Power grab in a pandemic: how absence of fans gave greedy owners their chance

Selling England by the pound, part 94. The European Super League may be many things: a structural inevitability, an exciting new format, a great sweating orgy of gullet-cramming avarice. But it can hardly come as a surprise. In reality this is football’s latest piece of mimesis, another moment where this grand, endlessly mucked-about piece of public theatre mirrors and reflects the world around it.

Greed is good. Greed will make your market work. This may all be true. But another thing about greed is it has no off switch or end point. The grabbing hands will grab all they can – and then raise their eyes in search of a little more. Welcome to us: 2021.

Related: The ESL would destroy football as we know it – it’s almost as if they don’t care | David Baddiel

Perhaps the most surprising thing so far about the news six English clubs have signed up as founder members of a mind-bogglingly lucrative private members’ club masquerading as a sporting league, is the identity of those parties offering the most volubly stunned and dismayed double-takes in response.

To date these include the Premier League, Uefa, Sky, BT and (it says here) Mike Ashley. Plus, of course, that well-known protectionist and guardian of the little man Boris Johnson.

This is presumably the same Johnson who used the Margaret Thatcher Lecture to state that inequality is “essential” to the human order, that hedge funds and “the Gordon Gekkos of London” should be treated as kings, and who speaks with a great throbbing flush of libido-driven excitement about the innate virtues of the wealthiest 2%. And yes, let’s have the politics right up the top. Because this has always been about politics, as much as those on the grabbing side might pretend it’s not.

Many will trace the latest move towards a breakaway back to the formation of the Premier League: Thatcherism in a pair of shorts, and the moment football’s richest clubs were encouraged to open themselves up to a subscription model, creating a wonderfully successful product that money, and the forces of money, were always going to come for in the end.

But this has also been the journey in every aspect of British society both before and after. Open up. Take away barriers. Outsource. Give those sweet, sweet wealth creators every freedom to practise their art, unfettered by the cold, dead hand of regulation, “legacy fans” and all the rest.

And yet it turns out the market will also come for that thing you love. In this case for that one area where the English retain a strange kind of sentimental socialism. You can take our health providers, our public services. Just leave the keys to the football club, eh?

With this in mind, the only real questions worth asking are: what will it actually be like? And is there anything we can do to stop it, delay it or bring some concessions?

Again, both of these require an acceptance that this is not a move in a new direction. The barbarians have not stormed the gates. They’re already here, sitting at the top table, cramming their maws with quivering slabs of fat, eyeing the pantry door.

It turns out the people who bought into English football, and who were welcomed in with gurgling notes of triumphalism, might actually be ruthless global capitalists after all. And not just that, ruthless global capitalists with only a passing interest in the identity, history, cultural value and geographical ties of our favourite football clubs.

This is why the Super League is finally happening. Look at the people leading the charge. The Glazer family have done little but leech profits out of Manchester United. You don’t get to act surprised at the natural end point of this if that process has never raised concerns before now.

Across town Sheikh Mansour is the deputy prime minister of another sovereign state, duty bound to locate his ultimate loyalties elsewhere. Roman Abramovich can’t even live in England any more. The part-owners of Milan are a bunch of notorious vulture capitalists.

These people do not care about the unmonetised emotions of English football supporters, or about such intangibles as family ties, a sense of place, social value, heritage, collectivism, let alone robust sporting competition.

There was no fan consultation here, no consideration for the views of the locals, no emotional open letter of explanation. Your views will not be taken down, and they will definitely not be taken into consideration.

It is also important to be clear over what is being lost. The Super League would destroy at a stroke the basic premise – open competition, connection to grassroots, geographical ties, a sense of home – that has underwritten, energised and nourished English football.

It is tempting to address this on its own terms and point out the new model will destroy the very things that have made its product so attractive. But sod the product. There are more important things at stake, elements that will be lost forever. The domestic league will be instantly devalued. The feudal separation of ultra-rich from the underclass will be complete. Any sense of intangible connection, of a unifying national sport, will be destroyed.

Those bonds have already been frayed and broken. But at bottom there is still a sense of unity, sporting romance, equality of opportunity, and football clubs as something more than simply a consumer choice.

Whereas the European Super League has its eyes on the wider digital global market, on a rootless streaming existence, free of these old bonds. It will disempower you, disengage you, restyle you as a unit-consumer. Under the guise of offering a better, endlessly available A-list product, it will cram the same homogenised substance on to your screen, and fan instead the cringing celebrity-worship that marketeers and sales people have nourished around the game.

It will make you hate football, but still buy football. And it will slowly kill football – not its reach or its income, which will be maximised, but the value people place on it, the joy it can bring, its richness.

Related: Revealed: unpublished Super League document justifying breakaway

The Super League will, of course, rubbish these suggestions. Already mitigating talk of “solidarity payments” and an overriding concern for the support network beneath has been pumped through the official channels. The women’s game will shortly get its own Super League blueprint, although details of this are very sketchy.

At which point the prospect of resistance presents itself. The Super League may look like a natural end point of so many things. But it is also a piece of opportunism born out of the pandemic. For the last quarter century fans in the stadium have acted as a chorus, checks and balances on the exercise of executive power. In their absence we have seen a power grab, a game that is now staged, governed and distributed entirely through a screen, and which feels suddenly free, empowered to define its own limits.

Football’s biggest clubs have discovered what they already knew – that they don’t actually need those troublesome, noisy humans in the stands, that this crisis is also an opportunity. There was always a fear that the thing we returned to would be altered, diminished in some way. Well, here it is.

Protests, mobilisation, fan engagement: these things have been absent, but they still have value. This is still our game, and our public space. We, the people, may have funded this world, and watched it mushroom to a state of critical mass, lost in those moreish colours and lights. If we want to do anything about this land-grab at a point of profound, irreversible change different behaviours will be required, a sharper, unblinkered sense of the politics at play. It really is time to pick a side.