Ben Guest
In what has been a whirlwind evening of football headlines, plans for the European Super League have been left dead in the water with all of the English sides involved having now signalled their intention to pull out.
It has seemed like a long 48 hours since the European ‘Super’ League was officially announced on Sunday evening, with six Premier League sides – Man Utd, Liverpool, Chelsea, Man City, Spurs and Arsenal – joining six of their European counterparts in signalling their intentions to form a breakaway league.
Despite Florentino Perez’s astonishing insistence that the intentions behind the Super League was to save the game from financial meltdown, the competition was a blatant and disgraceful financially motivated power grab by some of the continents largest clubs and their seemingly unscrupulous owners.
The proposals unsurprisingly sparked widespread anger across all factions of society, with Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher leading the calls for fan unity, action and pressure on the breakaway clubs during their Monday Night Football appearance
Leeds made a statement with their ‘Champions League: Earn it’ t-shirts, one of which was strategically placed in the Liverpool dressing room ahead of Monday night’s meeting, much to the frustration of Jurgen Klopp, though the Reds boss did admit that he was not a fan of the proposals, while James Milner spoke like a true fan by outlining his opposition.
After continued talk about the breakaway division throughout Tuesday, things really gathered pace since 8pm BST, reports claiming Chelsea would become the first club to withdraw.
Since then, the whole thing has fallen like a pack of cards, Man City becoming the first to officially confirm that they are pulling out at 21:19.
Then, the whole thing came tumbling just before 11pm, with Arsenal, Liverpool and Spurs all releasing statements within a minute of each other to signal their backtracking, before Manchester United completed the sextuplet of retractors a minute later.
As for the statements of retraction, only Arsenal and Spurs managed to seemingly put any thought into them by actually apologising to their fans for their decisions.
While the prospect of the Super League is officially over for our beloved English sides, the declaration of their breakaway intentions is likely to have ramifications for weeks, months and maybe years to come, with a whole load of trust now needing to be rebuilt.
There are already calls for a change of ownership at the likes of Man Utd, Liverpool and Arsenal, where the ESL plans are likely to be the final straw for fans’ patience at their American owners.
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