The greedy European Super League’s heavy defeat

Well, I got it wrong. I thought the bad guys would win, seeing off the protests from all those affronted by their proposed European Super-League (ESL). 

My reaction was no doubt the result of the cynical thought that Big Money does usually win. What I hadn’t reckoned on was the fragility of the conspirator’s nerve. The ESL must be the feeblest attempted coup d‘etat since Colonel Tejero stormed into the Spanish Parliament in 1981, or even since four rebel Generals committed to the cause of Algerie Francaise mutinied against President de Gaulle twenty years earlier.

Actually the ESL conspirators might have profited from making a study of these failed coups. Tejero and the French generals all thought their cause so admirable that they had failed to look beyond the first step and had failed to guard against opposition. Moreover, both coups were defeated by an appeal to public opinion. In Madrid, King Juan Carlos, whom they supposed to be the beneficiary of their coup, made a radio broadcast condemning it. In Paris, from de Gaulle, there was a broadcast to the troops, most of them National Servicemen, not regulars, commanding them to stay in their barracks and refuse to obey their mutinous commanders. Accordingly what had seemed very dangerous enterprises collapsed, leaving the architects of the coups looking both ridiculous and feeble. Which is just what the sinister masterminds of the botched ESL coup look today as, their nerves having cracked, they scurry around apologising to fans and loved ones. It’s enough to make a cat laugh. They remind me of a favourite Presbyterian Scots story which has the damned looking up from Hell and crying, “Forgive us, O Lord, for we didna ken”. To which the Almighty dourly replies, “Weel, ye ken the noo”.

As the ship of the ESL is consumed in flames, it appears that only Real Madrid’s President Florentino Perez is left defiant as the boy on the burning deck. We came, he says, not to bury football; but to save it, to add much-needed excitement to the game. This was to be done by enclosing the fifteen permanent members of the ESL in a gilded cage – though that’s not how he puts it. For him UEFA’s planned enlargement of the Champions League to 36 clubs is a terrible mistake. Nobody, he tells us, is interested in the league section of the tournament, interest stirring only at the knock-out stage.

Now, I can quite see that playing inferior teams from unimportant countries is a sad chore for a club like Real Madrid, as well as exposing them to the possibility of defeat by a despised little (i.e financially insignificant) club. Clearly it’s a bore, close to being an insult, for Real Madrid to have to play a club from, say, Scotland, Slovenia or Switzerland, that happens to have qualified for the big tournament. But, if Senor Perez would flip a coin and look at the other side, he would see that for any such clubs and their fans the chance of hosting Real Madrid, far from being a bore, is terrifically exciting.

Senor Perez goes further. He complains that too many matches are boring. This is, of course, true; it couldn’t be otherwise. Any genuine sports fan knows that there are periods of boredom in every sport. There are dead afternoons in cricket when nothing much happens and there have always been admirable batsmen who don’t have the turnstiles clicking. There are rugby matches bedevilled by penalties, “kick tennis” and repeated “pick-and-go”. In tennis itself there are tedious matches, sometimes between big servers – say, John Isner and Ivo Karlovic – which come to life only in the tie-break which decides most sets. We have all watched football matches in which the chance of a goal being scored seems no more likely than the landing of a UFO on the centre spot. I wonder if Senor Perez would like to double the size of the goal? You might then get basketball final scores. Would that be more fun?

Ninety minutes, he tells us, is too long for a game of football. I’m not clear what he thinks would be the right length. Yet when you consider the number of goals scored in the last of the 90 minutes or in added time, the duration of the match is surely justified. It often takes a long time to find chinks in a well-organized defence.

Football is by far the most popular sport in the world, and this is, partly at least, because it is very simple and easy to follow. But Mr Perez thinks it’s not simple enough. It concerns him that many young people aren’t interested in football, and that this is especially the case in Asia where, as a consequence, millions of potential subscribers and buyers of Real Madrid merchandise are not being enticed to the game. 

Perez’s remedy for this deplorable state of affairs is characteristic of corporate thinking: change the product, vulgarise the product. Never mind the millions who already love the game. They are already your captive audience. What you need is more captives and you can gather them in only by making what is already an easily accessible game still more accessible. Who knows? He may even have been paying attention to the wise men of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) whose new tournament “The Hundred”, to be played in the high weeks of summer, is designed to attract people who don’t like cricket. The ECB have ignored the feedback of the millions who love the game as it is.

Well, for the moment, thanks to popular indignation and a hostile press, Senor Perez and his fellow-conspirators have suffered a heavy defeat. But money has its own imperatives. They will be back in some form or another when their present wounds have healed, quite relaxed about sodding the public that football already has, and eager to debase the game in their search for loot.