From the album ‘Flux’ (1981)
Though we’re loathe to admit it, Gordon Gekko was right. The proposed European Super League captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit and clarifies how we feel about greed in its most brazen form.
Europe’s biggest and wealthiest clubs attempting to replace the Champions League with their own hegemony, loosely based on the American franchise model, was as inevitable as the reactions it was met with; ‘greedy fucking bastards’ (true), ‘it’s unsporting’ (absolutely) or ‘the game’s dead’ (referring to football’s soul).
While I sympathise with the disdain for its impetus, we have to see the European Super League for what it is – the result of a process we’ve happily fomented or at best willingly ignored. We’ve convinced ourselves that the slow and insidious erosion of the game’s competitive balance over the last three decades, along with its increasing economic inequality which we submissively financed, wouldn’t see consequences. Now there’s anger because that pretence has been vanquished. I firmly believe that in most instances it’s the sheer embarrassment at being made to feel so gullible, rather than the elitist nature of the new Super League, that’s riled people up. Claiming it’s the latter makes you look better though, doesn’t it?
Speaking of which, I could do without the piety from ex-playing pundits with their lips suckered on the Sky Sports teat. All of whom benefitted enormously from grotesque rises in their playing salaries after the Premier League’s formation. The European Super League breakaway may have been shameless, but so are they for using Sky Sports as a soapbox to spew populist rhetoric to appear grounded and using the issue itself as absolution for their involvement in football’s media explosion.
Make no mistake, the European Super League proposal has been a long time coming and its appeal has only grown as a litany of grievances at recent and long-running failures by UEFA and domestic football associations has too. Little doubt Covid-19 and it’s havoc on football finances was cynically wielded as a sickening justification to accelerate the timeline.
UEFA’s decadence, however, is the main cause. They willingly eroded sporting integrity over the last three decades in favour of profits, which has resulted in unwittingly conceding power to a small plutocracy of clubs. When the European Cup was rebranded as the Champions League in the early nineties there was far more financial parity in the sport, so clubs sought avarice in the margins. The increased sponsorship revenues tethered to UEFA’s renamed premier European competition, and worldwide commercialisation afforded by technological advances, changed that scope and attracted the worst kind of profiteers. Now UEFA needs the brand pull of the top clubs to maintain those sponsorship revenues. This is the destructive legacy of UEFA’s perpetual largess, where too much expansion lead to a bloated abortion of a group stage and allowed ease of access to too many clubs in the larger leagues to populate it. A mix of perpetual qualification and a relaxation on foreign player quotas has seen all the restrictions on hoovering up the best talent removed, allowing the big clubs to get stronger while weakening the rest.
A sign of UEFA’s lack of foresight and incompetence can be traced to the contentious aftermath of Liverpool’s extraordinary Champions League victory in 2005. That season Liverpool finished fifth in their domestic league and didn’t qualify for next season’s Champions League. UEFA had become so inured to the clubs winning the competition always performing well enough in their domestic league to qualify, that the scenario which left them having to fiddle a fair compromise (and let Liverpool defend their title) to save face had never arisen before. And even then Liverpool were made to go through the pre-qualifying rounds. A disgrace. Even now the winners of the World Cup have to qualify for the next finals tournament (which is equally scandalous). When it comes to sporting integrity, FIFA and UEFA’s is clearly selective.
Speaking of selective, UEFA’s complete indifference to racism is damning. Because it’s an ethical not a financial issue it’s paid lip service, with small fines and in extreme cases making clubs whose fans offend repeatedly play behind closed doors (not so effective a deterrent over the last year). However, as soon as their cash cow is threatened by the European Super League formation emergency meetings, sanctimonious statements and threats of bans for clubs were issued.
UEFA’s abject failure to implement financial fair play with any cogency or thoroughness has to grate with the likes of Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Manchester United, who, while they may be financial behemoths, have earned their global cachet through decades of sustained success since the second World War. The ghastly (state and oligarch owned) nouveau-riche trio of PSG, Chelsea and Manchester City have audaciously abbreviated this process with complete disregard for UEFA’s financial fair play parameters. While City were banned, it was overturned by CAS on a technicality and UEFA did nothing in response but sulk. If UEFA aren’t going to make Financial Fair Play viable it’s no wonder the clubs want something that will more effectively even the playing field.
While permanent placement in the Super League, without any threat of demotion or need to qualify through domestic performance, is unfair and elitist, as was the limited number of qualification places for non-member clubs, you wonder how different this new competition would look and feel when compared to the current Champions League, where so few clubs have a realistic chance of winning the competition year after year.
To drive that point home, in the Champions League era (1992 to the present) only two clubs have managed to make the final of the Champions League who didn’t play in one of the five biggest leagues in Europe (Germany, Italy, Spain, France or England), Dutch club Ajax (twice), and Porto (once). The last club to win the competition outside of those five leagues was Porto in 2004. And since their win in 2004 no club from outside the top five leagues has even made the final. In practical terms, the current structure has ensured it’s already a closed shop.
