On the strip of the Cote d’Azur where Roman Abramovich spends parts of his year, they tell a story that should serve as a reminder, as football has shown this week, there are times when even the wealthiest men cannot get everything they want.
Abramovich had added Chateau de la Croe, once the home of the Duchess of Windsor, to his property portfolio, on a pine-covered promontory known as the Peninsula of Billionaires. It is a part of the world where the yachts are super-sized and, to quote one estate agent, to describe it as upmarket would be a bit like saying New York had some “fairly high buildings”.
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But the Chelsea owner was not entirely happy with the rocky beach and, as the super-rich always like to get their way, two large boats sailed into view to dump a cargo of white sand over the stones.
Abramovich had the aesthetics he wanted. Then, a few days later, a gale whipped off the sea and – no sniggering, please – the next time the Russian oligarch wandered down to the shoreline with a beach towel in his hand there was the comedic moment when he realised all his sand had blown away.
Something else has blown off course for Abramovich over the last week and, again, perhaps he will have to understand the schadenfreude of the average football fan that the now-infamous Super League has led only to embarrassment and recrimination for the 12 clubs, including six from England, who had signed it off.
Nobody has heard from Abramovich, of course, because he chooses to make as many public utterances as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Abramovich operates on a level whereby he does not tend to speak to anyone outside his own circle. Together, he and his counterparts from Manchester United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham have been in cahoots to change the football landscape forever. Yet his fellow conspirators might not even know what his voice sounds like.
It is the same with Sheikh Mansour, the leader of Abu Dhabi who has been to one match at Manchester City since buying the club in 2008. Mansour, like Abramovich, leaves all the background work to senior members of staff. And, for Chelsea, it was the chairman Bruce Buck who took part in the Super League discussions without everybody else who was in the loop being fully convinced that Abramovich was as keen as some of the other owners.
“It was always felt that Roman had one eye on how things would be perceived in Russia from a political perspective,” The Athletic has been told. “If you support a breakaway, it could be interpreted as basically saying, ‘Chelsea are too good to play against Spartak Moscow’.”
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Observers familiar with Abramovich also pointed out that next season’s Champions League final is in Saint Petersburg and the competition has Gazprom, a Russian state-owned company, as its sponsor.
“It might be very difficult for Abramovich to say, ‘We are too good for a competition that has Russian teams and major Russian sponsors’,” says the same source. “In all the high-level discussions, it never felt like Chelsea were as committed as Manchester United, for example.”
Or Liverpool, perhaps, before the week turned into a damage-limitation exercise featuring apology after apology. Or maybe Tottenham Hotspur, the club that desperately wanted membership to the big-time despite having so little success, trophy-wise, that rival fans chant they “won the league in black and white”.
When Spurs take on Manchester City in the League Cup final tomorrow they will be trying to win their first silverware since that same trophy in 2008. Their last league championship was in 1961 and, 60 years on, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that some of the Super League big-hitters were, it is said, attracted more to the idea of involving Daniel Levy, the club’s chairman, than Spurs themselves.
Levy, after all, has championed the idea of a Super League longer than anybody in England’s top division. It made sense to recruit Levy when John W Henry, Liverpool’s owner, started talking seriously with Joel Glazer, his counterpart at Manchester United, about what, ultimately, will be remembered as one of the more infamous episodes in the era of the Premier League.
As a measure of the politics in the Premier League, it turns out Henry and Glazer had started speaking more regularly because of the threat that City posed to their clubs. The two Americans bonded, particularly when City came under suspicion for allegedly cheating the financial fair play system. Stan Kroenke, Arsenal’s owner, was another willing ally.
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“The seeds of the blossoming of this relationship is FFP,” says one well-placed source. “Look at some of the collective angst over Man City allegedly shirking the rules. That is when United, Liverpool and Arsenal started spending more time together. They all got closer and it went from there.”
Buck, an American lawyer who used to go shooting with Richard Scudamore, the Premier League’s former chief executive, was part of the circle that concluded the elite clubs had to sign up with Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Perez, or risk being left behind.
“Why did the Americans back Perez?” says a senior official from a club that did not get the invitation. “They had FOMO.” Fear of Missing Out.
The various owners and chief executives must have been desperate for it to happen because they also invited City to join their number when, usually, they preferred to treat the most successful Premier League side of the last decade as an outsider.
