Florentino Pérez and co believe new fans are needed to survive but misunderstand the game’s appeal and cultural role
T he storm has receded, but after a week that threatened the greatest rupture in European football since the legalisation of professionalism in 1885 and has apparently ended with a sullen acceptance of the status quo, nobody should think everything remains the same or that the crisis is somehow over.
What will history remember of the past few days? The images of Chelsea fans celebrating on Fulham Road as word spread the club had withdrawn from the European Super League? The exposed emperor Florentino Pérez desperately insisting he was wearing fine new clothes, whatever the nasty English might be insisting? More tangibly, perhaps, the beginning of a new age of militancy among fans, pundits and players, perhaps even politicians, a kickback against the idea that football is just a business to be run on purely commercial lines.
