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Evening Standard Comment: Football should belong to fans, not rich clubs

 (Christian Adams)
(Christian Adams)

The timing of the press release said as much as its tawdry contents. Gone 11pm on Sunday, a group of 12 football clubs — half of them from England — announced the creation of a European Super League.

The implications of such a move are multilayered, but it comes down to one overwhelming goal. To stifle competition in order to pocket more money. Club supporter trusts, including at clubs signed up to this new league, have condemned the move. We join them.

We do not pretend that professional football, as currently constituted, is a bastion of equality. The richest clubs, often bankrolled by billionaires or oil-rich states, dominate at home and abroad. But the fundamentals of competition, the thrill that on a given day anyone can beat anyone, endure. A European Super League jettisons all that, along with the entire ecosystem built up over a century.

The Premier League has seen an influx of American owners in the past 20 years. US investors are majority or part-owners in nine top-flight English teams. Many are also investors in US sports leagues such as the NFL, where concepts of relegation and promotion are alien. That is what makes our football different.

Some may argue it is the height of chutzpah for the Premier League and Sky Sports to complain about breakaway leagues and greed in football, given their involvement in the creation of a new competition in 1992. But now is not the time to divide the opposition.

Uefa must act. Three of the breakaway clubs are in this year’s Champions League semi-finals. They should be thrown out. Potential sponsors of such a league should think carefully about whether they would wish to be associated with such a competition. And governments should look at the reason why no German clubs have signed up to the European Super League, which is that, by law, more than 50 per cent of shares must be held by club members.

We cannot let the big clubs park the bus. Football should belong to the fans and communities from which they grew, not a closed shop of billionaires.

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