But that tells only part of the story from an unprecedented week that has led to the intervention of the government and been described in high-end football circles as “an unmitigated disaster wrapped in a clusterfuck”.
Fans are in uproar. Shirts have been burned. Relationships have been damaged and, in some cases, wrecked. Has there ever been a more baffling, crude, duplicitous, political, scheming, unsatisfactory, cynical, divisive week in the history of the sport?
Ferran Soriano, the chief executive at Manchester City, calls it the “Dr No” position. Every successful club, he says, should have one.
“Dr No, as his name clearly states, is the person in the organisation who often tries to scupper the visionary’s plans, maybe even telling him that what he is proposing is impossible,” Soriano, formerly the vice-president of Barcelona, writes in his 2012 book Goal: The Ball Doesn’t Go in By Chance.
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At Bayern Munich, Soriano explained, it used to be the financial director, Karl Hopfner, who took this role. For Barcelona, it was Anna Xicoy (even if Soriano refers to Dr No as “he” or “him”). At Juventus, Soriano says, it was the managing director Antonio Giraudo.
Soriano uses a football analogy. “On the playing field, Dr Nos are found, ideally, in defensive positions. They opt not to take risks unless absolutely necessary. They give orders to their colleagues to maintain their tactical discipline and they prevent them from recklessly abandoning their positions”.
Dr No, in Soriano’s words, “contributes prudence, perspective and cold analysis. He is the one who brings a dose of reality to all the discussions.”
What nobody could have anticipated was that the man playing the Dr No role for Manchester United was the executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward, who had spent his eight years at Old Trafford dreaming big as the frontman for the Glazer family.
Woodward buckled on the day after the story broke, calling Glazer on Monday to explain that the reaction was worse than he could ever have imagined and he could no longer back the Super League. Woodward had quickly come to realise it was a spectacular own goal. He also knew that he was going against his owners’ wishes bearing in mind Glazer was a vice-chairman of the Super League and had driven the project harder than anybody, even Henry, from the English clubs. As such, Woodward felt compelled to resign. Numerous sources across European football privately said they did not believe media reports that Woodward had opposed the Super League. Across Europe, senior executives felt he only resigned because the plan had rebounded, rather than due to a long-held opposition to the Super League’s formation.
It was an emotional decision and perhaps Woodward should have heeded the old advice that if you are thinking of quitting you should sleep on it, then sleep on it again. Woodward expected the Super League to go ahead without him and, having watched it turn to dust within the next 24 hours, he has been left wondering whether he acted too hastily.
As he put down the phone on Glazer, however, nobody knew that the whole project was going to unravel so spectacularly. Everybody was preparing for a long, drawn-out battle. As Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher cranked it up on Sky Sports that night, they had no idea Woodward had already thrown in the towel.
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Across Manchester, Soriano and his colleagues were also starting to realise it was in danger of blowing up in their faces. It might have been another 24 hours before City officially withdrew but no prizes for guessing who Perez meant when he talked about “one of the English clubs who didn’t have much interest in the Super League and affected all the rest”.
That, of course, leaves one obvious question: why did City accept a late offer to climb into bed with their rivals in the first place? And to understand their reasons is another glimpse into the politics, positioning and, at times, downright unpleasantness that exist in elite football.
On the one hand, City could align themselves with a group of clubs that had campaigned to have them thrown out of the Champions League and strategically not involved them in other group discussions.
On the other hand, City could have been left behind with Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain when those two clubs – Bayern, in particular – are regarded by City as their geopolitical enemies. Bayern and PSG are Qatari-funded, whereas City are bankrolled by Abu Dhabi. The politics are off the scale. City decided to say yes to the Super League because the alternative, to them, was unthinkable. And there is no doubt it also swayed City’s thinking that it was an opportunity to break free from UEFA, an organisation they hold in contempt after their Champions League ban, later overturned, because of the FFP dispute.
What City did not anticipate was the scale of the backlash and how quickly it would go to the top of the country. But nor did any of the others.
“Naive beyond parody,” is how one well-placed source describes it. “I don’t understand how they did not foresee repercussions or government intervention. This was a gift from heaven for the government; they could go full steam in, divert attention from whatever needed diverting, and get an easy win. They (the clubs) genuinely believed they could railroad it through, with UEFA weakened.”
