BLESSING IN DISGUISE
HOW EUROPEAN SUPER LEAGUE PROPOSALS COULD PROVE TO BE FOR BOTH SIDES OF THE OLD FIRM
YOU’VE got to imagine that Florentino Perez, Andrea Agnelli and their cronies would have had to work through quite the list of rejections before they eventually turned their gaze to Glasgow in order to fill the last remaining berths of their fledgling European Super League.
It’s not as if there’s been consideration for Celtic and Rangers in the past in European football circles and the corridors of power at Nyon where UEFA have propagated a virtual super league by employing a labyrinthine qualification process for “smaller” nations for most of the last decade.
The Dirty Dozen’s doomed enterprise is no more, of course, but don’t expect the “elite” clubs to mooch in the corner for long. The noises coming from each of the 12 – despite their crocodile tears and faux contrition as the backlash enveloped them last week – suggested they still think the idea is viable and that it was just communicated badly.
Once pandora’s box was opened and quickly slammed shut again, talk of a British Super League was inevitable. The prospect of Celtic and Rangers making a move to English football has been a topic of conversation since Methuselah was in short trousers.
It was last mooted with any kind of authority in 2009 when the late Phil Gartside, the then Bolton Wanderers chairman, proposed a two-tier Premier League structure which would include the Old Firm as well as a series of other proposals. In a foretelling of what we have witnessed this week, Gartside’s blueprint was in response to fears among smaller clubs outwith English football’s moneyed elite that there was a “polarisation of clubs and the[ir] increasing revenue differentials”.
However, a sense of the opposition to the proposal in English football was encapsulated by the Stoke City chairman, Peter Coates, who said: “If Celtic and Rangers were to come in, after a while that would become the norm. It would be no big thing. I think the minuses outweigh the pluses.”
What was true then is the same now: there just isn’t the appetite in England to bring in two big clubs who have the potential to usurp the smaller ones.
Nevertheless, while the European Super League proposal has dynamited old alliances it has simultaneously given fresh oxygen to the idea of cross-border leagues.
“Everything now is about the size of clubs and their followings,” said Celtic’s majority shareholder Dermot Desmond in October in a foreshadowing of what occurred last Sunday. “It’s become a digital world – streaming, Zoom. This pandemic has changed things. Digital forces will, I think, make English clubs reconsider the construction of their leagues.”
Ultimately, the ESL plan failed, but that was possibly the point of it. This was a flag in the sand, a message sent to UEFA by the big clubs over Champions League revenue and how much they were entitled to. Now that the dust has settled it is hard not to see it as anything other than a fag-packet ploy that backfired due to the cack-handed approach of its architects but perhaps it served a dual purpose: a warning shot to Europe’s governing body and a stalking horse to canvass opinion. While the good guys won out, a cursory analysis of the results of surveys in the aftermath of the ESL’s unravelling shows that the revulsion was widespread but not universal with two in three opposing the idea – extrapolate that data out and that’s millions of supporters who don’t fit the traditional demographic. It’s those viewers in the Far East, the Middle East and the United States, it’s the fan boys who follow players rather than clubs for whom matches involving AC Milan and Manchester City are an everyday occurrence on the PS5 or Xbox.
There is a certainty in all of this: the elite English clubs may have united some unlikely allies in the shape of UEFA, the Premier League, the Football Association, Boris Johnson, Prince William, “legacy” fans and, somewhat laughably, Sky Sports, but reconstruction has not been banished for good.
Yes, the clubs have been bruised and shunned in the interim but they will only tolerate so much sanctimony and it will eventually redouble their efforts to regain a foothold on the game. At present, they are taking their medicine. Similarly, the smaller clubs know full well that their broadcast deals will be meaningless without the consent of the big six.
In the meantime, there are positives to be drawn for Celtic and Rangers. Already noises from the European Clubs Association and UEFA suggest that greater consideration will be afforded to clubs for winning their respective titles rather than handed to the elite clubs based on their coefficient over the previous five years.
Despite the ratification of those Champions League reform proposals, there is now a groundswell of opinion among influential figures within European football’s governing body and the ECA that the changes to the access system passed last Monday should be looked at more rigorously.
It helps, too, that Edwin van der Sar, the Ajax chief executive, remains a prominent member of the ECA board and was an acolyte of Peter Lawwell during the outgoing Celtic chief executive’s tenure there. Lawwell’s position on the board will end imminently – a new membership was elected earlier this week – but his conversations about the disparity of representation in the Champions League for countries such as Scotland have not fallen on deaf ears.
Van der Sar has been a vocal champion of those reforms in the past and, with a healthy coefficient on the back of both Rangers and Celtic’s five-year performances in Europe, the stillborn European Super League – reviled by so many – may yet prove to have been a blessing in disguise for Scottish football.