On Monday afternoon, the Liverpool team bus rolled into Elland Road, home of Leeds United. Police watched over a crowd of angry Leeds fans, barricaded outside the entrance of a stadium that hasn’t welcomed more than a few thousand fans in over a year.

“You greedy, greedy bastards,” the crowd chanted as the bus passed by.   

Down on the touchline, the famously progressive coach of Leeds, Marcelo Bielsa, offered a lament in his pre-match interview.  

“The logic that prevails today in football and in the world is that the powerful are richer at the cost of the rest being poorer,” Bielsa said.

On Sunday night, twelve of the biggest soccer clubs in Europe announced their plans to create a breakaway league, which would eventually include 15 permanent members and five slots open for annual qualification. The Super League would replace the Champions League, the existing competition between the best teams from Europe’s domestic leagues. While many of the same clubs make it each year, the Champions League is much larger and has no automatic qualification. 

By increasing the number of games each year between Europe’s most marketable teams and splitting the pot among fewer clubs, the Super League promised to provide far greater and more consistent revenues for member clubs: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham, AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona, and Real Madrid.

The plan was to create a cartel in the style of most American pro sports leagues, in which a close group of franchises share revenues and negotiate deals together. The goal is to maximize profits for the club owners of all members. These owners, as Rory Smith writes, are not just fans who happen to be wealthy.

“An unlikely alliance of American hedge funds, Russian oligarchs, European industrial tycoons and Gulf royals,” Smith explained.

Money would slowly be drawn away from clubs outside the Super League, as television deals shifted away from domestic leagues. Some of the smaller clubs might have gone under. 

On the surface, this might seem fine, but the cultural context is irreconcilable. This situation has been compared to a reformed March Madness in which 75% of the teams get in each year regardless, guaranteeing them more money from the tournament and likely a huge recruiting advantage. Like European soccer, there’s a degree to which this happens anyway, but now it would be formalized. The rivalries, the heritage, the unpredictability, the fun, all swept away.

As news of the project broke, the uproar was immediate and fierce. 

Competition, a cacophony of voices cried, means something. If there are no stakes, nothing to lose or gain, who cares? Along with Bielsa, Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp expressed his doubts, as did voices from around Europe’s domestic leagues. Prominent players soon came to voice, including Kevin De Bruyne, Jordan Henderson, and Gerard Piqué. Perhaps most perceptive in his grasp of capitalist priorities was Leeds striker Patrick Bamford. 

Soccer’s biggest organizing bodies, FIFA and UEFA, threatened the breakaway clubs with bans and legal action. They perhaps sensed an opportunity to divert blame for their own role in creating soccer’s tale of two cities.

On Tuesday morning, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola faced the press. 

“The sport is not a sport when the relation between the effort and success, the effort and reward, doesn’t exist,” Guardiola said, clearly exasperated. 

Guardiola’s comments raised a few eyebrows. Manchester City have spent hundreds of millions supplying Guardiola with probably the best squad in Europe over the last five years. The club is synonymous with big money in football. Still, his concern exposed a fundamental gap. Even the coaches, players, and fans who have benefited the most from existing systems of wealth inequality between clubs don’t see the world in the same way as billionaire club owners. 

By Tuesday afternoon, the Super League was crumbling. First, Chelsea was rumored to be having second thoughts. Then, Man City formally announced that they planned to withdraw. By late evening in Britain, all the English clubs had withdrawn and the Super League was suspended.

More than players, coaches, or pundits (whose outrage cannot be fully untangled from their own financial stakes in maintaining the status quo if they’re working for Sky, NBC or other current TV rights holders), fans led the opposition. Protests, threats of boycott, demands for resignation, and aggressive campaigning by fan organizations brought down the project. It was just too much bad press for clubs, it seemed, and too much risk. 

Many soccer fans have been aware for years or even decades that the game’s institutions and financial structures favor the rich. Look around Europe. Wealth disparities lead to success disparities. Big clubs are unwilling to evenly divide revenue and toothless (or corrupt) organizations like UEFA can’t make them.

They’ve put up with a lot and often reaped the benefits of wealth, but most fans of these Super League teams still want their clubs to stand for something. Man United are supposed to be a working class club. Man City are supposed to be underdogs. Atletico Madrid are supposed to believe hard work is the principal value in soccer and in life. Arsenal are supposed to be about dignity and class. Liverpool’s club motto is “You’ll never walk alone.” Barcelona’s is “Més que un club.” These are all imagined identities, but they still matter, even to a global fanbase with no connection to a club’s geographic home.

Anger had been simmering, but the Super League was clearly a step too far. Clubs led a half-hearted PR campaign suggesting that the Super League somehow protected the future of the game and its fans, without offering any explanation as to how. They cited the financial burdens all clubs face due to the pandemic, even though they are disproportionately protected.