At one point Lord Udny-Lister, Boris Johnson’s special envoy to the Gulf, contacted the United Arab Emirates government to warn them that City’s participation in the Super League might damage the country’s relationship with the UK. Abu Dhabi, it quickly became clear, did not want it to become an international row.
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The biggest irony, perhaps, is that the Big Six brought in InHouse Communications as their PR company with its perceived closeness to the prime minister after being involved in his 2008 mayoral campaign. “Perhaps in a misguided belief that they would be able to stop the government getting angry,” one political observer says.
As it turned out, the one thing that everyone agrees upon is that the clubs lost the PR battle. There was no official spokesperson, no CEO, no ambassadors and nobody, it seemed, who was willing to front it up.
But it would be wrong to say there was no PR strategy. There was a PR strategy – the problem was that the relevant people were reluctant to do what was asked of them.
Abramovich and Mansour never talk to the media. Levy was not considered important enough to take the lead (though nobody was impolite enough to put it that way). Kroenke was not part of the core group, led by United and Madrid in particular, who championed the project. The Glazers have an image problem and do not like going in front of the cameras. And, though it was put to Henry that he should lead from the front, he was not keen either.
More than once, it was put to these billionaire businessmen, and their highest-ranking executives, that they needed to stand together and convince the public they were doing the right thing.
Nobody, however, wanted to risk being the lightning rod.
“The way they communicated the plan was semi-clandestine,” Ramon Calderon, the former Real Madrid president, tells The Athletic. “It (the announcement) was late on Sunday night. Why did they not do it openly in a way a plan like this should be presented?
“I cannot understand how they could not foresee this reaction. It was going to be a mess and everyone was going to be opposed. Politicians were involved: Boris Johnson, President Macron, everyone. It was all too much. It is the worst moment to do it, in a pandemic, when clubs are struggling to survive. They divided the world of football.”
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Nor did they have Bayern or Paris Saint-Germain on board.
“Therefore,” Calderon says, “the project was born dead.”
One of the most remarkable parts of this story is that when the Super League started to sink, when the cracks turned into gaping holes and lawyers were brought in to extract the clubs out of legally binding contracts, the people at the top of the chain had no real idea about who was in, who was out, and who was wobbling.
The league’s newly formed company, based in Madrid, found out via the media that Chelsea and City were pulling out before either club made contact to formalise the news.
Until that point, the Big Six had been planning their move in the only way that was really possible during a pandemic. “It wasn’t a case of meeting on yachts or a James Bond-style storyline,” says one of the people involved. “It had all been done through Zoom calls, picking up the phones to one another or Whatsapp groups.”
Another source says: “There was one group for the owners. Then one for the executives on the next rung down. And, probably, one or two private groups.”
When everything started to unravel, however, confusion reigned. A lot of the time, the key people were finding out details from the media. One of the clubs thought releasing a statement might risk litigation and were surprised when City put one out. An emergency call was arranged between the owners — or at least some of them — and very quickly it became an exercise in damage limitation.
The previous day, Buck had held a specially convened meeting with Chelsea’s players.
When the Chelsea hierarchy woke on Tuesday there was a resolve, to begin with, to weather the storm. “But it just got more and more intense,” says one insider. “There was nobody out there with a positive word. It was universally despised.”
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Chelsea had started informing department heads the previous Friday that the club were jumping in at the “last minute”. The language made it obvious that it had been some time in the planning. But the story was leaked to The Times at lunchtime on Sunday and, within hours, the government had mobilised, FIFA and UEFA had started putting out statements, the Premier League had expressed its outrage and Neville, in particular, had worked up Sky Sports viewers into a froth of moral indignation.
None of the Big Six even had a press release ready to put out. In PR terms, they had lost day one. And if you lose day one, you normally lose day two as well.
A separate source noted: “Chelsea, like City, are clubs many consider to be owned more for the purpose of reputations than profit. They are not deemed to be vehicles to increase wealth, unlike United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Tottenham, who are about increasing the valuation of the club. Chelsea and City are run to deliver on whatever it is thought to be of benefit for the ownership. The storm of the Super League provided the exact opposite effect of why they own the club.”
