Tommy Martin: The war against the Super League has been won, but who will win the peace?

Thu, 22 Apr, 2021 - 06:00

Looking back, we should have known that the Super League was doomed when we heard that they had hired Theresa May’s former spin doctor to run their communications strategy.

The genius behind ‘Brexit Means Brexit’ soon got to work: Sunday night’s official announcement of the dastardly plan was so lacking in substance that it amounted to little more than a declaration that ‘Super League Means Super League.’

While the concept seems flimsy and ill-considered in the aftermath of its embarrassing collapse, it’s easy to forget the sense of imminent peril that gripped the football world when the first shots were fired on Sunday. Though the back-of-a-fag-packet sums and the tacked-on promises of solidarity can now be clearly seen as evidence of cobbled-together amateurism — fig leaves to cover the naked greed — we’re so used to football’s bad guys getting their way that there seemed a sense of grim inevitability about it all.

Thankfully, in the darkest hour, an unlikely alliance formed. It was the plotters bad luck to launch their offensive when Sky Sports Super Sunday was on air. Rather like the Russian winter, there is little hope of success in any football campaign when one runs into the rabble-rousing rhetoric of Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher.

Fresh from recent hand-to-hand skirmishes over Trent Alexander-Arnold, the red pair united in resistance to the Super League, with Alex Ferguson as a sort of shadowy Gandalf lending moral gravitas in the background.

By force of authority, articulacy and ability to speak for long periods in a very high-pitched tone, Carragher and Neville rallied a broad constituency of fellow pundits, former players and, crucially, fans to the cause. The Super League bandits might have expected their clubs’ fans to gladly shuffle along towards the Promised Land, banking on the supporters sharing the owners’ rapacious self-interest. They didn’t, and that has made all the difference.

Initially it appeared an exercise in grand satire that this great mobilisation of the football proletariat played out largely on Sky Sports. The broadcaster dedicated hours to an anti-Super League propaganda campaign, including an epic and brilliantly-produced Monday Night Football programme.

Many found the lack of self-awareness astonishing. There were only passing attempts to interrogate the role of pay-TV broadcasters in the gold rush which began with the formation of the Premier League and Champions League in 1992, and how the free market economics by which they flourished had inevitably led to this moment of angry fissure.

That the Super League represented an existential threat to the Premier League, Sky’s jewel in the crown, was all the editorial justification needed.

But this was a time for action, not introspection. In the words of that old diplomatic maxim, there are no allies, only interests. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. And so the Super League was faced down by a broad coalition of angry fan groups, current and former players and managers, derisive media, bandwagon-jumping Tory politicians, twitchy sponsors, an emboldened Uefa and a see-what-way-the-wind-blows Fifa.

Soon the song of resistance grew louder. To the barricades marched Amazon, denying any involvement in the farrago. Then Paris Saint Germain, the pride of Qatar swearing blood allegiance to Uefa. So too the brave boys of Bayern, not to be found wanting!

Can you hear the people sing?!

By Tuesday evening thousands of irate Chelsea fans barracked their team bus on its arrival at Stamford Bridge, brandishing handmade signs decrying the influence of money on the game (no really, I shit you not). The protests broke the wavering resolve of owner Roman Abramovich, who, owning most of the mineral wealth of Siberia, wasn’t really pushed about the Super League anyway. Chelsea were out and the house of cards fell.

Never has so much been owed by so many to so much cardboard and permanent marker.

A brief sense of elation was soon dashed by flicking on Sky Sports News. There, Tim Sherwood was giving a sort of victory address.

“What they ‘ave to realise,” declared the former Spurs gaffer, “is that wot we ‘ave ‘ere in the Premier League is the best product in the world. In. The. World.”

On Twitter, Henry Winter of The Times told the vanquished to “Respect the English Pyramid,” sounding like a Victorian archaeologist looting the tomb of Tutankhamun.

One felt rather like Churchill looking east in 1946 at his erstwhile ally Joe Stalin.

Oh, for an iron curtain to put Tim Sherwood behind.

So, the war has been won, but who will win the peace? How resolute will the anti-Super League coalition prove now that the common enemy has been faced down?

There has been a giddy sense of a line drawn in the sand against the ongoing commodification of professional soccer. That the fans have spoken and said ‘no more’. Now to take on high ticket prices, hefty TV subscriptions, obscure kick-off times, non-existent regulation of club ownership, agents fees, spiralling player wages, sportswashing, corruption and…you’re all still with us right?

[Looks around] Guys? Guys?

In reality, we are left with Uefa’s monstrous new Champions League, cravenly intended to placate the same clubs who tried to destroy the entire fabric of the European game.

We are left with the same structural inequalities that make many European leagues an uncompetitive procession.

We are left with penurious smaller leagues whose champions are doomed to navigate multiple qualifying rounds for the honour of being outgunned irritations to the Champions League elite.

We are left with state-owned superclubs whose bottomless pockets inflate football finances and drive their dumb rivals towards bankruptcy.

We are left with rapacious vulture capitalists considering how next to have their wicked way with the game.

In short, we are left with the same conditions that provoked the launch of the short-lived Super League in the first place. That’s why it was a shame that many of the discussions this week were tough on the Super League, not tough on the causes of the Super League.

Maybe, now that the breakaway threat has been faced down, talk will turn to better revenue distribution, spending controls, protections on club ownership and a new desire not to simply cave into the greedy demands of a gilded few.

Because this week’s unlikely allies have learned, as others have done in the past, how far appeasement gets you.