Given that Tottenham Hotspur have just committed to joining the new European Super League, it is fair to wonder why they bothered to fire their underperforming manager, Jose Mourinho.
With his team lying in seventh place in the Premier League, and thus, as things stand, ineligible for a place in the lucrative and prestigious Uefa Champions League next season, such a move would be, on traditional grounds, understandable. However, soon, if the planned super league goes ahead, it doesn’t matter that much where Spurs finish in the table. Their place in the super league is retained in perpetuity. They might not win it, but they could never be relegated. They could substitute star players, such as Harry Kane and Son Heung-min, for a few Sunday league players with impunity.
More realistically, Spurs might find themselves unable to keep up with the vast spending required to have much chance of winning in the super league, given that Manchester City are, in effect, funded by a sovereign state, and the rest by multi-billionaires. The best players would be bought from the rest of football – globally – by clubs in the European Super League; but also by the very richest clubs in the super league from the weaker (relatively) members of the super league.
It would end up with an elite group of three or four clubs in essence engaged in a permanent bidding war for talent, the clubs’ vast revenues being funnelled, as now but in even greater volumes, directly into the bank accounts of the most glamourous players. As such, it doesn’t even sound like a particularly sustainable business model, except that some of the club owners have practically unlimited access to funds.
The super league should be strangled at birth. It will drain football of its essential element of competition, and the sport of aspiration. The supposedly exciting contests between great storied names would have all the tension of a big game “canned hunt”. It would be a plastic game. Already disfigured by big money, the sport would become even more grotesque.
The players, managers and fans are, to say the least, unenthusiastic. German and French teams are, for the time being, staying aloof, and a super league without Paris Saint Germain or Bayern Munich is not going to be that super to watch or, indeed, much respected.
The proposal has the feel of a try-on about it, a bid and a threat by the so-called “big clubs”, so that they can rig the rules of the existing Champions League and secure a place in the current or enlarged Champions League. It might work, considering the depressing repercussions of the super league, but it might be worth the FA, Premier League, Uefa, Fifa, fans and players calling the super leaguers’ bluff.
Does Manchester United really want to be relegated or expelled from the Premier League and have Old Trafford left half empty? Does Mason Mount never want to play for England in the World Cup? Does Liverpool FC want their fans to defect to Everton or give up on football, their legendary passion turned to despair?
Despite everything, the problem is that the super league will be just too tempting for the owners of these clubs to retreat, even with the prospect of compromise. They have become global brands, like it nor not, and their local or even national roots have long since atrophied.
The uncomfortable fact is that, despite what we see on social media, there may well be enough fans of these clubs worldwide who will pay to watch meaningless games on television and buy memorabilia. The loss of most of the “home” fan base might not prove much of a deterrent. If some players quit, others can be bought from around the world.
The logical conclusion for a rootless club is to gravitate towards its new markets. Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium might as well be in China or Nigeria, as Highbury, and there’s no good reason why Chelsea shouldn’t relocate to Russia, or Manchester City to Abu Dhabi, where their owners live. Liverpool FC, complete with the famous Anfield gates, Kop and statues of Shankly, Paisley and Hughes, could be lifted and plonked down in California or Massachusetts. It would be more honest, and might allow English football to rebuild itself, poorer but happier.
Immediate expulsions of the “top six” would mean Leicester City winning the Premier League, unexpectedly, for the second time in five years, with West Ham United, Everton and Leeds United as runners up, also going into the new Champions League to go head to head with the likes of PSG. Put like that, it doesn’t sound so bad. Real football will survive.
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