Earlier this year football fans, politicians and royalty united against the breakaway European Super League. Oliver Shah reveals how the multibillion-pound plan was scuppered — but could still be revived?
They called it Project BSW — Best Show in the World. In 2017, even as an exultant Real Madrid lifted the Champions League trophy for the third time in four years, their long-serving president and a small group of trusted advisers were working on a secret plan to revolutionise European football — and smash the competition they'd just won.
Real Madrid were ostensibly revelling in the glow of a blowout season. They had clinched their first "double" of the 21st century, winning both the Champions League and La Liga in Spain. They had swept the Copa del Rey, the Spanish equivalent of the FA Cup, and the Fifa Club World Cup. Cristiano Ronaldo, a record signing from Manchester United eight years earlier, was the top Champions League scorer with 12 goals. Revenues at the 119-year-old club nicknamed Los Blancos were up by a healthy 8.8 per cent to €674.6 million.
Yet the president, Florentino Pérez, a construction magnate whose passion for Real Madrid began at the age of five, had become convinced that without radical intervention the grandest and oldest of Europe's grand old football houses faced a bleak future. Real Madrid's 2016-17 on-pitch success had come at an off-pitch cost. Although sales were up, profits were down by almost 40 per cent as the club spent big on player salaries. Pérez believed that Real Madrid and other teams owned by mere billionaires like him would increasingly struggle to compete with the financial firepower of Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), pumped up with Gulf petrodollars. He was frustrated at the perceived toothlessness of Uefa, the sport's European governing body, in dealing with extravagant, possibly rule-breaking spending by these sovereign-owned superclubs. And he was worried that unless football became more exciting and spectacular, Gen Z viewers — their attention spans whittled away by addiction to mobile phones — would soon switch off in favour of Fortnite or Netflix.
So Pérez and two of his closest confidants started planning a breakaway competition that would genetically engineer more regular clashes between Europe's football titans: Chelsea v Juventus, Liverpool v Inter Milan, Man United v Real Madrid. The Best Show in the World would offer permanent places to its founding members, removing the risk of relegation, allowing them to borrow against lucrative broadcast revenue streams far into the future and invest in state-of-the-art stadiums. It would replace the Champions League as the most prestigious continental competition. With one bound — and a little help from Wall Street — Europe's elite clubs would be free of their financial problems and Uefa's meddling.
That vision became more urgent as Covid ripped through the West last year, emptying stadiums and sports teams' coffers. But less than 48 hours after its chaotic launch in April, Project BSW, now known as the Super League, lay in ruins,its proposers engulfed in accusations of greed and selfishness. Fans were furious at the permanent structure, which would have cut off the top from football's so-called "pyramid", neutering domestic competitions such as the Premier League. "We want our cold nights in Stoke" proclaimed one banner at a protest by Chelsea supporters outside Stamford Bridge. Boris Johnson threatened to drop a "legislative bomb" on it; Prince William tweeted that he shared fans' concerns over "the damage it risks causing to the game we love". Man City and Chelsea pulled out, and the Super League collapsed.
Viewers enjoying the pinnacle of European football — today's Euro 2020 final at Wembley — should not assume the beautiful game has escaped entirely, however. Based on extensive access to the key players, this is the inside story of how the Super League was born, how it was killed off, and how it might yet be revived. The 12 founding clubs, including six English sides, still have shares in the Madrid-based parent company, SLCo. The three most vigorous pushers of the Super League, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, have obtained an injunction preventing Uefa and Fifa from sanctioning them. Their case — that football's governing bodies are behaving anti-competitively by stymieing breakaway competitions — has been referred to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). La Liga president Javier Tebas calls them "miserable failures" and "shipwrecked people", but they are determined to fight on. "It cannot be that we just succumb to a de facto self-regulated monopoly without making sure that they understand the difficulties we're going through," says a source close to one.
Pérez, 74, is a soft-spoken tycoon with a hard core. He sees himself as a great figure in Real Madrid's history, a descendant of Santiago Bernabéu, the illustrious president who helped create the forerunner of the Champions League, the European Cup, in 1955 and whose name adorns the club's stadium. Pérez was elected president in 2000 on the controversial promise that he would poach Barcelona's brilliant winger Luís Figo, which he duly did. He has been in power ever since. "To understand Florentino, you need to understand Bernabéu," says someone close to him. "There were letters from Uefa to Bernabéu insulting him for trying to organise the European Cup. Bernabéu felt the weight of history and Florentino is feeling the weight of history. He needs to do something for football, and he believes Real Madrid has to lead that change."
