Such is the speed at which news happens these days, and the fact that I’m currently on holiday, the “European Super League” has already been killed by the time I’ve sat down to write about it. However, to my mind, it raised some important points that need to be discussed, and so I’m going to go ahead and write the article anyway.
For those unaware, the “European Super League” was going to be a football league formed by (at least) twelve of the richest football clubs in Europe, which would break away from their national leagues in order to form this new continental competition. This created immense anger among football fans, who saw this as a move by the richest in the sport to consolidate and greatly expand their wealth and power at time when many smaller clubs across the world are struggling to survive financially. Sums rumoured to be in the hundreds of billions of euros were thrown around as joining bonuses, and there would be no relegation, thus ensuring the clubs’ access to this wealth in perpetuity.
The majority of the backlash was seen in England, the country in which six of the league’s would-be clubs are based. There were sizeable protests by fans of all six clubs outside their respective stadia, and there has been little mention of anything else on social media in the past few days. Of course, the fans are in the right – the absence of the richest teams in English football would kneecap many of the smaller ones, and the excitement created by the potential jeopardy of a relegation or a giant-killing would be dead for ever, too.
Football fans must begin to see the bigger picture, however. For all of the football-based points, the magic of Wigan Athletic winning the FA Cup, or Leicester City winning the league, it must be recognised that the move to create the “European Super League” did not happen in isolation. It was a direct result of the rampant right-wing politics and economics that so many (English) football fans seemed to consistently support until this week.
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Right-wing politics have always been about one thing: the concentration and consolidation of power and wealth into the hands of a select few
Right-wing politics, “Boris”, Brexit, Nigel Farage, The Sun, and any other example you can think of, have always been about one thing and one thing only: the concentration and consolidation of power and wealth into the hands of a select few, at the expense of everyone else. The “European Super League” was not an aberration, but a logical conclusion of that ideology, with football as its context.
My point is that all of these fans were right to be outraged by the “European Super League”, but that they should have that same rage when similar things happen in other parts of life – when James Dyson can send a text to the Prime Minister to secure himself a tax break, when nurses’ wages are in real terms lower than they were fifteen years ago, when the richest six people in the UK have as much money as the poorest thirteen million, when fishermen are going bust because of Brexit, but hedge funds are doing just fine, and when millions if not billions of pounds of your money is being spent on ‘government contracts’ for personal friends of tory ministers. Rampant unchecked capitalism is even more harmful in your daily life than it is in football.
While the “European Super League” may have been prevented, its equivalent in everyone’s daily lives is working just fine. You have seen for yourself and been outraged at the logical conclusion of right-wing politics in football terms. You opposed the concentration of wealth into the hands of a select few in football – why not try it in the rest of your life?
