It lives. It breathes. It walks the earth again, out there scratching at the doorjamb, rattling the handle, gripped by a renewed and surprisingly self-righteous (fan engagement? Sustainability? Uh, really?) kind of life.
The European Super League never really died of course. Instead it simply collapsed under the weight of its own billionaire-grade stupidity, offering up an initial power-grab so poorly conceived it failed even to satisfy the three elements in its own name.
The ESL Mk1 wasn’t super. It wasn’t really a league. And it wasn’t ultimately European enough to live without the cooperation of post-Brexit Britain. Football supporters took to the streets in protest. Even the semi-competent human blancmange of vanity and vice serving (for want of a better world) as prime minister could threaten to kill the ESL with “a legislative bomb” because he thought it would make some people like him for a bit.
But this was only ever going to be a temporary banishment to the shadows. Two years later that coffin lid has begun to creak. And as of Thursday morning the ESL is back, rebranded via its latest press release as caring and austere, as real football for real people. And above all empowered by the startling case of the Premier League v Manchester City, a charge sheet of alleged financial chicanery that may, by the law of unintended consequences, have handed the ESL a significant angle of attack.
“The walking corpse that is the European Super League twitches again with all the self-awareness one associates with a zombie.” This was the Football Supporters’ Association’s instant response to Thursday’s comeback. The FSA has been hearteningly robust all the way through this thing, the only party in any of this you can actually trust. Agree or disagree, you know what you’re getting here, a de facto unionising of supporters against the bosses.
But while the zombie metaphor – for me, Clive – is a good one, things have also happened to zombies in recent years. Zombies used to be slow, bovine and pack-based. There was a satisfying mathematics, a kind of human Tetris, in dodging these staggering hordes. The original George Romero zombie-verse of the 1970s ultimately offered hope that human ingenuity could outmanoeuvre the spectacle of nemesis, collapse, disaster, apocalypse. In the end we’re always smarter and more nimble.
Then something bad happened. Zombies got faster. They became wolf-like and swift, incapable of being outrun or fooled into doodling around shopping centres. It got worse. Zombies started having feelings. The last Living Dead film had a zombie king with a gleam of furtive intelligence in its eyes, out there mobilising zombies, giving them purpose and hope, nursing sly zombie schemes.
And this is also the thing with the ESL. Victory may be miles off, even more so given the European court’s early backing of Uefa’s natural monopoly. It may still be a zombie entity. But it is no longer drooling and frothing, dropping half-baked late-night plans, easily brained with a polo mallet. The ESL has got smart.
Two years ago Europe’s domestic leagues could take the high ground by presenting themselves as robust and morally righteous, proper sport in the face of this charade, this WWE variation. The optics were perfect. Underprepared for any real resistance, the ESL was jeered out of town.
If this is to be the battlefield, the ESL now has a line of its own to peddle, a way of prising apart that hole in the perimeter fence, presenting itself as the good guys, alternative to a Premier League that has now laid charges of cheating against its own champion team. How far can they take this thing?
Right now the only significant content on the website of the new ESL vehicle, the A22, is still an old video message from its chief executive, the slightly unnerving Bernd Reichart, a German sport marketing executive who is pictured staring straight out of the screen looking like he’s about to start selling you a sensitively packaged male hair colourant shampoo and, possibly, a dildo.
Reichart talks passionately about transparency and proper governance, speaking here on behalf of his invisible disruptive overlords. “I am convinced football can do better,” he concludes with a cod-religious zeal, a quality that might seem more convincing if he hadn’t been hired from a TV company to apply a facade of synthetic human feeling to a corporate takeover plan.
But this is the wider point. The ESL is at least learning, tailoring its plan in a way that feels a little more ominous. Terrible PR killed this thing first time around. Maybe good PR can make it work. And that brightly coloured target the City case offers up is already being hungrily addressed.
The new master plan warns against “third parties who benefit without taking any risk …. Spending should be based only on resources generated, not from competition-distorting capital injections.”
This is very close to just saying it: no to government wealth funds, political projects, odd-looking connected sponsorship deals. This is the ESL gleefully taking the moral high ground, in a way that will be hard to rebuff while the Premier League fights its internal battle.
Later the document talks about “respect for European Union law and values” demanding “stakeholders embrace the values, laws and fundamental freedoms of the EU”. And yes, this is human rights stuff. Here we have another attack line, the sound of poor old human rights and freedoms being waved around as a sword, essentially to stop some carbon-fuelled football club buying Gavi for £150m; which, we can all agree, is what human rights and freedoms were invented for.
In the meantime some of the other obstacles have cleared. Roman Abramovich was the first owner to leave the room in 2021. Todd Boehly is more likely to be the first guest hammering at your door wearing a tequila holster and chaps, draped across a hen party he met on the tube. City turned against it too. Would they now?
It was in the end feelings, the emotional response, that stopped this thing in its tracks. But feelings are mutable and attention spans short. Words such as transparency, probity and destructive greed can now be employed by the other side. At the very least we have something new; the sense, in a brutally transactional industry, that this is now an entity that can be sold.
