While the soccer community celebrated the failed launch of the European Super League last week, the motivating factors behind the proposal haven’t gone away, APA reports citing CNBC.
Now known as the “dirty dozen,” 12 powerful European soccer clubs tried to form their own enclosed league, which was scuppered just days afterward due to pressure from fans, authorities and governments.
These teams, particularly in Spain, are still nursing pandemic-induced debt, while revenues at many clubs around the world have been hit after virus restrictions forced games to be played behind closed doors — evaporating matchday incomes.
Florentino Perez, the president of Real Madrid which was one of the clubs involved, has told Spanish media that the project, or one very similar, will still move on.
His Barcelona counterpart Joan Laporta has stressed that the ESL clubs are open to dialogue with UEFA, Europe’s governing body, in a bid to revive the project.
Simon Chadwick, a director of Eurasian sport at the Emlyon Business School, believes suggestions that the Super League has fallen apart are naive, telling CNBC that Europe will get a “super league by a different name,” adding that it is “a case of when, not if.”
Chadwick argues that the coming years will bring further polarization and industrial concentration, with the big clubs set to accumulate further power, and the gap between them and the smaller clubs growing further.
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