Fans have been urged to remain vigilant to the possibility of a “stealth” Super League, exactly five years after 12 clubs announced the formation of a controversial breakaway competition.
Late on Sunday, April 18, 2021, the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’ all announced they had joined the European Super League.
It was proposed that 15 of the league’s members would be permanent – free from the threat of relegation.
Within 48 hours all six had withdrawn amid pressure from national and international football authorities, the Government and even the Prince of Wales. But the greatest opponents of all were supporters, who mobilised – despite Covid-19 restrictions – to express their outrage at the plans.
“The fundamentals of the game were significantly and severely under threat,” Football Supporters’ Association chair Tom Greatrex told the Press Association.
“This was a competition that removed any sense of sporting jeopardy and just offended the sense of what football is – and supporters could see it.”
The competition would have been a direct rival to UEFA’s club competitions and while the six pledged to continue in the Premier League, the Super League was also seen as an existential threat to the English top flight.
Asked why the clubs chose to do it, Greatrex added: “I don’t think they anticipated that so fundamentally breaching the competitive tenets of the English game was going to result in the level of outcry that there was.
“I think they assumed that because they had been able to do whatever they wanted, pretty much for such a long period of time, they would be able to do pretty much what they wanted again.”
The withdrawal of English clubs was swift, with all six having pulled out by late on April 20.
The Super League concept did not officially die until February this year, when its chief supporters Real Madrid announced an agreement signposting the end of their legal dispute with UEFA.
Greatrex does not believe such a bold breakaway will ever happen again, not least because English clubs will soon be subject to independent regulation.
However, the expansion of the Champions League and FIFA’s Club World Cup are arguably signs of the game still being bent to the will of the big club owners, all chasing greater revenues and more security for their investment.
Greatrex said: “There needs to continue to be vigilance about the way in which existing competitions are formulated and amended to get close to some other features of the exclusivity of the Super League, those ‘stealth’ changes.”
He believes the Super League did have one positive impact – forcing the Government to act on bringing in an independent regulator.
A fan-led review of football was promised by the Conservative Party in their 2019 election manifesto, but Greatrex believes without the Super League scandal, it may have been kicked into the long grass.
“There’s more chance that the Government would have caved to the representations from the Premier League and others, that there wasn’t really an issue. It was best left to football to sort itself out. That’s what Super League changed,” he said.
“For the first time, you saw that actually the Premier League wasn’t in control of its members and having a minority of those members signing up to a project that effectively undermined the Premier League itself, that was the first time that the football authorities lost control of the argument.
“If you take a step back and you look at the Super League episode as a whole, I think it’s quite hard not to draw as one of the conclusions that supporters demonstrated a knowledge, understanding and sense of perspective that was much more sophisticated than almost any other player in that whole drama over the course of that few days.”
