Just over a year ago, an evil cabal of European billionaires, American hedge fund plutocrats, Russian oligarchs and Gulf royals came up with a scheme to rip out the heart of the beautiful game and place it on the altar of their greed. Only the heroic resistance of ordinary football fans, aided by an Old Etonian prime minister with his finger on the populist pulse, stopped this diabolical liberty.
What – as Lord Sugar might have said, were the former Tottenham Hotspur chairman not part of the problem – a load of old tut.
And yet this is the story told by Kicking Off: The Rise and Fall of the Super League (BBC Two), of the fateful days in April 2021 when the owners of 12 of Europe’s biggest clubs, including six from the Premier League, unveiled plans for a breakaway competition to rival Uefa’s Champions League. Then, in just three days, the plans were kicked into touch, thanks to fan protests.
Another less flattering version of the story was airbrushed from this documentary. Fans of leading clubs might just as easily be thought of not as resisting capitalistic excess, but as implicated in its spread. That story would tell how football has deracinated communities, introduced pricing policies that make opera seem affordable and colluded with the world’s most despotic regimes, while fans cheer from the sidelines.
If you think I exaggerate, consider what happened at Stamford Bridge two months ago. Newcastle United fans barracked their Chelsea homologues with a banner that read “We’re richer than you”. Newcastle, you see, had recently been bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s £315bn Public Investment Fund, giving it means beyond even the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, Chelsea’s owner, whose assets had just been frozen by the UK government because of his cosy relationship with Vladimir Putin. The day before the Toon Army made this boast, Saudi Arabia executed 81 men. In short, football fans are not always the principled souls presented by this documentary’s talking heads.
In the programme, the Match of the Day host and former England striker Gary Lineker makes an intriguing point: “[Football] is not a religion. But it’s not far off for many people. They don’t want it messed around with.”
It is true that football fans worship at the temples of the Etihad or the Emirates as their ancestors did in church: the game is not exactly the opiate of the masses, but of those who can afford astonishingly expensive season tickets or are prepared to make Comcast’s shareholders richer by subscribing to Sky Sports.
But despite what Lineker says, fans have long been happy to see the game messed around with. They have welcomed transfusions of dirty money, applauded teams filled with vigilantes on six-figure weekly salaries, even endorsed shirt sponsors who induce vulnerable people to gamble with money they don’t have.
None of this is to say that the dirty dozen should be let off the hook. This documentary explains how and why an old guard of debt-ridden elite clubs devised the European Super League. A central motivation was to resist the rise of the nouveau riche, such as Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, both of which are funded by Gulf states’ oil money and able to draw on unprecedented capital to secure the best talent.
To survive, clubs such as Real Madrid and Juventus wanted to tilt the playing field in their favour. Their proposition amounted to a competition between 20 teams, ringfenced to include 15 founder members every year, plus five who would qualify based on their performances over the past five years, rather than season-by-season achievement in their national league. This would have made the competition akin to the NFL and the NBA in the US, which feature the same teams every year.
Why is this intolerable to fans? Because, as this documentary keeps telling us, it crosses a red line, namely that any team should be able to climb to the very top through performance alone. In truth, this is nonsense on stilts. The playing field has long been tilted in favour of the teams with the fattest stacks of banknotes.
Bradford Park Avenue or Blyth Spartans (to name a couple of impecunious Bs) will never climb to the top unless something counterintuitive happens – say, a bored sheikh decides to fling a few hundred million at them. To pretend otherwise is to buy the lie at the heart of this programme, namely that football fans are nobly fighting wicked plutocrats.
But here is the twist. Uefa is finessing plans to expand the Champions League. As Jonathan Liew argued last month in the Guardian, that could involve giving places to historically successful clubs who fail to qualify, which would make it a super league in all but name. This may prove that the fans’ battle to save the soul of football last April was not successful, as this programme claims. And, worse yet, that the supposedly beautiful game has become chronically, perhaps irredeemably, ugly.
• This article was amended on 5 May 2022 because an earlier version wrongly said Rupert Murdoch would be made richer through people subscribing to Sky Sports. Murdoch’s nearly three-decade reign at Sky TV ended in 2018 when the broadcaster was sold to the US media firm Comcast.
