Super League origins
Silvio Berlusconi, some 30 years ago, sat in the boardroom of his grand villa at Arcore outside Milan and expounded for and this writer exactly how the big clubs were about to take over international football.
For Berlusconi, international football was moribund, a curiosity only for the history books. Tomorrow belonged to him and his like: rich owners of both their clubs and the burgeoning new world of cash-rich commercial television, which had pushed state broadcasters into penurious retreat.
Milan were then the finest team in the world: Franco Baresi, Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard, et al. But the players aged, titles were lost and with it Berlusconi’s enthusiasm for his toy. Football had served its purpose as a platform for grander ambitions that secured three terms as Italy’s prime minister.
Berlusconi sat halfway down a relentless timeline leading towards a Super League. His significance was in bringing not only energy but a high personal profile to the project. He also enjoyed perfect timing: the early 1990s saw UEFA ape the FIFA model for TV and sponsorship exclusivity and convert the ground-breaking European Cup into the Champions League.
UEFA, ever since launching the Champions League, has had to run to stay one step ahead of the big clubs’ voracious financial appetite. Hence today’s elite club world with its multimillion cash pursuit driven by an unchecked player wages spiral and, latterly, the COVID-19 shutdown.
However many ways UEFA devised to slice the pie, the big clubs always wanted more
All of this is nothing new – the hastily-collapsed Super League being merely the latest chapter in expansionist dreams which can be traced all the way to the founding of the Football League in 1888.
Different names, same plot. The original clubs had become addicted to the competitive drug of the FA Cup and wanted more – more matches, more competition, more profile, more income. Hence the creation of the Football League, then professionalism and pursuit of the necessary funding.
Preston chairman Major William Sudell, in importing players from Scotland, was one of Berlusconi’s football/business forebears. Another was millionaire housing developer Sir Henry Norris, the Arsenal chairman who found Woolwich too small for his ambitions. So he shifted the Gunners lock, stock and smoking barrel north across the River Thames.
Accelerated rail travel provided clubs in central Europe (Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia,
Italy, etc.) with the means to launch the Mitropa Cup in the late 1920s. The two-leg knockout competition took its nickname from the Mitropa (Mittel Europa/Central Europe) sleeper trains. Not a league yet, but it was a start.
End-of-season tournaments, such as the Latin Cup, grew in popularity after World War II and sparked the creation of the European Cup in 1955.
Note that the tournament was devised not by UEFA but by the media: to be precise, the French sports daily L’Equipe. Editor Gabriel Hanot and colleagues Jacques Ferran and Jacques de Ryswick sit directly in that Super League timeline between Sudell and Berlusconi.
The European Cup pioneers quickly understood the value of remaining among the elite. Hence the holders were granted a right to compete the
next season even if they were no longer domestic champions. Without that fail-safe, Real Madrid would not have achieved their inspiring and all-conquering quintet of crowns. Similarly, subsequent trebles would have been beyond both Johan Cruyff’s Ajax and Franz Beckenbauer’s Bayern Munich.
Serious debate about Super Leagues took off in the 1960s. The excitement surrounding Tottenham’s Cup-winners Cup clashes with Rangers prompted forecasts of the “Old Firm” making up a UK league. Simultaneously the feasibility of a “real” European league was aroused, notably in these pages by Brian Glanville back in 1964.
Even the original grainy-grey TV pictures of Real Madrid, Barcelona, Benfica, Milan, etc. had opened a window for supporters and officials onto the vast new future spreading at their feet.
That is where the debate remained – in the media and boardrooms of envy – until Berlusconi came along. To be fair, if it had not been Berlusconi then it would have been another media mogul. He was merely the first to seize on the financial potential blown open for football by a televisual revolution empowered by satellite and cable technology.
Berlusconi’s Canale 5 pointed the way in Italy just as Rupert Murdoch flexed his Sky muscles in the UK and the Premier League embarked on its own domestic breakaway from the Football League.
Berlusconi envisaged that national team football would wither and die as the newly-refinanced club game branched out all over the world. Fans might even be handed free admission to matches because the crowd atmosphere was such an essential contributor to the telefootball experience.
Simultaneously the fragmentation of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia propelled UEFA’s membership from 35 towards its current 55. The new nations demanded their own right of access to European competition and its financial pie. The worried “old guard” pressed UEFA for the security of a guaranteed presence.
UEFA met this twin challenge by converting the historic European Cup into the Champions League. More clubs, more matches, more money.
However many ways UEFA devised to slice the pie, the big clubs always wanted more. Berlusconi commissioned the Milan-based Media Partners agency to devise a Super League format. He brought other big clubs on board: Ajax, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Inter, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester United, Milan, Marseille, Porto and Real Madrid.
UEFA duly came up with more money, which the clubs blew in an international transfer market fired up by the free-for-all – an unintended consequence of the 1995 Bosman Ruling.
One sphere in which Berlusconi was demonstrably wrong was in predicting the end of international football. If anything, the European clubs’ militancy forced FIFA and UEFA to ramp up the visibility and financial attraction of their respective World Cup and European Championship.
A key factor in maintaining a new balance had been the creation of an interlocking international match calendar by FIFA under Sepp Blatter (not all of Blatter’s ideas were bad ones).
In 2013 a new Super League proposal emerged from a meeting of minds between Galatasaray president Unal Aysal and Juventus’ Andrea Agnelli. Unal claimed the support of between 15 to 20 clubs, including Manchester United, Paris SaintGermain and Real Madrid. Again, UEFA came up with more money and the idea went back into cold storage.
Not for long. In 2017 FIFA, now headed by Gianni Infantino, decided to cut in on the act by expanding the Club World Cup to 24 teams (12 from Europe).
Separately, according to revelations from the Football Leaks outlet, Bayern Munich and “the most powerful and richest clubs in Europe” began plotting a breakaway from UEFA in 2021. Founder members were named as Arsenal, Bayern Munich, Barcelona, Chelsea, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Manchester United, Milan and Real Madrid, plus invitees Atletico Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Inter, Marseille and Roma. All sound familiar?
The latest Super League rose and fell even faster than all the previous proposals. But bear in mind the aphorism of philosopher Jorge Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Football has a short memory.