Scotland must heed Cormack’s Super League warning

ABERDEEN chairman Dave Cormack isn’t always one for getting it right. Particularly when it comes to choosing managers.

However, as a lone voice warning of the challenges that would be posed by a new European Super League, he ought to be listened to.

Plans for this competition never went away after its first incarnation fell in 2021. They’re definitely going nowhere now, not with the European Court of Justice having ruled that UEFA and FIFA acted unlawfully in banning clubs from joining it.

Of course, club after club is coming out to say they are not interested. That they’re sticking with UEFA. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Let’s see if that changes should Saudi Arabia, for example, throw their financial weight behind a breakaway.

Professional football is a dirty business. It is always about the money. It has been in the past and it will be in the future. Cormack is bang-on about the threat posed — or the opportunities provided, depending on your point of view — by what unfolded in Luxembourg on Thursday.

The plan put forward for a 64-team league by the A22 group isn’t hugely thrilling. Chances are it will be altered again in future, for as long as this process of sidelining UEFA and FIFA takes.

But all sport is changing. Look at the state of golf. There is only so long big clubs and big competitions across Europe can allow the English Premier League to pull ever further away from them without attempting to do something.

Cormack sees this week’s events as ‘a Trojan horse’.

‘As usual, in Scotland, we have slept-walked our way into this without any discussion,’ he stated.

As they say across the English Channel, plus ca change. There is a tsunami coming and it looks like most of the folk involved in football here are still at the beach bar ordering a pint.