Larry Ryan: Were we ready to walk away from English football?
And for three heady nights, you just roll with it — revel in Chelsea fans staging an emotional protest about the malign influence of money on the game, writes Larry Ryan
Did we ever feel more alive than when football was dying?
When was the last time we were as energised by 48 hours of drama in the grand old game?
Probably on a good Champions League quarter-final week with all the big clubs playing each other, Super League supremo Florentino Perez might point out.
Still, little did anyone consider, this time last week, how attached we were to the veneer of competition at the top of the professional game.
Who among us realised they’d be ready to jack everything in for West Ham’s right to dream of all that came with a top-four finish?
We now, at least, have located the Rubicon. We might be able to tolerate a billionaire coalition of sportswashers and oligarchs and hedge funds fencing off the top of the game for themselves. But if the same lads try to put it in writing, just to ironclad their guarantees, that, we now know, is a bridge too far.
It turns out that every time fans clamoured for their superclubs to splash another €100m on a striker who will make the difference, it was with one eye on the transfer fee trickling down ‘the pyramid’.
And so, led by the two most persuasive voices from pay-TV, the people rose up via plucky underdogs WhatsApp and Instagram and Twitter against self-interested juggernauts who have taken over the world.
And for three heady nights, you had to turn off the irony detectors and just roll with it — revel in Chelsea fans staging an emotional protest about the malign influence of money on the game we love.
Ah, it was truly magnificent drama. A live mini-series, a compulsive binge-watch, rolled out via Sky and social media with fresh twists every half hour. The centrepiece a sprawling morality sermon by evangelists Carra and Nev on Monday night, building to a high-octane action sequence on the news channels Tuesday evening, as the bad guys’ plan unraveled.
It was impossible to focus on the actual football being shown, which seemed very tame in comparison, something else Florentino might note wryly.
For the match-going fans of the Premier League, there was finally a common focus for decades of rage that usually gets directed at each other. Ticket prices, kick-off times, VAR — it all bubbled into the mix as the billionaires finally got their comeuppance.
Only Klopp, really, didn’t read the room, finding time in the middle of it all to crank up a notch his long-running feud with Gary Neville. As a sport came together for once, Kloppo was still making it about Liverpool versus Manchester United.
An easy trap to fall into since he was talking on Sky, who have done more than most to reduce football to Liverpool and Manchester United.
Why did it fail so badly?
We’ll never entirely know how things would have gone down had Bayern Munich and PSG been on board — perhaps with Ajax instead of Spurs to lend a classier nod to history.
For a time, early doors, such as when James Corden boosted the project by expressing his heartbreak, this could have gone either way.
When Ian Holloway told us the Super League would be a disgraceful betrayal of Prince Philip, it should have been game on.
But from the start it just wasn’t believable. Roy Race first lectured about the threat of a European Super League around 1982. And leaked documents showing one is on the way have emerged roughly every six months since.
So a hastily knocked together website and a handful of tweets wasn’t enough to convince people this was a done deal. And that reasonable doubt was enough to mobilise fans into stopping it.
Getting a PR firm on board just last Sunday afternoon wasn’t ideal.
Given even 24 more hours, the finest spoofers money can buy would surely have come up with one or two sweeteners — some stunt about tickets for a tenner maybe, just don’t read the small print.
But this ‘prospectus’ offered us nothing, just lazily set out the terms for a cash grab, even down to a laughable nod to setting up a comparable women’s league, as ‘soon as is practicable’.
Yes, they would look after the ladies down the line, when they got around to it, by cutting out the continent’s powerhouses like Wolfsburg and Lyon to involve several clubs who hadn’t the slightest interest in women’s football until they were shamed into it fairly recently.
Not getting the players or managers on board at all was a bigger problem.
There were no stars to lean on for Insta content. Instead they had James Milner in front of the cameras, fuming after two dropped points, and giving the whole thing short shrift.
In the end, an age-old suspicion of Johnny Foreigner played its part too in collapsing the English end of the operation.
It was Arsene Wenger who noted the crowning irony in the English getting out of Europe to master their own destiny, then rejoining to destroy the one thing they have that’s the envy of the world — the Premier League.
As reality dawned, it fell to Graeme Souness to defend their fields from foreign owners and roar, ‘go home, yank’.
For the Irish fans of the ‘big six’, things were more complicated.
Did we really have the right to complain about English football pandering to faraway territories, just because we dug their early stuff?
But in the horror and anguish washing around this side of the water, could you detect a frisson of excitement too? A certain readiness to cast off those lifelong ties we’d made for spurious reasons decades ago, that had been leaving us cold for a while, and were now starting to embarrass us.
In all those vows to walk away, to stay local, to start going to Turner’s Cross, it sounded like some of us had been waiting for the red line moment that would set us free.
By the end of the week, however. football had been reincarnated. We were squabbling over who deserved credit for the resuscitation. It was back to Liverpool and Manchester United. It was back to banter.
Maybe Kloppo had read the room better than anyone.
