Earlier this year, Real Madrid’s president, Florentino Perez, announced something that could have changed football as we know it forever. The man in charge of Los Blancos announced a breakaway league from the domestic leagues, and the UEFA tournaments. A new European Super League, featuring only the best teams in the world would be organized, and 12 teams including Barcelona had agreed to participate in this new tournament. However, following the backlash from fans, and other teams, all the invited teams withdrew from the tournament, leaving only the three founding teams in the project.
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These three founding teams were Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Juventus. Although the league was the brainchild of Perez, these other two teams also had big parts to play in the birth of the league, and they continue to support their causes. The main reason that they gave for the new league was that football was not exciting anymore. Perez claimed that young people only watched the big games such as the El Classico, or the Manchester Derby, etc. Thus to make football exciting again, they wanted to get all the big teams in one league, where they would face each other week in and week out.
This was obviously far from the truth, and in reality, everyone wanted things to be the same. Fans wanted to see the underdogs beat the elites, and with a break-away league, we would have never seen Villareal beat Manchester United in the Europa League last season. Thus, the fans protested against the league, however, these three clubs remained adamant. UEFA tried to take legal actions against them, and even threatened them with bans from the UEFA-based tournaments.
Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus want to continue developing the Super League
A court ruling in Spain, ruled against UEFA in the case against the ESL, and in a more recent European court ruling, the result was the same. The court ordered UEFA to reverse all the legal sanctions placed upon these three clubs. In a new statement by these three clubs, they celebrated the court rules and said,
"“FC Barcelona, Juventus, and Real Madrid CF welcome today’s Court’s decision enforcing, with immediate effect, UEFA’s obligation to unwind the actions taken against all European Super League founding clubs, including terminating the disciplinary proceedings against the undersigning three clubs and removing the penalties and restrictions imposed on the remaining nine founding clubs for them to avoid UEFA’s disciplinary action.”Source Goal"
The statement went on to say that if UEFA tries to cause any other further disturbances, they are liable to pay penalties. Then the clubs claimed that UEFA had monopolized over the European footballing market and were using threats to keep their hegemony over the elite clubs in Europe.
While technically, there is nothing we can do to stop the ESL if the clubs want to go ahead with it, the fans have definitely shown their support against the project. Barcelona being one of the clubs still supporting the league is definitely saddening however, it is understandable why they want to go ahead with it. The project was green-lit by former president, Josep Maria Bartomeu, when the financial situation at Barcelona had hit rock bottom.
Thus, for the Catalans, it was one of the best ways to keep their club alive, and come out of the massive debt. However, under the leadership of Joan Laporta, fans are hoping that Blaugrana can come out of this financial turmoil even without the introduction of an elitist, exclusive Super League.