Chelsea’s directors had come to realise that, if they tried to stick it out, it could ruin Abramovich’s reputation with the club’s supporters. And they could not let that happen.
Not that it was just Chelsea who were caught on the hop.
At one point, Henry switched off his phone because he was being bombarded with calls. Michael Gordon, president of Liverpool’s FSG ownership group, worked through most of Sunday night from his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, before heading to his office near Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, the next morning. He met Henry at the stadium on Tuesday because that is where FSG tends to meet to discuss important matters. Tom Werner, FSG’s chairman, was in touch from Los Angeles. The tone of the discussions was that, PR-wise, it was becoming a crisis.
At the very least, it needed some tact and diplomacy to try to quell the escalating anger.
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Instead, the Super League had Perez and the Juventus president, Andrea Agnelli, as their front-of-house spokesmen. “And there is not a conciliatory bone in either of their bodies,” one Premier League executive notes. “We had Perez speaking about kids not watching football anymore, how we should start shortening games and how ‘we’ve got legal cover so won’t be banned’, which was basically saying, ‘Fuck off, this is going to happen’.”
Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that City were the first to withdraw, accepting the penalty clauses it would incur, given that they had nothing really to lose in terms of their relations with the other clubs.
Those relations with the other members of the Big Six have gone back to being, at best, distant. There have even been some wild conspiracy theories that, somehow, this was part of a strategic plan on City’s part to sabotage it for their rivals. The Athletic has found nothing to support these claims (regarded by City with contempt) but it probably sums up the politics of the Premier League that it is being alleged in the first place.
City, by their own admission, have no friends.
Inside the club, they have never forgotten the first time in the Abu Dhabi era that the team qualified for the Europa League and Garry Cook and Brian Marwood were the City executives who attended the draw in Monaco. When they walked through the door, they found themselves cold-shouldered by the other English representatives. Huddles formed. People started whispering. The battle lines had already been set.
Ten years on, perhaps it is just as well that Soriano is a skilled politician and, in his own words, a believer in “planned emotions”. In layman’s terms, it means he is a good actor – experienced enough to realise that sometimes it pays to keep your enemies close.
He and Perez, for starters. Once rivals for Barcelona and Madrid, it probably sums up the Premier League politics that Soriano seems to get on better with Perez – “a knowledgable and resourceful leader” – than his counterparts in England.
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“I heard two very significant comments about his management style from members of the Real Madrid board,” Soriano once said. “The first was, ‘Florentino is 15 years ahead of the rest of us, he is already thinking about what we’ll do in the future, things we can’t even imagine’. The second was, ‘Florentino is a rounded person, without edges. It is very hard to get angry with him’. Emilio Butragueno went so far as to say he was ‘a superior being’.”
This week, however, there are lots of people who are angry with Perez amid little evidence, from his unapologetic interviews, that he understands the opposition to his plans.
“He (Perez) thinks he is the only one in the world and nobody is at his level,” Calderon says. “He does not listen to anyone who is not ratifying what he thinks. If he asks something, it is to make sure that what he thinks is correct. If not, he does not listen to those people. He always acts in that way. I am sure he thinks he is right and the people around him cannot say anything. I don’t know if he is living in another world.”
Calderon was president at Madrid from 2006 to 2009. “I remember someone came to us with the same (Super League) idea. I cannot remember the name of the bank who said they could risk the first year of the investment but could not provide a guarantee beyond that. It was a 15-minute conversation for that reason.”
In 2016, however, it was back on the agenda. Sources have told The Athletic that it was talked about seriously by various executives from the European Club Association (ECA). Woodward was one of the two English representatives invited to give his opinion. The other was Ivan Gazidis, then Arsenal’s chief executive. And the irony is that both Milan CEO Gazidis and Woodward, who took had a role in the discussions four years later, were unified in showing little enthusiasm for it.
Bayern were keen enough to check whether they could leave the Bundesliga, in stark contrast to their current position. But there was strong resistance at the time from some members of Bayern’s supervisory board and it never got off the ground. Woodward and Gazidis were subsequently excluded from any more talks. But nothing ever materialised, almost certainly because a Super League was never realistic without the leading English clubs.
Some people have tried to join the dots to the evening in 2017 when five businessmen, with not a great deal of hair between them, pulled up their chairs at Locanda Verde, a high-end Italian restaurant in Manhattan.
