THE issue of football clubs joining the European Super League attracted widespread condemnation from columnists in the newspapers.
The Daily Mail
Richard Littlejohn said the men in the boardroom had chosen to ‘detonate English football in pursuit of global riches.’
“Any residual obligation they may have felt to the domestic game has gone with the wind,” he said. “They were well aware that the condemnation would be savage — from supporters, from the other clubs they were betraying, and from ex-pros such as former Man Utd captain, now Sky pundit, Gary Neville.”
He said from the mid-1980s when home sides were allowed to keep all their gate money — rather than having to divvy it up with the visitors — the big clubs have been demanding an ever-greater share of the cake.
“These days, as I’ve remarked often enough, I hate everything about football, from the corporate greed and contempt for the paying public to the ghastly tattoos and serial cheating on the pitch. Thinking about it, the last time I really, truly cared was during the golden years at the Lane in the early Eighties.”
The Daily Express
Stephen Pollard said there will not be a fan in the country who has ‘anything but contempt for the idea of a league from which member clubs can never be relegated, which is cut off from the basic structure of football and which treats fans as if they are an irrelevance, ‘
“We fans are under no illusions that football is run as a business - a hugely successful, multi-billion pound business in the case of the Premier League,” he said. “I feel ashamed that my club (Tottenham) has stuck two fingers up to the rest of football and decided that we will seek to destroy everything else for the sake of some more money.
“In the end, I don’t think the ESL will happen. Fans are not powerless. Without us, football is nothing. And the breakaway clubs will rightly feel the wrath of their fellow clubs.”
The Independent
James Moore said the owners of the clubs and their friends had been ‘carving things up to their liking and conning us with the line that it’s capitalism, and everyone wins from the trickle-down when it’s red in tooth and claw, for years, in multiple arenas.’
People had largely bought it, he added.
“It’s taken a step so naked, so brazen, so blatant in its unadulterated greed that it eclipses even football’s everyday variety, so shameless about its cynical attempt to fix the market, to get the people who usually greet stuff like this with an airy “of course, just make sure the cheque’s in the post” with the word “no”.
“Even their players, whose silence they might have hoped to buy with the prospect of a fat cheque, even they’ve been protesting. As well they might. “
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