This week, soccer fans felt what everyone living in a capitalist system has felt at some point—the crushing realization that what they thought was a community, a cultural institution of which they were a part, is really just a company that doesn’t care about them at all, that sees them as customers, assets. 

To many fans, the Super League was so hurtful, so dismissive, so arrogant that most were able to find common ground and briefly set aside rivalries. Many constituencies can fairly be called complicit or hypocritical for their role in supporting these owners when it suits them, but no fan, player, or coach is really at fault.   

“The problem with trying to stop a European Super League is that football has opened its doors to the kind of money & power that is ungovernable: Billionaires, royalty, oligarchs used to controlling & destroying governments,” journalist James Montague tweeted.  

And yet, if only for today, the people won. What shined through was not just a widespread sense of disapproval. It was more like a collective “fuck this and fuck you.”

It’s a victory, but the momentum needs to be sustained or else a new Super League will be proposed in a year or two. UEFA is not the solution. They had their chance. Fan pressure with the support of smaller clubs and other influential voices in the game is the solution. Fans need to join supporters’ trusts and push for more reforms, like better revenue sharing, cheaper ticket prices, transparency, adequate investment in clubs’ women’s teams, and sustained efforts to make soccer’s institutions anti-racist and environmentally sustainable. These are big goals, but the last week has shown that, for all our week-to-week idiocy, fans can still tell right from wrong and do something about it. 

Some owners are better listeners and communicators than others. Regardless, structural changes are needed, because, as commentator and fan Clive Palmer said in a recent podcast, the power dynamic in European soccer is broken. 

“I want a new right-back. Whose gonna give to me? We have to turn around to the same people that we’re slaughtering today because the legislation and the lack of safeguarding of our clubs means we are dependent on these people”

Many have called for European clubs to adopt the German model, which prevented Bundesliga clubs from joining the Super League. Loopholes notwithstanding, German clubs have to be at least 51% owned by the club itself, not external investors. Tens or hundreds of thousands of fans can pay between €30 and €60 for membership in the club each season. This is the way of the past across Europe and the way of the future. Government regulation would likely be required, as owners won’t just want to give up their power.

This week’s fiasco also made me think about my relationship with the would-be Super League club I support: Arsenal. 

At the beginning of the season, Arsenal began promoting one of their new jerseys. Manager Mikel Arteta narrated a beautiful video.

“I want to tell you what I talk to the lads about every day, about what it means to be part of our family, a strong family.” he says, “First, there is the non-negotiables: respect, humility, belief. And it’s okay to get angry, to raise our voices, as long as it comes from the right place.”

I feel like a sucker for buying the $120 jersey, not so much for the money spent itself, but for falling for the high level marketing scheme of a corporation and its notoriously ruthless and selfish owner, Stan Kroenke. It’s impossible to fully divorce yourself financially from a club, but it’s scary not knowing where exactly your money is going. Employee wages, player salaries, stadium maintenance, youth academies, transfer fees—fair enough. Beyond that, I don’t know. 

Over the summer, the club laid off 55 employees, citing the pandemic. It felt cruel at the time, but now we find out they were planning on making $425 million the next summer off the Super League. That’s disgusting. Trust is earned. 

The thing is, I believe in the values talked about in that ad and associate them with Arsenal. I feel fraternity with the players and with Arteta. Sometimes when you watch and think about a team so much, they really can start to feel like family. 

Arsenal fans who otherwise amount to strangers can feel like family because we share much joy and pain, because we love the same thing. Everyday Arsenal employees are like family because they facilitate something I love. My Arsenal supporting friends, both real and on Twitter—they’re like family. My brother, who turned me onto Arsenal in the first place—that dude literally is my family. 

These people, to me, are Arsenal.

Jerseys are special because they let you express yourself and feel connected with that community, that family. Maybe I’ll still buy them in the future, frustrated as I am. The least I can do, though, is try to offset contributions to greed with donations to and involvement with some of soccer’s better angels, like the Arsenal Supporters Trust, fan-owned clubs, and fan-oriented media companies. I’m American, but I want to support ordinary fans in England, Spain, Italy, and around the world, not the billionaires—some of them American—who increasingly run and ruin their clubs.

There are far more important things in the world, but I can’t help but love soccer, so making it better should matter more to me. Part of that process is learning to spot the difference between clubs and their owners, communities and their exploiters. Like most fans, I can’t just stop supporting Arsenal. I’m trying to learn what that support really means.

David Rocastle, the late Arsenal legend lovingly known as “Rocky,” phrased this idea succinctly in what has become a widely-applied mantra for many supporters of the club.

“Remember who you are, what you are and who you represent.”

Also, Stan Kroenke, if you’re out there, get out of our club. 

 

Will Slater can be reached at wslater@wesleyan.edu.