Did you know that one of the first attempts to form a European Super League was codenamed Project Gandalf?
It was conjured up by the game’s elite in the late 1990s but the fellowship unraveled as soon as the plotters realised they were better off financially if they stuck with the Champions League, which was just setting out on its journey to becoming the runners-up-and-best-of-the-rest league, too.
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Why the plan was named after the Tolkien hero is lost in the mists of time but wizards have a lot in common with European Super League plans: you cannot kill them.
We were reminded of the immortality of ideas at this week’s Financial Times Business of Football Summit in London, where almost every headline speaker at the two-day event was asked for their opinion on a story most football fans thought they had last seen plummeting into a black abyss nearly a year ago.
“It will make a comeback,” said Gary Neville, when asked if he thought the European Super League was an ex-idea.
“It will come back in some rehashed, reworked version, maybe with a cherry on it this time.”
The former England and Manchester United defender still does not think it will get off the ground (“the fans don’t want it”) but, to mix cinematic/literary metaphors, he does not think it is safe to get back in the water until the government forces English football to accept an independent regulator. That was the main recommendation of the fan-led review conducted by former sports minister Tracey Crouch in the wake of the European Super League’s most recent reincarnation — those febrile 48 hours last April when 12 of Europe’s biggest teams, including the Premier League’s Big Six, decided the Champions League was not exclusive enough any more.
“When that happens, I’ll finally believe the European Super League is dead,” he added.
Neville, now a businessman, football club owner and leading pundit, is not the only one with a sixth sense.
In a long answer, that was only vaguely related to the question, La Liga boss Javier Tebas raised the level of alarm several notches by claiming Barcelona, Juventus and Real Madrid, the three clubs that have refused to denounce themselves for plotting a breakaway, have been at it again.
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“A week ago, I think it was in his house, two or three teams met and now they’re saying ‘well, we don’t want fixed places in the league and we don’t want to lose our place in the Spanish league’,” said Tebas, looking in the direction of European Super League vice-president-in-waiting Andrea Agnelli, who was sat close to the stage where he himself would be talking later.
Tebas claimed the Super League plan had been updated from last year’s model of 15 permanent members (Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain backed out) plus five “invited” teams to something less resembling a gated community for the ultra-rich.
“They’re doing this because it’s very difficult for the English teams to join this competition,” Tebas continued. “So what they’re doing is creating a European system with two tiers, one is the national leagues, which is secondary, and the other is the European Super League, where two or three will be relegated but you’ll always have Juve, Real Madrid or Barcelona there.
“But every time I hear new information from these three clubs I get cross — they lie more than (Vladimir) Putin. They’re constantly saying this won’t affect the national leagues and all the national leagues must be stupid because we’re all saying it hurts. These three say ‘no, no, we’re not going against the national leagues’.
“That’s an insult — I feel humiliated by that — they do huge harm. We’ve done huge reports on this with academics and consultancies. It would cost us €1.8 billion to €2 billion — huge damage.”
While Tebas feels humiliated, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin is fed up.
“I’m sick and tired of speaking about this non-football project,” the boss of European football’s governing body said via a video-link from its Swiss HQ. Ceferin was meant to attend the conference but it might be too soon to put him in the same room as Agnelli, a man the Slovenian lawyer has called a “snake” and the worst liar he has ever met. Ceferin, by the way, is godfather to one Agnelli’s children. Sometimes you literally cannot make this stuff up.
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“First they launched their nonsense of an idea in the middle of a pandemic,” Ceferin continued. “Now we’re reading articles everyday that they’re planning to launch another idea in the middle of a war. Do I have to speak more about these people? They obviously live in a parallel world.”
These words were uttered with a degree of menace but they did not seem to dampen the spirits of the gentlemen in the room from A22 and Flint Global, the two consultancies that continue to look after the business and PR affairs of the Super League.
They seemed very pleased with their work and why not? Despite having no new clubs on board, no new ideas to share and no date for their restraint-of-trade case against UEFA at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), everyone was talking about them again. Gandalf himself would have been proud of this piece of sorcery.
Eventually, after every other speaker at the conference had been asked for their thoughts on “ESL 2.0”, it was time for Agnelli “in conversation” with the FT’s outgoing sports editor Murad Ahmed, who had earlier expertly sold this chat by saying, “I have no idea what Andrea is going to say”.
Ahmed opened the final session by saying Agnelli had asked for “38 seconds” to get something off his chest. For those of us in the room who remember what happened the last time the 46-year-old Italian had something important to announce, this was a moment pregnant with possibilities.
And then… nothing, niente, nada. Not if you had ever heard him speak about the economics of European club football before, anyway.
Instead of a cunning new format, new teams, a broadcast partner and start date, we got a lecture about how much money clubs earn today (a lot), how much they spend (even more) and why the only way to change this recipe for ruin is to scrap the Champions League and let him and his fellow aristocrats run their own midweek, cross-border league.
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The same story as last April, then. The same story as May, June, July and August, when Barcelona, Juventus and Real refused to accept the terms of surrender offered by UEFA. And the same story as September, when UEFA suspended the punishments it had already agreed with the nine clubs who had seen the error of their ways and the whole affair was kicked upstairs to the ECJ.
“To me, today, European football is in dire straits and it needs deep and profound reforms,” he said.
Asked why the ESL failed, Agnelli answered: “To me, it’s not a failure. We’ve been hearing about potential breakaway leagues since I was a teenager, dating back 25, 30 years, so it was a project that has been nurtured within the industry for quite some time.
