Outside InEuropean Super League setback won’t stop the hunt for more football revenue
- Pandemic-induced financial pain will have played a part in the plan by some of Europe’s top clubs to form a breakaway league
- Fan outrage has derailed the plan this time, but the problem of high player wages and the lure of lucrative deals over broadcasting rights remain
After a seemingly interminable year during which so much media attention has been focused on US politics, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, it has been a relief over the past two weeks to be swept onto new issues – even if it is in an area about which I have for decades had very little interest, and confess embarrassing ignorance.
Even before I left the UK in the 1980s to make Hong Kong my home, I was a national “aberration” for my yawning unconcern over “the beautiful game”. Perhaps that was in part because I attended a school where we played rugby.
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Plans for breakaway European Super League plunges football in Europe into crisis
But I think most of all it was because I grew up in Grantham, one of England’s least charismatic towns, where the local football team, Grantham Town FC, was muddy, messy, clumsy and a persistent disappointment to the few hundred fans who shivered on the concrete London Road stand to see them lose most Saturday afternoons.
I recall a sort of “golden era” after 1965 when former Norwich City star Terry Bly was manager, and in 1973 reaching the third round of the FA Cup, but mainly the story of the Grantham “Gingerbreads” was of mud, grime, indifferent defeats and a steady churn of chairmen and managers.
The idea of “the beautiful game” did not readily spring to mind – nor the multibillion business that European soccer has become, and over which an exclusive group of global billionaires have in the past week been waging war.
It has been fascinating to watch as passions have flared, politicians have fulminated, and millions of fans have risen in protest. A banner hung outside Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium complained: “Created by the poor. Stolen by the rich”.