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Around the table that night were Joel and Avram Glazer, along with Woodward, Henry and Gazidis.
“They weren’t there for the blue crab,” Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg wrote in their co-authored book, The Club, about the growth of the Premier League, describing the scene as “the most unlikely gathering of enemies since the heads of New York’s organised crime families held their regular meetings in red-sauce joints to keep the peace”.
Yet numerous sources have confirmed that the truth is more mundane: the NFL was holding its annual meeting in the nearby Conrad Hotel. The Glazers, owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, were in New York along with Kroenke, who owned the Los Angeles Rams and had invited Gazidis across the pond.
The mood was convivial. They clinked wine glasses, broke bread and would probably have gone unnoticed had it not been for an Arsenal fan on the next table who snapped them on his phone. Nobody seems to remember who picked up the bill.
All that can really be said for certain is that the Big Six are now finding out what the rest of English football thinks about their secret alliance to strike out on their own.
Already, there have been threats of sanctions. The ECA board is described as “spitting mad”. The Premier League and the Football Association are holding a governance review. “Our primary focus now is working to ensure this can never happen again,” says Mark Bullingham, the FA chief executive. “We’re exploring all options to prevent that, including legislation and changes to our rulebook, and nothing is off the table.”
The relationship between the Big Six and Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, has also suffered potentially irreparable damage. Sources have told The Athletic that one reason why the Big Six decided to make the leap was that there was far more tension between themselves and the other 14 clubs than when Scudamore was in charge.
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As for the new structure of European football, what should we make of Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, Bayern’s chairman, taking over from Agnelli on UEFA’s executive committee and Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the PSG president, replacing Agnelli as chairman of the ECA? Or, rather, how do you imagine City must feel about this new power axis given their fractured relationship with the clubs these two men represent?
“I don’t believe there was a calculated strategy (by City) to blow up the Super League,” one leading football administrator says. “Because if there was, it was a shit one.”
The ramifications will continue at all sorts of levels bearing in mind the grandson of Bill Shankly contacted the Liverpool Echo newspaper at the height of the fan backlash to say he wanted his grandfather’s statue to be removed from Anfield.
Jurgen Klopp might have aimed a few barbs at Neville but the anger of Liverpool’s manager was really with his own club’s owners. Klopp has made his feelings absolutely clear to Gordon and, to put that into context, that is probably the most important of all the relationships at the club (usually, Klopp speaks to Henry only when Liverpool’s owner is in England).
It is believed FSG had been warned by more than one person on Merseyside that pushing for a Super League risked damaging the club’s relationship with Klopp, especially as it was done behind the manager’s back. It happened anyway and Klopp’s disappointment is real, regardless of the apologies he has received.
The players could see Klopp was angry when he spoke to them at their team hotel in Leeds on Monday morning, preparing for their game at Elland Road that night. “Then the players got followed, heckled and hounded by Leeds fans when they went for a walk in the city centre,” says a dressing-room source. “People were shouting ‘scum’. It was just horrible. It was the same when the team coach arrived at Elland Road.
“One of the foreign players said, ‘What the fuck is this? Why are they booing us and calling us money-grabbers? Can you explain it to me? What have we done wrong?’
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“There were a lot of messages flying around on the team coach after the game. Everyone really mobilised on the back of what Klopp and James Milner said to the media after the game. It was all led by the captain, Jordan Henderson. His leadership was immense and the rest of the players were right behind him. The statement all the players put out on their social media at 9pm on Tuesday was powerful.
“There was relief that it all collapsed but there’s still anger. Why do FSG never seem to seek advice until it’s too late? If they had bothered to pick up the phone they would have been told what the reaction would be.”
An agent for one Liverpool player adds: “It was a mess. For the players, there was a lot of uncertainty and a lot of questions. The Champions League is the pinnacle for the players and walking away from that didn’t sit right with any of them. Everyone I’ve spoken to hated the idea of a closed shop.
“Then you had the concerns over whether the players would even be allowed to play international football at major tournaments if the Super League went ahead. And what about contracts? The ones at Liverpool are heavily incentivised. There are Champions League qualification bonuses. Would they even be valid if Liverpool weren’t going to be competing in it? Did the rest of the Premier League season even matter if they were joining a breakaway league?”
