In mid-April 12 clubs who fancied themselves to be the biggest, the most important and frankly the most potentially lucrative around made a controversial announcement. They had decided to set up a league together, and there was nothing anybody could do to stop them.
Cue outrage. “A dozen clubs, who style themselves the pick of the talent, have joined hands for their own mutual benefit, apparently without a care for those unhappily shut out in the cold,” raged one newspaper. “Is it fair to the clubs thus coolly left to shift for themselves? On what principle has the selection been made? Are the clubs chosen absolutely the strongest, or is it a case of starving out thriving and dangerous rivals?”
Another fumed: “The league is not formed for the purpose of encouraging football, it is formed so the allied clubs can make more money than they already do,” describing the clubs involved as “nothing better than circus shows” and the idea as “a huge strategy to dip into the pockets of the public”.
It was 1888, and the first season of the Football League was being planned. Precisely 133 years and one day later, the launch of a new international super league was announced.
Within 48 hours it had died under a deluge of outrage, and other than the sheer quantity of it leaking from social media platforms there was very little to differentiate most of it from what has come before. Football is not a game that tends to react well to innovation, or to be able to differentiate between the positive kind – setting up a league rather than playing constant friendlies and assorted cup competitions, for example – and the genuinely harmful.
The idea of a European super league has not always been unpopular. In 1960, after Bristol Rovers proposed a reorganisation of English football (one 18-team top flight fed by two regional second divisions, four regional third divisions and so on), the Times wrote about the “crying need to create an upper cadre, forming a super-league of no more than 16 clubs who can perform and grow wiser in some newly established European League”.
At the same time the Observer proposed “a Premier League of 16 clubs chosen for their playing record, ground facilities, financial strength and spectator population” from which “the best teams [would] enter a European league”. In 1972 the Conservative minister for sport Eldon Griffiths hosted a theoretically secret meeting at his London apartment where he tried to persuade the Football League to launch a European equivalent, which he described as “inevitable”. In February 1957 the Guardian reported “some voices within the Football Association would favour a supernational European league bringing into opposition the finest talent in all the countries”.
Mostly, however, the idea has met, as this year, with nothing but hostility, and complaints which could almost be copy-and-pasted into any recently published comment piece. “A European league would skim the cream off English football, and to support such a scheme would be for the Football League tantamount to suicide,” the Guardian wrote in 1957. “The clubs themselves – at least the currently successful ones – will demand the right to take part and those successful clubs are precisely the ones which the league would find it hardest to gainsay. Its effect at least initially must be to increase the prosperity of the leading clubs and to decrease that of the poorer.”
That was the first season in which an English club played in Europe, Manchester United ignoring the Football League’s “strong request” not to take part and reaching the semi-finals of the European Cup. In 1958 there was speculation that United could be expelled from the league for accepting an invitation to play – offered in response to the Munich air disaster – despite not having won their domestic title, which was considered a terrible precedent. But speculation about breakaway leagues, both domestic and European, really ramped up in the 1980s.
In 1985 talks took place between the so-called Big Five (Liverpool, Everton, Manchester United, Tottenham and Arsenal) – plus Manchester City, Newcastle and Southampton – to discuss a breakaway league and the Guardian raged about the prospect of “the few richest and most successful clubs” setting up on their own, declaring the idea “tawdry and greedy”. Graham Kelly, secretary of the Football League complained “the emphasis now is on money, not football, and the sooner everybody recognises that the better”.
In 1988 the story simmered once more, with the added impetus of Silvio Berlusconi plotting a European version, and the Guardian wrote about a project that “is all about money and television” adding: “The top clubs, believing, correctly, that the armchair fan only wants to watch them, see no reason why any of the money should go anywhere else. [But] the English game is about 92 clubs, not 10 or 13.”
The following year David Lacey, the Guardian’s football correspondent, noted the story never quite goes away: “Always you get the feeling that one day the threats are going to be more than a series of back-page headlines designed to keep the hoi-polloi in order.” And in 1991 the domestic breakaway finally happened, with the 22 First Division clubs resigning from the Football League to set up alone.
The Observer wrote: “It remains to be seen how the new arrangements will quench the thirst for money and power of the big clubs, or where elitism will stop among this self-governing group. Money will talk and the time will surely come when they will want the poor to be no longer with them. The push towards a further breakaway may come from Europe, whose more influential figures have pressed for a Continent‑wide super league. The close-season machinations will have made it clear that those who are a genuine force in football will always believe there is a bigger game round the corner.”
In 1990 there was talk of an agreement in principle between 16 clubs across Europe, with Liverpool and Rangers representing Britain. In 1992 the European Cup became the Champions League – “It cannot be denied that 90% of the total income comes from these major clubs,” the Uefa president, Lennart Johansson, said, “and that if they demand change, we have to listen” – but the plotters barely paused.
The owners of the six English clubs involved in the latest attempted breakaway were all born and are based abroad, a fact that many have blamed for their readiness to cast tradition and history aside – but in 1998, when representatives of a dozen European clubs were reported to have met in London, Manchester United had a chairman from Cheshire, Liverpool had an owner from Merseyside, Everton’s was from Birkenhead, Arsenal and Tottenham’s were from London and Manchester City’s from Lancashire. It didn’t seem to make much difference.
“The projected European superleague is pure, naked, unadulterated greed,” wrote Jeff Powell in the Daily Mail. “Not content with having loadsamoney and bags of influence, the giant clubs of this continent appear to want all the money and absolute power” And not much, it seems, has changed since.