As Juventus, Barcelona and Bayern Munich and the like are to the Champions League, so too is the Premier League heavily reliant on the brand pull of the irksomely nicknamed ‘big six’ clubs. It is they who drive interest and social media impressions, and entice broadcasters, foreign and domestic, to spend billions on the TV rights. They’re propping up the rest through even distribution of revenue, allowing them to behave well beyond their means with disgusting displays of bravura opulence to deliver rank mediocrity – see Everton’s recent transfer business and any of the catastrophic wage to turnover ratios for most bottom feeding Premier League clubs.
So the threat of domestic league bans was, and is, a clear bluff. Is anyone paying hundreds of quid a year for Sky, BT (and whatever else) to watch a league where Leicester, Everton, Leeds and Wolves are the marquee clubs, and where Reading and Hull are imported to take the place of Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester United? Would the same number of Chinese, Americans and Indonesians watch and bet on this ‘product’? Not a chance.
Now the important questions – how close was this proposal to being realised? Is it likely to return soon in another guise? Or was it just leverage?
To maintain control I can envision UEFA capitulating to permanent Champions League entry for clubs based upon some historical criteria of having won the competition a number of times. Limiting it to three wins would mean only Inter Milan, AC Milan, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Ajax, Manchester United and Liverpool would automatically qualify every season as it stands, and it could be claimed as (somewhat) merit based. UEFA’s current plan for 2024, while less extreme, already contains a not too dis-similar mechanism, allowing a safety net through accrual of coefficient points if one of the big name clubs has a stinker of season. Further tinkering with the structure of the Champions League’s format beyond 2024 is all but assured (more games, more money) as is a reformatting of the prize money to further favour the biggest clubs.
And that’s another reason the European Super League clubs moved now, they saw the Swiss model for what it is – the sign of a weak hand. While the clubs behind the European Super League overplayed their hand and were defeated this time, they’ve collated more feedback on what kind of proposal could pass for acceptable. We’re talking about ruthless people here. They know fans are against a closed model of European competition. Expect the next proposal to assuage fairness concerns while also getting the founding clubs what they want – automatic entry in all but name. If Chelsea or Barcelona don’t qualify through their domestic league, they’ll have to go through several rounds of pre-qualification as the rest of the riff-raff from Slovenia and Finland currently do in the Champions League, only they won’t play anyone who threatens to knock them out. This feels like a fait accompli either way. While the big clubs underpin the prestige and revenues of the Champions League the threat of a break away will remain and this leaves UEFA in the same bind – keep conceding ground to placate the elite clubs, or lose control over this runaway gravy train.
I hate being so apathetic and pessimistic, but I keep returning to two questions: how realistic is the kind of sweeping reform that would be meaningful? And short of that is it worth saving a competition, ran by a morally bankrupt federation, that’s been bastardised beyond all recognition from its original format, just because it’s only slightly less egregiously greedy and unsporting than its potential replacement or what it’s bound to mutate into relatively soon?
If it’s left you all numb, well good. That’s the truth and inevitability of the evolutionary spirit, what it creates it then destroys. The only certainty this situation reveals to me is that, in this instance, we’re not truly prepared for the discomfort that’s necessary to stop this process.
From the album ‘Sound Affects’ (1980)
From the album ‘Trembling Flowers’ (1991)
The older I get the more I hurry when doing mundane tasks. Often I attempt to do three things at once and in a fragmented mess fail to conclude any of them, that or I carry a general anxiety that I’m not doing enough with the time I’ve got. It’s the ultimate form of futility that causes disorganisation and ultimately costs time. The best analogy I can come up with is of trying to clasp really fine dry sand in your hands – the more you squeeze your fingers together and tense the muscles the quicker it seeps out.
Instead of dwelling on the existential nightmare that is our present (as The Pistols rightly concluded – there is no future) and in an attempt to do something more constructive than ‘doing a Peter Sutcliffe’ (which involves wandering around GTA V hammering random pedestrians over the head), I decided to attack my neuroses head on, and avoid present-day introspection for good measure, by indulging in a wee retrospective. Yes children, we’re fast approaching the eight year anniversary of WLWASIOH.
Life events have instigated this, which I won’t bore you with. This blog was started after a significant event. Creating it helped me through that time, and is now there to distract me again when I most need it. The date of WLWASIOH’s creation to the present day essentially bookends a period of great change for me personally. Let’s just say I’m in the mood to reminisce about it and other things beyond.
Morbid curiosity is at play here too. With one housebound day bleeding into the next, usually I can’t remember what I had for tea the previous night, so I’ve got little chance of remembering what I wrote on here several years ago. Just what disasters lurk?