The idea of a European super league has bubbled away for decades. In 1998, then AC Milan owner and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi proposed a breakaway contest whose members would play midweek matches. Uefa saw it off by expanding the Champions League and offering clubs a greater share of the money. Two years later disgruntled teams including Liverpool and Man United formed a group known as the G14 to bargain with Uefa and Fifa. They occasionally threatened to form a super league but the G14 — by then numbering 18 — was disbanded in 2008 after more concessions from the governing bodies. It was assumed that clubs simply brandished the idea whenever they wanted leverage in talks with Uefa's apparatchiks in their glass offices in Switzerland.
In 2017 Pérez got serious. He turned to Anas Laghrari, a Moroccan-French investment banker at a small firm in Madrid called Key Capital. Laghrari, 37, is a surrogate nephew to Pérez, who was born the same year as Laghrari's father and has been friendly with him for decades via the construction industry. Laghrari junior and Key Capital had done work for Pérez's €7 billion ACS construction empire. Laghrari, who speaks to Pérez on a daily basis, brought in John Hahn, an American private equity executive.
Their initial plan was to create a pan-European league that would have eclipsed domestic competitions such as the Premier League, with teams required to play exclusively in the new league and games scheduled at weekends. The six English sides that eventually signed up to the Super League — Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Man City, Man United and Tottenham Hotspur — would have had to quit the Premier League, tearing the heart out of top-flight British domestic football. This would have been the most money-grabbing format. "A big club v big club game is ten times more valuable than a small club v small club game," says someone briefed on the idea at that stage. "But there's another twist, which is that a game on a Saturday is probably two to three times more valuable than a game on a Wednesday, because Asia and the Americas will tune in at the weekend. So big club v big club on a Saturday is worth 20 to 30 times as much as small club v small club on a Wednesday."
The Super League's founders quickly abandoned that nuclear option on the basis that it would be too socially toxic. They shifted their focus to a midweek knockout competition that would replace Uefa's Champions League. Whereas Champions League places are allocated to whichever teams finish in the top few positions of their domestic leagues, meaning there is no guaranteed entry, the Super League would have 15 permanent members, with five spaces for guest clubs. This absence of "jeopardy" — the risk of being relegated — would particularly appeal to American owners such as John W Henry at Liverpool and Joel Glazer's family at Man United. All the big US sports leagues — Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association, the National Football League — are "closed", giving clubs confidence about their future revenues but removing the drama and meritocracy of relegation and promotion. This is anathema to the English game. The pyramid ecosystem allows teams — in theory at least — to move between the lowest and highest levels, leading to fairytales such as Brentford FC's return to the Premier League next season after more than seven decades in the lower leagues. Brentford will bring the total number of clubs to have played in the 20-team Premier League to 50 since its inception in 1992, highlighting the top flight's fluidity.
"Americans literally don't understand the jeopardy point," says a source close to the Premier League. "They don't understand the core football fanatic; they don't have any equivalent. They don't have that same visceral fanbase."
Importantly, like American competitions, the Super League would have strict limits on spending. Clubs would be capped at 55 per cent of their revenues for spending on player salaries and fees, or 27.5 per cent of the highest-earning club's revenues. They would also have to maintain profitability over a rolling three-year period. These measures were designed to curb the inflationary spiral in salaries seen as a by-product of Abu Dhabi and Qatar's huge investments in Man City and PSG respectively, and Uefa's perceived failure to enforce financial fair-play rules intended to curb spending. European clubs typically spend up to 80 per cent of their revenues on player wages. "That was the most compelling part of the story," says one Super League club owner. "Let me control my costs in a stable and sustainable environment."
Then there was the small matter of income. The Super League's creators reckoned it would bring in more than €4 billion a year from broadcasting and sponsorship rights — roughly double what the Champions League produces. About a third would be distributed between the 15 founding clubs, with a further third shared between all 20 teams, including the five guests. A fifth would be allocated based on performance and the final 15 per cent would be paid depending on broadcast audience size. And there would be no pesky Uefa taking a cut.
Pérez and co had the outline of a plan. Now they needed financing. In 2018 Laghrari and Hahn contacted the Madrid office of the private equity giant CVC, a pioneer in sports investment. CVC had bought the rights to MotoGP in 1998 and Formula One in 2005, and went on to take minority stakes in Premiership Rugby, Pro14 and the Six Nations, as well as trying to buy into Italy's Serie A football league and professional tennis. CVC Madrid referred an early version of the Super League plan to CVC London, which turned down the chance to be involved because the firm didn't believe in disrupting the football pyramid.
