The last few days have been quite emotional in a very uncertain world for me.
While the Manchester United game was rounding up and I was gearing up to celebrate my club’s win against a most difficult opponent who we hadn’t won at home for 5 years I began to scroll through my twitter feed and saw sports journalist mentioning something about a European Super league.
As we all know by now that iteration of Super League is all but dead; after significant pressure from the UK government and the fans all 6 English clubs pulled out of the project and I am sure many relationships have been ruined at this stage.
Questions that linger with me after watching this saga play out have gone as such;
- Were the fans subliminally co-opted by the media, UEFA, EPL & the government into helping quell this ESL project? Were we just tools
- What next? We know the big clubs aren’t going to lose significant power (maybe they will go quiet for a brief period) because this venture won’t hurt their market share, meaning UEFA & co are still somehow beholden to them. How many concessions will these supervisory bodies now give these clubs?
- Will Spanish clubs survive as they are with so much debt and minimal liquidity?
As a football lover, I monitored the news watching as a group of rich out of touch men were willing to gamble with the very traditional values and structures I had come to know since I was a child, all in the name of enriching themselves. What is more insulting is how they used vague statements to make empty promises about helping the football pyramid continue to be sustainable.
UEFA/FIFA/TheFA and the EPL also need to take a look at themselves. How they allowed clubs like Inter Milan to end up in questionable hands is puzzling. Letting these clubs go disgruntled for years while dragging their feet to placate their greed or nip it in the bud is totally unforgivable. Football can’t be run sustainably with ballooning wage bills and questionable investments. Things have to change.
All these thoughts flashed through my mind and for a moment it felt as if football was going to die.
