Real Madrid and Barcelona steadfast in reminding Uefa who they are

In November 2021, Florentino Pérez stood before the members’ assembly and, to a standing ovation, declared that someone should remind Uefa who Real Madrid are, vowing they would not give in on their fight for the Super League. They would go it alone if they had to.

Two years on, he stood before the club’s 14 European Cups, a show of strength even though he stood alone, and said “freedom” had triumphed. So had football, according to Pérez. “Our destiny is in our own hands,” he said. The ruling from the European court of justice, he continued, represented a “before and after”.

“Florentino always wins,” said the president of the league, Javier Tebas, repeating a sarcastic line of which he is fond. This time, Real Madrid’s president really had, although the judgment did not represent support for a Super League project, something Tebas was keen to stress. It had come, Pérez claimed, in the face of threats and pressure; he has repeatedly projected Madrid as the saviours of football and victims of those who run it, whose dark power he had stood up to.

As a pioneer, too: there was a certain irony in the reminder that Madrid had played a key part in the construction of the European Cup. Madrid released a five-minute video which showed images from their European history, the most storied of all, accompanied by Berton Braley’s poem The Will to Win.

Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta, Pérez’s only and perhaps unexpected bedfellow in this whole process, was continuing with a more conciliatory tone he has adopted over recent months. “Barcelona’s position absolutely does not go against the Spanish league,” he said.

In Spain, the two gigantic clubs are powerful political institutions that do not just account for 60% of football fans according to governmental figures, but a significantly higher percentage of partisan media coverage where there has been no huge backlash against the Super League. It has been lost on no one that it was English fans who brought the whole thing to its knees.

Sometimes that has come with a hint of envy, perhaps even a sense that there is some ill-defined purity lost. But many of those fans in Spain don’t care much about what happens to the rest of a league which does not have the economic power of the Premier League and which, in any case, has started to see itself as a de facto Super League. Nor do they care much for the authorities against which their clubs are aligned and which they see as adversaries not to be trusted: league, federation, Uefa.

Madrid and Barcelona supporters are far more inclined to welcome the risk of a breakaway, or even a collapse of domestic competition, than, say, supporters of Manchester United or Liverpool. Those papers incline towards their clubs which meant this ruling being projected as a victory, perhaps more of a definitive one than it will probably prove to be. Over the last few months the buildup to the ruling in Spain had tended to project it in similar terms: a victory in the court would mean the Super League would happen.

On the television channel La Sexta, Antonio García Ferreras opened his editorial by announcing the “bombs”: “the Super League has won”, this was a “before and after”, and “Uefa’s monopoly is over”, their cosy money-making club broken up. Madrid and Barcelona were the only ones that had kept going and they had been vindicated, despite the threats. Oh, and games will be free. García Ferreras was Real Madrid’s director communications and is among Pérez’s closest allies.

“I bet you 25 dinners that there’s no Super League in two years or six or eight,” Tebas said in one interview. He has previously described the project as the kind of thing you come up with drunk in a bar at 5am. On Thursday he had extended that to 6am; they are all “intoxicated” he said. He was having a busy day that suggested that he was not quite as certain as he said: a vociferous, confrontational presence anyway, there were tweets, statements, interviews, press conferences.

His position was strengthened by the response throughout European football. There had been an assumption from Madrid and Barcelona that privately some of the biggest clubs support them really and that once they had won the court case, once the new project was presented, the Super League would surely be revived. But that didn’t happen.

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La Liga mobilised swiftly, aggressively. Atlético Madrid and Sevilla released statements saying they did not want a part of it. All the Spanish clubs that play on Thursday night will do so carrying the anti-Super League slogan: Earn it on the pitch. All except Real Madrid, of course. La Liga’s TV channels will push that message during broadcasts. That will not be seen as a popular reaction, even if there have been statements against the Super League from national supporters’ groups; rather, it is an institutional message, one interested party against the other.

This may not lead to a Super League but it does shift the balance of power. That in itself is worthwhile for the big two, a wresting back of some power. This week Laporta framed it not so much as a breakaway as an opportunity to look Uefa in the eye.

“Our destiny is in our own hands,” Pérez insisted, his first victory secured. “Our right to propose and organise competitions that modernise and attract fans from all around the world has been fully recognised. Today, free Europe has again triumphed. Football and its fans have triumphed too. Today, law and justice, truth and freedom, have imposed themselves upon the pressures that we have suffered for more than two years. Today will mark and before and after; it is a great day for the history of football and the history of sport.”

Madrid and Barcelona still stand alone but they are Madrid and Barcelona. Uefa had been reminded of that.