Having accepted that I’ve reached a point in my life where I simply don’t have enough time (or patience) to be embarrassed by my failings, I endeavoured to read all my content again with a more forgiving eye. Lately I’ve been reminding myself of the following; ‘the goal cannot be achieved without suffering’ and ‘the purpose of life is not happiness, but usefulness’. Even if we successfully find ways to delude and distract ourselves, we know this life is all about adversity, and you’ve just got to cope with the varying degrees of it as best you can. WLWASIOH may fail to be useful and I may not be suffering enough to succeed (and that depends on what you define as success), but it does sufficiently distract me from nihilistic and fatalistic thoughts. For me, that’s invaluable.
Surprisingly I came away feeling quite enthused by the body of work on WLWASIOH. It’s not…dreadful? That’s…something? I’m really proud of the short stories, articles about music and TV. Yeah, there are subpar offerings in each of these categories and elements in all I would change, but broadly speaking, I actually enjoyed re-reading them.
I’ve gotten some ‘hot’ take opinion pieces right too, even though they irksomely belong to the realm of clickbait journalism more than beguiling creativity or intellectualism. My piece on Ched Evans’ return to professional football after he was released from prison for rape is a particular highlight. Sure, I was right, after the initial outcry died down he started playing football again and nobody cared. The whole episode exposed the dishonesty and cynicism inherent in cancel culture, that it’s mainly populated by self-serving and fickle poseurs obsessed by the egotism derived from (predominately social media) status, who temporarily focus ire on a specific target, before moving on to the next outrage to maintain their visibility in the vanguard of the milieu. While this process has aggregated to permeate some cultural attitudes (some for the better, others not), we can say with complete certainty that it’s impossible to expunge someone like Kevin Spacey or Michael Jackson retrospectively. Most us of don’t and won’t let our lives be dictated by guilt. I mean, really now, you’re not gonna watch ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ or ‘The Usual Suspects’ cause Spacey is in it, or dodge ‘Off The Wall’ and ‘Thriller’? Piousness of that degree is an impossible standard and makes you an insufferable bore.
But, anyway, just like cancel culture, this is all about me. And it’s clear the opinion piece genre has produced my worst articles. Lowlights include arguing that the cynicism with which Liverpool football club’s American owners had ran the club would demolish and demoralise Jürgen Klopp. Quite the opposite happened – though I still contend that’s mostly thanks to the incredible qualities of the German. My excitable theory of Yes campaign’s momentum being unassailable, as evidenced by the infinitesimal ratio of Yes stickers appearing in Glasgow windaes compared to ‘No Thanks’ ones, ranks high (I mean low) too. But the pièce de résistance was my column from early 2019 where I was convinced that Scottish independence was inevitable by simply waiting. It is my worst take on WLWASIOH, and recent events has seen it clinch its place at the bottom.
I’m left quite bewildered by all of Salmond trial stuff (pre, during and post), the abject failure to protect the anonymity of his alleged victims, the selectivity of prosecutions for contempt of court when covering the case: it seems that writing for a newspaper, no matter how crap it is or how much of a hack you are, affords you establishment immunity, whereas a blogger disseminating the same information is prosecuted, oh well. The idea of there being a SNP government led conspiracy against Alex Salmond seems really far-fetched, particularly when there’s abundant proof of government ineptitude to chew on. As someone who isn’t versed in the internal politics of the SNP, why an SNP led Scottish Government would go out of its way to destroy Salmond, who hasn’t been an MP or MSP for nearly four years, makes no sense, even if they suspected he may, at some point, return, as he now has. It’s the Madelaine McCann syndrome. For too many, a conspiracy theory is preferable to uncertainty or no (good) theory at all. The truth is often supplied by the most obvious explanation – that there were a series of fuck ups, followed by a succession of other fucks ups trying to rectify or cover for the initial errors, given those involved likely became aware of the consequences for themselves professionally. Acts of panic can be mistaken for guilt very easily.
The latter doesn’t absolve the shocking failure to date to hold them to account, however. More importantly this episode and the SNP’s inertia over independence (to use a trite football analogy, you have to shoot to miss an open goal, the SNP haven’t even cocked the leg in this parliament term) has harmed the chances of it. Will Alex Salmond’s list party enhance it? I don’t know. Either way, we’re about to find out.
So yeah, my delusion that independence was inevitable just because of, well, continued popularity and that that can ever be perpetual without delivering on its main purpose, was the most foolishly shite thing I’ve blogged in eight years. Not bad all things considered. Having established my instincts on this particular political subject are continuously defective, mixed with my growing pessimistic despondency that Scottish independence will ever happen, means it’s all but certain the opposite will transpire. I’ll conclude with the caveat that, particularly at a time such as this, having hope for the future, whether arrived at spuriously or otherwise, is a dangerous, but necessary, thing.
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard 
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