Before everything fell apart, Henderson had arranged a WhatsApp call for Wednesday night with a number of senior players from Big Six clubs. In the end, it was not necessary and was cancelled by 9am. And by that stage Henderson and Klopp had relaid the feedback of angry players and staff to Gordon via a Zoom call.
Mikel Arteta, the Arsenal manager, has received an apology from his own club. Arsenal’s chief executive, Vinai Venkatesham, has also apologised to the players. Indeed, Venkatesham has also contacted all of the Premier League’s other clubs to say sorry.
There is lingering resentment, however, when it comes to how some Arsenal players regard Kroenke. This goes back to them taking a pay cut last year. Arsenal have sacked a lot of staff and, increasingly, the players are questioning the club’s owner. “There’s a lot of tension,” The Athletic has been told. “The players know Mikel and Vinai are caught in the middle. There is a lot of frustration bubbling away.”
Thousands of Arsenal fans made their frustration known by protesting against the club’s owners before last night’s Premier League match against Everton at the Emirates.
As for Spurs, Levy was said to be infuriated when, in 2016, five of the Premier League’s Big Six were invited to meet an executive from the International Champions Cup at London’s Dorchester Hotel. The ICC’s founder was Stephen Ross, the New York real estate developer and Miami Dolphins owner. Spurs did not get the invitation.
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More puzzling is what Joe Lewis makes of everything in his position as Tottenham’s majority owner. Lewis, an 84-year-old billionaire, lives as a tax exile in the Bahamas. Yet he has a good relationship of his own with the Americans. At one function in New York, which was to celebrate a television rights deal for NBC and where one of the guests was a British ambassador, guests were struck by how friendly he was with Kroenke and the Glazers, though Spurs sources insist the events are unrelated.
“He was part of that club,” says a source familiar with the Tottenham hierarchy. “He appeared to be part of the group and he is likely to have been in on this.”
Levy, nonetheless, was always the one from Spurs who took part in the negotiations and was most intent on joining what Agnelli is still stubbornly claiming would be “the most beautiful competition in the world”.
Speaking to La Repubblica and Corriere dello Sport, Agnelli is certainly not showing any signs of backing down. “A third of the world’s football fans follow at least two clubs and it’s often the case that these are among the founders of the Super League. Ten per cent of them are fascinated by the world’s best players, not the clubs. And the most alarming stat of all: 40 per cent of people from 15 to 24 don’t have any interest in football.
“There is a need for a competition that can recreate what they are doing on digital platforms, turning the virtual into reality. In FIFA (the computer game) you can create your own competition. That competition must be brought into the real world.”
Others who were involved in the process, and can see the benefits of the Super League, point out that the vast sums of money on offer would have trickled down to benefit every level of the professional game. Some of the leading Italian clubs, they say, take in less money than one that has been relegated from the Premier League in the last few seasons and is now in the Championship (Huddersfield Town have been cited).
They also insist they were deadly serious about putting together a budget for women’s football that would have turned it into a much bigger spectacle with world-class facilities and financing, like the men’s equivalent, from the American bank JP Morgan.
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Yet Perez, in particular, is in danger of opening himself to ridicule by insisting that the Super League is still viable.
“The press (in Spain) is very much influenced by Perez,” Calderon says. “Florentino is very powerful in that sense and they are trying to save his head by saying he is a visionary. It is clear that in England the press has been stronger and the pressure from the fans has been greater.”
The problem for Madrid, as Perez acknowledged in one of his interviews with El Chiringuito TV, is that the absence of a Super League might adversely affect their transfer plans at a time when they are financing a complete rebuild of the Bernabeu.
“For him, it (Super League) is absolutely necessary,” Calderon adds. “We (Madrid) need to invest a huge amount of money and we have not got it. We have a loan but, as everyone knows, this kind of work on a stadium always triple from the initial price.
“Everyone was expecting to have (Erling) Haaland and (Kylian) Mbappe coming here to Madrid. But he admitted we have lost a lot of money in the pandemic and he desperately needed to have this money from JP Morgan. Now, though, it is ridiculous to think they can go on with the Super League. This was something that was going to kill football.”
Everything felt a lot more innocent in 1964 when the esteemed football writer Brian Glanville wrote in World Soccer magazine that the creation of a European League (no mention of “Super”, admittedly) was inevitable.
