Super League defeat is a win for UEFA – but here is why any celebration should be tempered

Ian King 16 Dec 2022 11:57 AM

The European Super League has lost with the preliminary hearing of the ECJ, but there are no ‘good guys’ involved in this whole sordid conversation.

It remains on a respirator, but the number of people standing around the bed is rapidly diminishing and it seems unlikely that it will be revived in anything like the forms that have been previously pushed upon us. The European Super League, the great land-grab attempted by a tiny number of Europe’s biggest football clubs, seems even further away than it has at any point since it was first sprung upon us in April 2021.

The preliminary report from the European Court of Justice is neither final nor binding, but there is really no way of spinning its publication as good news for Real Madrid, Barcelona or Juventus. Advocate general Athanasios Rantos found that FIFA and UEFA rules were compatible with European law and that, while the European Super League was free to set up a rival tournament of its own, it could not ‘continue to participate in the football competitions organised by FIFA and UEFA without the prior authorisation of those federations’.

Rantos was highly critical of the Super League project, stating that, ‘It would appear that ESLC’s founding clubs want, on the one hand, to benefit from the rights and advantages linked to membership of UEFA, without however being bound by UEFA’s rules and obligations’, but he also had a warning for European football’s governing body: ‘UEFA must avoid favouring its own competitions by unjustifiably refusing to authorise competing events’. Final judgement in this case will be published by the 15-member Grand Chamber of the ECJ in March, but it would be considered staggering were the final report to be much different to the preliminary one.

The first half of the 2022/23 season has hardly been a great advertisement for the European Super League. Most obviously, the ‘Super’ aspirations of both Barcelona and Juventus have hardly been helped by their teams crashing through the floor of the Champions League and into the Europa League in the group stages. Barcelona only took one point from four games against Bayern Munich and Inter. Juventus lost five of their six matches and were only transferred into the Europa League because Maccabi Haifa had an even worse goal difference.

These two clubs have hardly been a stunning advertisement for the alternate universe of a European Super League, either. Despite their well-known financial issues, Barcelona spent the summer having seemed to have learned nothing from the saga that had preceded it, spending money raised against future revenues chasing the dragon of getting back to the very top of the European club game. This has not been an unqualified success (or, some might argue, even really a qualified one), but at least they went into the mid-season break top of La Liga and they haven’t publicly soiled themselves to the extent that Juventus have.

At the end of November, the entire 15-member board of directors of the club, including president Andrea Agnelli, vice-president Pavel Nedved and CEO Maurizio Arrivabene, resigned en masse following the Turin prosector’s investigation into financial irregularities at the club, including alleged false accounting and irregularities in player transfers. The constitution of a new board won’t be decided by shareholders until the middle of January.

For all the bullishness of these three clubs, the notion that this league will happen seems further away than ever. After all, quite asides from the court-related legalities of it all, why on earth would anyone want to join a sporting body, two-thirds of which have had the sort of autumn that they have? And even if there were club owners who might overlook this, further obstacles remain.

New owners at big English clubs may look at the sort of payday that a European Super League would bring with dollar signs in their eyes, but if Todd Boehly or whoever ends up buying Manchester United and Liverpool were amenable to it all, well, that would only put them in the same position that the six English clubs were in when the league was announced in April 2021.

Public opinion towards a European Super League in England has hardly softened since then, and whether the motives for buying in were motivated by making a very large amount of money or sportswashing, any new owners hoping that they could have a slice of this particular cake and eat it would likely find out what the ramifications of doing so would be fairly quickly.

Similarly, German clubs are likely to continue to refuse to be involved, and with Nasser Al-Khelaifi of PSG being pretty much the sworn enemy of Real Madrid and head of the European Club Association it doesn’t seem likely that the French champions would be getting involved either. And at this sort of point, it’s worth asking which clubs that would give a European Super League much credibility would be that interested in joining it.

But we shouldn’t start thinking of UEFA as being anybody’s knights in shining armour. Their reforms for the Champions League remain an abomination, and the idea that they are interested in anything beyond retaining control of the game themselves seems pretty laughable. This is not a battle between a ‘good’ side and a ‘bad’ side, one of which deserves our unequivocal support. Instead, this is a battle between two sides, one of which is even worse than the other, and with the slim – okay, gossamer thin – possibility that the less bad side could in time be reformed. In this particular case, any ‘victory’ for UEFA comes with a considerable number of asterisks.

The same applies pretty much across the board. In England, the Premier League seems to have failed to prevent the introduction of an independent regulator for football. FIFA have confirmed that they will be starting a 32-team Club World Cup from 2025, amongst other bright ideas that will only further pressurise a schedule that has long been creaking from everybody wanting repeated slices of that sweet, sweet money pie. In short, there are few to no ‘good guys’ to be seen here.

If the experience of the 2022 World Cup has – from a footballing perspective – proved anything, it’s been that fans love a bit of unpredictability. One of the great joys of any World Cup is that, for all the constant prattling on about celebrity players and the like, most national teams are flawed and beatable in some way or another. It feels like a competition from the outset in a way that doesn’t even apply to the current iteration of the Champions League, and there seems to be little public interest in growing those financial gaps still further.

Perhaps the next big test for whether the European Super League can continue to limp on will come with the constitution of that new board at Juventus in January. Should they decide that they need to focus on getting their own house in order, the league will be left another third short and looking like no more than the fever dreams of two heavily-indebted Spanish clubs with an obscene sense of entitlement, but who seem incapable of living within their means. Even Real Madrid, the ‘healthiest’ of the three, had a net debt of just over a quarter of a billion euros as of the end of June.

But the fact remains that there is sufficient money sloshing around European football to keep every single club healthy and competitive, and that this isn’t the case is the result of a large number of choices made over a substantial period of time. But even a moment of final, destructive defeat for the European Super League should only be the start of a movement towards ending the perpetual contortion of the game towards the best interests of the richest and the richest alone. It’s the fact that this won’t happen which means that any celebration at this court defeat feels considerably tempered.

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