Owners to feel fan backlash

FOOTBALL OPINION

The shallow, desperate, immoral, chiselling European Super League is dying. And apart from a few self-obsessed, self-centred club owners who tried to force it through and destroy football as we know it, it will not be mourned.

It was a plot that deserved an ignominious end and how pathetic that less than 72 hours after it was exposed it looks to be over.

Where was the real belief, the conviction that this was the right thing to do?

That it would save a sport rather than tear it apart?

It was never anything but a vulgar land grab; a coup that deserved to be quashed and, as so often with such unconvincing rebellions, it is failing.

Make no mistake, the architects of this plan still have moves to make. They have thick enough skins and a love of the dollar to try to brazen it out but that would be, not for the first time, a gross underestimation of the opposition they have now mobilised.

In fact that is one of the positive consequences of this tawdry affair. The Premier League, as an organisation, needed to win a big fight, having stumbled through the pandemic and Project Restart, and now it has. Hopefully there is no turning back for them.

There should be one more significant outcome. This should not only be the end of the ESL but the absolute end for Project Big Picture which also so significantly threatened English football.

Around £4 million has been wasted by the Premier League on a strategic review to appease the “Big Six”, to try to keep them happy and onboard.

But what can they now do? They cannot threaten to break away again because they now know the reaction that provokes. They should be told they no longer enjoy special privileges.

Will the fans of these clubs ever feel the same about them under their present ownership? It is unlikely. The owners have trampled on their dreams, their love, their bond and once that has happened it is hard to feel the same ever again.

This was no way to behave, and no way to run a football club.

They made their play and it has failed. Either they change or they go. — Telegraph Group UK