Madrid, Barca fight UEFA
IN November 2021, Florentino Pérez stood before the members’ assembly and, to a standing ovation, declared that someone should remind UEFA who Real Madrid are, vowing they would not give in on their fight for the Super League. They would go it alone if they had to.
Two years on, he stood before the club’s 14 European Cups, a show of strength even though he stood alone, and said “freedom” had triumphed.
So had football, according to Pérez.
“Our destiny is in our own hands,” he said.
The ruling from the European Court of Justice, he continued, represented a “before and after”.
“Florentino always wins,” said the president of the league, Javier Tebas, repeating a sarcastic line of which he is fond. This time, Real Madrid’s president really had, although the judgment did not represent support for a Super League project, something Tebas was keen to stress.
It had come, Pérez claimed, in the face of threats and pressure; he has repeatedly projected Madrid as the saviours of football and victims of those who run it, whose dark power he had stood up to.
As a pioneer, too, there was a certain irony in the reminder that Madrid had played a key part in the construction of the European Cup. Madrid released a five-minute video that showed images from their European history, the most storied of all, accompanied by Berton Braley’s poem “The Will to Win”.
Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta, Pérez’s only and perhaps unexpected bedfellow in this whole process, was continuing with a more conciliatory tone he has adopted over recent months.
“Barcelona’s position absolutely does not go against the Spanish league,” he said.
In Spain, the two gigantic clubs are powerful political institutions that do not just account for 60 percent of football fans, according to governmental figures, but a significantly higher percentage of partisan media coverage where there has been no huge backlash against the Super League.
It has been lost on no one that English fans were the ones who brought the whole thing to its knees.
Sometimes that has come with a hint of envy, perhaps even a sense that there is some ill-defined purity lost. But many of those fans in Spain do not care much about what happens to the rest of a league that does not have the economic power of the Premier League and which, in any case, has started to see itself as a de facto Super League.
Nor do they care much for the authorities against which their clubs are aligned and which they see as adversaries not to be trusted: league, federation, UEFA.
Madrid and Barcelona supporters are far more inclined to welcome the risk of a breakaway, or even a collapse of domestic competition, than, say, supporters of Manchester United or Liverpool. Those papers incline towards their clubs, which meant this ruling being projected as a victory, perhaps more of a definitive one than it will probably prove to be.
Over the last few months, the build-up to the ruling in Spain had tended to project it in similar terms: a victory in the court would mean the Super League would happen.
On the television channel La Sexta, Antonio García Ferreras opened his editorial by announcing the “bombs”: “the Super League has won”, this was a “before and after”, and “UEFA’s monopoly is over”, their cosy money-making club broken up. Madrid and Barcelona were the only ones that had kept going and they had been vindicated, despite the threats. Oh, and games will be free. — Guardian