European football’s dirty dozen must not be allowed to slip back into their routines. Now is the time to get vindictive
Those of you with a taste for these things will have noted the irony: a competition designed to eliminate promotion and relegation in perpetuity somehow managed to shed half its teams in a single evening. One by one the scions of the European Super League fell, like spurned pastry chefs in a televised baking competition: first the prize flans of Chelsea and Manchester City, then the rest of the English clubs late on Tuesday night, then Atlético Madrid and the two Milan clubs on Wednesday morning. Farewell then, Super League. You promised a leaner, more tightly-focused vision of football, and you achieved it by launching and shelving an entire tournament within three days.
Naturally there is a tendency towards schadenfreude here, the urge to rejoice and revel in this triumph of popular will over the cold hand of Big Commerce. The principal protagonists have been humiliated. Ed Woodward at Manchester United has already paid for the fiasco with his job. The Juventus chairman, Andrea Agnelli, was forced to bury his pet project on live television. Even JPMorgan Chase, the investment bank that was funding the venture, has paid a price: its corporate sustainability rating has been downgraded by Standard Ethics from “adequate” to “non-compliant”.