David Dein went public with his own proposals in 1992 while he was Arsenal’s vice-chairman and a senior figure in the FA. “Arsenal Euro Dream”, read the back-page headline in the Daily Express. “I have a vision of a European League which I think would appeal to the players, the fans and the England team manager,” Dein said.
Maybe you also remember Garry Cook had some radical views when he was appointed by City, under the ownership of former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, as the chief executive who eventually arranged the Abu Dhabi takeover.
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Cook had previously been in charge of Nike’s Michael Jordan brand, based at their headquarters in Portland, Oregon, and his vision of elite football in England comprised a top division of 10 to 14 clubs with no promotion or relegation. “The fans,” he said, “would find a way to get passionate about it.”
And we know now, strictly speaking, that Cook was right: the fans have been passionate, to say the least, when it comes to showing what they think about having a league that could be described as a closed shop and, in Pep Guardiola’s words, is not sport as we know it. Anger, disgust, outrage. From the sit-down protest outside Chelsea to the storming of United’s training ground, it has been rare to see football fans so united in their grievances.
The Athletic has discovered that one chief executive from a Super League club was so torn about the proposals he chose to abstain when his boardroom colleagues put it to a vote.
Ultimately, though, the 12 clubs who said yes will have to live with the “Dirty Dozen” tag and the ECA now wants bans to be handed out to the individuals – Agnelli being one, Woodward another – who debated the Champions League reforms while secretly planning to take a wrecking ball to the competition. There have even been private talks among prominent clubs outside the Super League over the feasibility of banning these clubs from UEFA competitions as a punishment. In reality, this is not financially sensible as the Champions League broadcast revenue depends on the biggest clubs with the biggest names but the mere discussion speaks for the palpable anger coursing through the continent.
“There had been a really happy vibe on the virtual meeting,” one ECA official says. “Then everything changed. How could these people go behind our backs and leave without explaining themselves or saying goodbye?
“How can you sit together with people and never mention this and stab us in the back? If your brother has betrayed you, you don’t want to see him for a very long time. It’s personal. We have no trust in these people. They would never be elected to positions again.
“Would they really want to walk back in the room anyway? Would Agnelli like that? He would need the best speech in human history and still nobody would trust him. Juventus, as a club, would be welcome but the damage for him is beyond repair.”
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Juventus deny that Agnelli is resigning but how can it be sustainable for the Italian champions to have a president who has burned his bridges with UEFA (described as a “snake” by its president Aleksander Ceferin) and now finds himself in a tense and awkward situation with most of Serie A.
As for Woodward, he has described it to friends as “the worst mistake of my professional life”.
Shortly before 11pm on Tuesday, an email was sent to United’s staff to state the club had changed their mind about being involved in the Super League.
A second email came shortly before the club’s public apology to fans. “Dear colleagues,” Joel Glazer wrote, “I know it has been an unsettling few days for everyone associated with Manchester United and I would like to personally apologise for the concerns and uncertainty this has created for you. While we have always acted in what we believed to be the best long-term interests of the club, I now fully recognise that, with regards to the European Super League, we got this wrong. Events have moved very quickly, and we regret that we were not able to keep you as well informed as we would have liked. Our priority now is to rebuild trust with our fans and other important stakeholders, not least you, our people.”
Glazer and Woodward are known to have visited Henry at least once in Boston, possibly at the home of the Liverpool owner.
Yet their plan has backfired on them and next weekend, when United play Liverpool at Old Trafford, there will be more protests. Woodward might not even be there. He intends to leave this summer – forget the PR spin about him staying until the end of the year – while the Glazers will retreat to Florida and probably not feel too saddened they are no longer just reviled in Manchester but across English football as a whole.
As one football executive says: “This week reminds me of Beverly Hills Cop II with Eddie Murphy. It starts with a heist which doesn’t go well and the mastermind of the heist analyses it with the line, ‘This was a perfect plan – executed with Neolithic incompetence’.”
(Additional reporting: Dominic Fifield, James Pearce, Simon Hughes, Laurie Whitwell, James McNicholas, Jack Pitt-Brooke, Raphael Honigstein, James Horncastle, Joey D’Urso, Matt Slater and David Ornstein)
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)