“Last year was the first time that not one, not two, not three, but 12 clubs made a statement, a shout of alarm, which is we have to do something to build a sustainable industry or we’ll be submerged.”
Agnelli, whose great grandfather Giovanni founded the Italian car giant Fiat in 1899, then launched into his critique of UEFA, “a regulator, 100 per cent monopolistic regulator and gatekeeper”.
This, as explained by The Athletic last year, is the crux of the ESL trio’s case against UEFA. In Agnelli’s view, UEFA is not just a regulator, it is a market participant and a greedy one at that. He says he has no problem with UEFA the governing body, it is UEFA the rival that annoys him.
To be fair, he was dropping hints about that even before he ambushed Ceferin last April. The UEFA boss had spent more than a year negotiating a new format for the Champions League from the 2024-25 season onward with Agnelli, who at that time was also president of the European Club Association, the lobby group that represents the interests of Europe’s leading clubs.
To most observers, it looked like another case of UEFA making a series of concessions to the rich clubs — more games, easier qualification — to stop them from going through with their 50-year-old threat to form a breakaway league.
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Agnelli called the plan of a 36-team, Swiss-model league — with 10 guaranteed games, not six — “beautiful” but he did moan about the fact that UEFA owned the rights to the Champions League and therefore made all the big commercial decisions. At the very least, he said, that should be a joint venture with the clubs, who are the real experts at selling football.
UEFA missed those signals, however, and focused on the politics of getting the new format approved. On Saturday, April 17, Ceferin tried to call Agnelli to discuss the joint statement he wanted to put out, backing the plan, to ensure a smooth ratification at the UEFA Congress on April 19. Agnelli turned his phone off.
On Sunday morning, the first reports of the ESL rebellion emerged, although the official launch — a press release, website and Twitter handle — did not come until Sunday night, a good time to bury bad news.
Having listened patiently to Agnelli’s lecture about European Union competition law, Ahmed asked him why anyone in football should ever trust him to lead a project again given his betrayal of UEFA, the rest of Serie A and the vast majority of the clubs at the ECA.
Agnelli said what betrayal? He claimed he had told UEFA he “was studying alternative projects” when they asked him if there was anything it needed to know before approving him for another term on its executive committee. He said UEFA did not question this statement. And he could not volunteer what those alternative projects were because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement with the rest of the ESL clubs and he also had his fiduciary responsibilities as chairman of Juventus, a publicly-listed company to consider.
Anyway, he added, proposals like the ESL fall through all the time. How was he to know this one would actually get to the point they sent the press release?
“I don’t see and feel the mistrust you talk about,” said Agnelli, with puppy-dog eyes, before adding, “OK, yes, from the Spanish guy I felt it.” The Spanish guy being Tebas.
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Asked what he wanted to do now, Agnelli said: “I will now sit back and advocate for open and transparent governance and wait for the ruling of the European Court of Justice that will say if (European football’s) current governance structure fits the European Union treaty.”
Blimey, we got all excited to hear you say you are waiting for an ECJ ruling. Never mind Brexit meaning Brexit, isn’t that a bit… you know, boring?
Some saw this non-event coming, though.
“No, I don’t worry about it,” said Premier League chief executive Richard Masters. “I have many things to worry about but the European Super League is not one of them.
“It was over and done within 48 hours in this country, thanks to the fan backlash and all sorts of other people getting involved. I’ve never known football so united as it was during that week. But really the idea defeated itself. It was such a poorly executed and poor idea, so I’m fascinated to hear what Andrea is going to say.”
We suspect Masters is not too upset that his fascination was misplaced.
Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish was more annoyed by the trick pulled by a different conjurer, UEFA.
“If you were to ask pretty much any club in Europe outside the gilded 20 that run the ECA, most people would tell you that UEFA are the greatest enemy to domestic leagues that exist,” said Parish.
“You’ve got a completely opaque ExCo, with people on it from individual clubs with far too much say, you’ve the ECA in there, you’ve got new Champions League proposals that look so much like a Super League that you can’t tell the difference. In fact, in some regards, they’re worse.
“There’s one area where Mr Agnelli and I would agree: the clubs should run tournaments and the governing body should govern. While we have this situation where UEFA, FIFA and the people who run the game are fighting the leagues for control of the calendar, we’re in trouble.
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“We’re sleep-walking into it while UEFA picks our pockets. Mr Ceferin uses the Super League as this nasty terrible thing that he was able to stop but, frankly, he was part of making something else happen, with its coefficient places and 40 per cent of your money depending on your last five years’ history — he was already pulling the drawbridge up.
“He talks about extending the tournament from 32 to 36 teams but is he including the teams that I saw in the Champions League when I was a youngster? No. He’s trying to give two more places to people he thinks will provide the most media revenue in any given year.
“All of these competitions have an element of being gerrymandered in a way that only certain clubs can take part. At least with the Super League, they didn’t try to hide it. With UEFA it’s happening by stealth.”
That, in a nutshell, explains why the Super League idea is so powerful. The big clubs only have to keep it alive in their hearts and UEFA will crumble. Parish, as an established member of the Premier League, knows all about drawbridges and self-perpetuating advantages over clubs further down the pyramid.
“You’re sure you don’t want to launch European Super League 2.0 right now?” Ahmed asked Agnelli, just to be safe.
“This is your colleagues again! I’ve been reading so much about it,” he said, before picking up a piece of paper from the coffee table that separated them, “these are the new clubs, shall I open it?”
And everyone laughed.
But it is coming back, right?
(Top photo: Daniele Badolato – Juventus FC/Juventus FC via Getty Images)
