So the rich kids have decided to take their ball and go home, over the weekend a “European Super League” was announced 12 of the major teams in world football AC Milan, Arsenal, Atletico Madrid, Chelsea, Barcelona, Internazionale, Juventus, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Tottenham Hotspur have all decided to get together and form their own league in a sort of defiance to UEFA and the Champions League it will take the shape of a mid-week league type tournament with 8 more teams to be added to form an even group of 20 teams.
Teams like Bayern, Dortmund, and PSG have rejected the invitation to join the league for various reasons. The aim of the Super League is to begin as early as this year.
Now that all the facts are out of the way let me inject my personal feelings into this, as you may have guessed from the title of the article I absolutely hate the idea of this league for many reasons, the main 2 being the absolutely capitalist and monopolizing nature of this move. Before you contrarians and “devil advocates” get on your idiot soapbox saying “football was already capitalist and corrupt” or “UEFA and FIFA are not better”, I just want to let you know that anyone with working neurons can see that but the way to fight capitalism and corruptness is not by creating supercapitalism.
Each participating club in the European Super League are due to earn a staggering amount of money just for the fact that they are in the league alone, that type of money could have been invested into the different league pyramid each team plays in to help lowly local clubs who are struggling to even stay afloat but instead of that the teams so an opportunity to keep the money at the top of football and deny teams in their league a share of that prize if that not the definition of a monopoly is that not the very thing we chastise and demonize Amazon for.
For years we have seen small clubs get punished by the ever-growing money at the top of each countries football pyramid and we complained and hated it so what sense does it make for that money to not only get bigger to be completely unreachable by said teams its very wayward behavior and thinking. The second reason I absolutely detest this move is like most(if not all) football fans I am a romantic and in the same breath we love chaos look at the banter it produces.
Ajax runs to the UCL semi-finals a few years ago, Leicester winning the EPL, hell even these moments gave us joy because of the romance involved because they took on the big teams and for the most part they won. Most fans fall in love with the club they support for various reasons be it the history of the club and what it represents. Liverpool fans sing YNWA, a saying that means you'll never walk alone, a song of togetherness and of the common people.
Fans who are people of color grew up watching Ian wright, Henry, Andy cole, Evra and fell in love seeing people that look like them and come from their backgrounds make it to the top. That is the romance this game has attached and this league spits in the face of that. On the flip side like I said ALL football fans love chaos and banter Arsenal in 9th place has produced some AMAZING content that we lose simply because they wanted more money.
Look I am not going to sit here and tell you that football has always been fair hell UEFA and FIFA are fighting this league harder than they fight racism in the game and the evil they have done to the beautiful game is not lost on me please understand that, but if you think the way to defeat evil is to create something eviler then you are just entering an endless cycle of greed, stupidity and the death of football as we know it. Professional football has always been as long as you had a ball at your feet and time left on the clock the laws of the universe did not matter. Do not let greed and money kill football.
