‘It was like shouting into a hurricane’: how the Super League crashed

As the last clubs crawled from the smouldering wreck of the European Super League, the £4.5bn competition that promised to turn football on its head only to crash and burn inside 50 hours, the blame game was already beginning. Insiders tell of a disastrous public relations strategy, of little earthquakes inside clubs, and of the 12 clubs being unable to get their message across amid a continual onslaught: from fans, governments and football’s governing bodies. “It was like shouting into a hurricane,” one well-placed Super League source says.

So what did go wrong? The seeds of the downfall came early, when the story broke in the New York Times and the Times at lunchtime on Sunday. That surprised the breakaway 12 clubs, who were leaden-footed and failed to make an official announcement until late that evening. “It went from: ‘Is this coming?’ to: ‘Shit it’s on, it’s happening,’ very quickly,” says one source. “But for hours and hours there was no official statement. And so the Super League’s enemies were allowed to pile in. No one was putting the positive case.”

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A narrative took hold. That the 12 founding clubs were greedy, taking a golden hello of between £200m and £300m while leaving the rest of football scrambling in the mire. That the new pan-European midweek league would ruin the Premier League and destroy football’s pyramid where – in theory – a small club can climb to the top. Perhaps it was all fair. But no one was pointing out the potential benefits to the game, including better enforcement of financial fair play and £10bn being given to clubs down the pyramid over 23 years – three times more than at present.

The secrecy of the project became another weapon against it, with players and managers completely blindsided by the news. They did not know how the Super League worked, when it started, and what the consequences might be for their contracts. As the Italian legend Paolo Maldini admitted on Wednesday: “I’m the director of AC Milan and I didn’t know anything about the Super League project. I have never been involved in the discussions, I saw the news on Sunday evening.” Into the vacuum rumours began to spread.

On Monday, for instance, Chelsea’s players met their chairman, Bruce Buck, and several said they had no interest in a future where they’d be banned from internationals. In truth that was something legally unlikely to happen. As one Super League source put it: “The legal advice was that Uefa is a monopoly … and any attempt to ban clubs or players would be a clear case of a breach of EU competition law.” Others say the proposals had another fatal flaw from the start with Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain, last year’s Champions League finalists, refusing to sign up despite huge pressure to do so. But an even greater problem for the Super League was the supremely hostile reaction of fans, governing bodies and governments.

The UK government led the way, not only inviting fan groups to have their say but also promising a “legislative bombshell”. That surprised some involved in the Super League. “It’s not Covid, it’s not Brexit, it’s not Greensill,” said one. “So it was an easy win for them and was not going to cost them any money.” European and world football also presented a united front against the proposal with the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, heavily pressured by people in the game to criticise the Super League at a speech on Tuesday.

The tide was turning, and quickly. Sources say that the manager Pep Guardiola’s criticisms raised the alarm at the board of Manchester City, and he personally told the board he did not expect to be involved in a Super League when he was signing a new contract. There was also tension between Jürgen Klopp and part of the Liverpool board, which he expressed when his side travelled to Leeds on Monday.

It all meant that by the time the 14 remaining Premier League clubs met on Tuesday there was growing optimism that the nascent project was in trouble.

To one sharp executive inside English football, the Super League was built on four pillars – great teams, incredible financing, a huge market for a new project, and a regulatory framework that would survive a challenge. But by Tuesday he believed two pillars were wobbling – the teams, with Chelsea and Manchester City looking for a way out, and the market, with Amazon, Sky, Comcast and BT all saying they were not interested in a TV deal.

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And while Chelsea and Manchester City were still briefing journalists that they were still in, behind the scenes their respective owners, Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, were increasingly uneasy. They are not involved in football for profit but for reputational reasons. The sight of fans blocking the streets was enough to make Chelsea pull out. And then the dominoes fell.

Although City and Chelsea quit first, it is understood there was a point during the afternoon when all parties realised in unison that the game was up. While they announced their decisions at different times, they did not do so as a reaction to one another. The later announcements by Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool and Spurs came after those clubs had decided on the precise nature of their statements and tied up other loose ends.

So what next? On Wednesday the Juventus owner, Andrea Agnelli, insisted he remains “convinced of the beauty of that project”, before suggesting Boris Johnson’s opposition to the European Super League was linked to Brexit – a claim laughed off by those in government.

Meanwhile some involved in the Super League now admit their actions have changed football – only not as they intended. “Uefa’s hand is massively strengthened,” said one. “I believe we are talking about a generation before something like this is tried again.”