The pros and cons of the ESL: madness or the ultimate evolution of football?

Like many other things over the years, football has changed. The football of our grandparents and fathers, the football we all fell in love with as children, is undergoing a drastic change.

Photo Credit: Sky Sport

Like many other things over the years, football has changed. The football of our grandparents and fathers, the football we all fell in love with as children, is undergoing a drastic change. For the time being, the short but intense epic of the Super League (or #ESL) has ended amidst the jeers of the fans and the scorn of public opinion. This is a well-deserved fate for the promoters of the initiative, who got everything wrong, and not just from Sunday 18 April 2021 onwards. The urgency to create a super league was mainly dictated by the colossal debts that many of them got themselves into, spending far more than possible and circumventing in every way the very fragile financial fair play regulations. The 'surprise' announcement provoked an instinctive and fierce reaction from the outside world and institutions, to which the founding members proved incredibly unprepared. Let's analyse the pros and cons of this proposal.

Pros of the Super League

The advantages of the creation of the Super League? None... at least for us human beings. Probably just the pleasure of having a level match every week, but that's it. On the contrary, for the clubs the pros increase, just like their earnings. The 15 founding clubs are companies that turn over millions of euros every year. The Super League, unlike the Champions League, would have guaranteed permanent income. In short, the thinking of the founding clubs was to put together a fiercer European competition, so that they would have increased their overall revenue. But for us, as supporters, the only thing left is that bad feeling, that emptiness... as if our best friend, the ball, was slowly deflating.

The cons of Super League

There are not many words to describe what some presidents have tried to do to football. A game, with more than 150 years of history, is being further distorted for the sake of money. The primacy of sporting merit in the ESL would have been sacrificed for the benefit of a closed and predefined circle of clubs. But to prevent a team from even the slightest chance of advancing to higher levels is like removing the main element of the game of football: ambition and sporting glory. The top European competitions should be for the teams that deserved it the year before, not for those who won in the past.

It is still unclear whether it was street riots, protests by coaches and captains, the demands of the ultras, pressure from the British government, or something else that nipped the Super League project in the bud. The fact is that on the evening of Tuesday 20 April, not even 48 hours after the announcement of its birth, the new league crumbled. The six English teams abandoned the project. Liverpool and Arsenal even apologised to their own fans, while admitting the influence of the stakeholders (i.e. all those who bring money to the club, not just those who go to the stadium wearing a scarf) in the decision to give up. Those of the 'Big Six' were followed by the steps back by Atletico and the two Milanese.

In the statement through which the Super League announced the suspension of activities, however, a significant sentence appears: 'We will reconsider the most appropriate steps to reshape the project'.

This means that the implementation of this project could simply be postponed, but not ruled out altogether. While waiting for the issue to come up again, between one mockery and another, it would be useful to ask ourselves whether the idea of the Super League is just a springtime brainchild of a group of crazy billionaires, or an inevitable step, a natural evolution of the professional branch of the world's most beloved sport.