and watch their teams? The clubs would find new fans, in Asia and North America.
J.P. Morgan was ready to underwrite the new Super League, the owners pressed go — and boom! It was a seismic eruption of anger and betrayal felt right around the globe. These overseas owners just don’t understand the power of the fan base. Hell, I don’t understand crazy football fans. Like the editor of this newspaper, who flew to London and back to watch his team, the fifth-tier Tranmere Rovers, play Forest Green Rovers at Wembley Stadium in 2017, with the winner to be promoted to the heady heights of League Two. Fiftyfive hours of flying, return, 24 hours on the ground, just to watch a football game. (Which Tranmere Rovers lost, 3-1.)
I spoke to former professional footballer Paul Ifill this week and he put it beautifully: “Before we were footballers, we were fans. You start out playing football for fun, it’s not for the money. It’s not a business to you, you’re just doing something you love.”
In the end, the fans and the players won. The clubs who stayed true to their fans, like Bayern Munich, won. And the billionaires lost.
In this day and age, it’s not often loyalty and passion and love can beat the almighty dollar — or euro. This time it did. Power to the people, man.