The European Super League is the ugly corporate underbelly of the beautiful game

Think British football and the names that instantly spring to mind are men who transcended the sport to achieve the status of working class heroes and icons.

Messrs Shankly, Stein, Clough, and Ferguson were cut from the same granite in terms of their working class roots, as were many of the game’s top players in the same era. These were men who understood the importance of football to working class communities, its crucial role in providing excitement, pride and the opportunity for temporary escape from the banality of life lived as an appendage to the machine. Man Utd, Liverpool, Celtic, Rangers, other clubs of similar stature, are sporting, cultural, and social institutions combined.

The announcement of a putative breakaway European Super League (ESL), made up initially of twelve of Europe’s elite clubs - among them Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man City, Man Utd, and Tottenham - marks the final debasement of the beautiful game, completing its journey from, per Shankly, working class ballet, when it still possessed a soul, into a Vegas-type spectacle wherein greed dictates everything and corrupts all.

Football in England has only itself to blame with the opening up of the sport to the whims and fancies of superrich foreign owners. People whose only interest is profit, status and the bottom line, with no attachment to the cities and communities in which the clubs they own are located, this was always a recipe for disaster, ensuring the eventual lapse of the game into a circus in which success and glory on and off the pitch is not earned but bought.

If this season, played in the midst of a pandemic, has proved anything it is that without fans football is but a shadow of itself. The passion, the togetherness, the history and ethos shared back through generations, this is where the fans are indispensable to football as a cultural entity and clubs as those social, cultural and sporting institutions already mentioned. Without fans clubs large and small become untethered from that which gives them real meaning. The end result can only be the game debased to the point where it is gutted of substance and solidity, instead turned into another cheap product of Americana.