Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

Football’s Super League critics are being hypocritical

Gary Neville (Credit: Sky sports)

Is it possible meaningfully to oppose the decision by Europe’s biggest football clubs to form an unaccountable, anti-democratic Super League if you voted to Remain? The obvious answer is that it’s not. Not that that will stop anyone.

The proposed Super League is an almost exact sporting distillation of the issues that defined the European Union referendum: the continent’s financial power house football clubs are threatening to carve up immensely lucrative markets while simultaneously shutting down external competition irreversibly.

A televised rant by Gary Neville – vocal remainer and stalwart of the Manchester United team that in 2000 infamously turned its back on the magic of the FA Cup in order to participate in the FIFA Club World Cup in Sao Paulo – has crystallised public opinion against the new competition: it’s ‘disgusting’ and ‘disgraceful’, he said.

After Neville, Britain’s other famous Gary piped up. People’s Vote campaigner Gary Lineker implored fans to vote with their feet. He tweeted: 

Many former players have taken to expensive non-terrestrial subscription television channels – BT Sport, Sky Sports – to point out the game is losing touch with its working-class roots

‘If fans stand as one against this anti-football pyramid scheme, it can be stopped in its tracks.’

The footballing firmament, in fact, is apparently united in its abhorrence for the new competition. Many former players have taken to expensive non-terrestrial subscription television channels – BT Sport, Sky Sports – to point out the game is losing touch with its working-class roots. They are complaining that the biggest clubs, rather like permanent members of the UN Security Council, can never be relegated from the proposed competition.

Ever since Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV bought the rights to English top flight football in the mid-nineties, football fans in the UK have wrestled with a simple question: how much corporatism is enough corporatism? The answer has always been far from clear.

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