If by chance you hadn’t noticed, the Champions League has been a small Super League for a long time: when in the 1997/98 edition UEFA opened participation to teams that have not won their national title – thus demolishing the old format of the European Cup – has allowed the major leagues to gradually take all possible space. Today the top clubs go straight to the group stage, the most unlucky teams start slaughtering each other in the preliminaries at the end of July and then boh, who sees them more? And since 1998 they have always won, the top clubs, those of the theoretical fortnight (then dropped to 12 and already creaking even further, apparently) which constitutes the founding block of the Superlega project. With the only exception of 2004, when Porto di Mourinho won by beating Deschamps’ Monaco in the final at the end of a decidedly anomalous edition, the last in which the minor teams did much better than the richest and most titled ones: the edition in which Deportivo La Coruña (who now plays in Spanish Serie C) eliminated Juve and Milan before surrendering to Porto in the semifinals. An edition perhaps already unrepeatable today. And that we could never, ever relive in a Super League with almost all fixed seats and some invitations: it could perhaps happen to play it every now and then at Porto (two Champions on the bulletin board against the zero of Psg, City, Arsenal and Tottenham, to say, admitted for bank account and certainly not for securities). Definitely not at Deportivo La Coruña.
All this to say that in the year 2021 we cannot afford certain levels of amazement or indignation. Wake up: football hasn’t been fair for quite a while. Of course, the roundness of the ball has always fixed a few things, but not all of them. And less and less. In the name of our passion for football, for decades we have made everything go well – betting, doping, mafias, subjection, scams, scams – and now screaming at the sacrilege is a little laugh. The Superlega is a not very sporty and very economical operation, but where is the surprise? Football is a mega-business. Which today has a big problem: between pandemic damage and past madness, it is about to implode. If it does not generate the profit it could generate, it has the right to look for it in the ways and times that suit it best. It is a question of survival. Of course, pathological gigantism and wicked choices do not depend on us fans. But what we have always considered our toy is in serious danger. It all seems very simple to us from our sofas. Well, know it: it isn’t.
The real toad to swallow concerns the sporting issue: a League where you are admitted for the wealth and number of fans and not because you have won matches and eliminated opponents, well, it’s disgusting, an insult to the most basic values. And these voices that are already overlapping: shorter matches, divided into three halves … but what is that? For this it would be worth chaining to the gate of the stadium.
We hope they will reconsider and find the right solution. For the rest, peace: sooner or later there will be a Super League. Real alternatives football seems to have no more.
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