By autumn 2018 Laghrari and Hahn were taking a different tack. They called the Canary Wharf office of JP Morgan, the giant Wall Street investment bank, to explore whether they might fund the Super League entirely with debt. JP Morgan was the obvious bank to contact: it is one of the biggest players in global sports finance, with clients including the Glazers at Man United, and it had a strong relationship with Pérez.
JP Morgan was receptive to the idea of funding the Super League. "An initial phone call turned into initial meetings, which then turned into more meetings and more phone calls," says a source familiar with the bank. Reports of the financing talks leaked to Sky News in October 2020 and again in January this year. Key Capital discreetly used both moments as opportunities to survey thousands of fans on what they would think of a breakaway contest. The two surveys came back suggesting that 60 to 80 per cent of football fans would support the Super League, according to a source close to the project. "The guys behind this are not stupid. Everybody understood there was going to be a group of fans who wouldn't like this and would need to be spoken to," he says. "But there was complete consensus that while fans may react negatively in the short term, once the competition was actually up and running and these fantastic matches were being played, it would be really popular."
JP Morgan drew confidence from these surveys — and from another factor. As the project progressed, the Super League's proposers believed they were gaining the tacit approval of Fifa, football's highest international governing body. Given rivalry between Fifa and Uefa, Laghrari and Hahn thought they could persuade Fifa to give the contest its blessing, which would override Uefa's inevitable objections. The Super League's founding documents, drafted by the magic circle law firm Clifford Chance, refer to the need for formal approval from "WO1", an entity easily identifiable as Fifa. In return, the Super League would help Fifa president Gianni Infantino realise his long-held ambition of expanding the Club World Cup by dispatching 12 marquee teams to play in a new and improved annual competition. "I have no doubt at all that he was behind this project," says Tebas, La Liga's president. Infantino denies collaborating with the Super League proposers.
Whatever Fifa's position really was, JP Morgan signed a deal to lend the Super League a €3.25 billion "infrastructure grant", secured against future broadcasting revenues and spread over 23 years. Each club would get a "golden hello" of up to €300 million.
As he started trying to herd the big cats of European football into his shiny new enclosure, Pérez found an early ally in Andrea Agnelli, the president of Juventus, which bought Ronaldo from Real Madrid in 2018. Agnelli, 45, is a scion of the Fiat carmaking dynasty, which has controlled Italy's most successful club for almost a century. Ambitious and intense, he shares Pérez's view that football is at risk of losing Gen Z viewers — he likes to point out that his ten-year-old son would rather wear a Fortnite T-shirt than a Juventus shirt.
He also shares Pérez's contempt for Uefa. Agnelli sees the European governing body as fundamentally conflicted, regulating clubs while competing with them and intermediating on their behalf with broadcasters and sponsors. Despite this, Agnelli sat on the Uefa executive committee for years. He is said to have "flipped" at a meeting in December 2020 when Uefa presented its budget for 2021-22. Agnelli felt its optimistic forecasts showed it was out of touch with the clubs, which were being hammered by Covid yet still had to foot huge wage bills.
The 12 sides that came together as the founding members of the Super League represented a strange coalition. At its core were six Spanish and Italian teams — AC Milan, Atletico Madrid, Barcelona, Inter Milan, Juventus and Real Madrid — whose bosses had always gazed enviously at the riches of the Premier League and feared being left behind. Next were four English clubs — Arsenal, Liverpool, Man United and Spurs — whose owners had long thought they put more into the Premier League financially than they got out, and who saw an opportunity to make big money. Like Real Madrid's Pérez, Liverpool's Henry (estimated net worth: US$2.8 billion) and Man United's Glazer family (net worth: US$4.7 billion) think of themselves as "middle-class billionaires" outgunned by plutocrats such as the oligarch Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea, and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who owns Man City. Although the Super League's strict cost controls were designed to combat the aggressive spending of Man City in particular, Abramovich and Mansour ultimately signed up, perhaps wary of losing cultural capital or prestige were they to sit on the sidelines.
As the project gathered pace, the clubs and financiers convinced themselves they were right. "You had a room largely of megalomaniacs who just believed their own story," says someone who observed it from an early stage. "And by eliminating from the room anybody that could give them a different point of view, they ended up in this very myopic world."
On March 11 last year, Atletico Madrid's Álvaro Morata drilled the ball past Liverpool goalkeeper Adriàn to seal a stunning 3-2 comeback at Anfield. Liverpool, the holders, were out of the Champions League. That night, the sight of 3,000 Spanish fans going wild seemed completely natural. Less than a fortnight later, with coronavirus cases surging, England was plunged into its first lockdown. The Atletico Madrid-Liverpool clash was the last top-flight fixture played in front of a full crowd for more than a year.
The impact of Covid reinforced the case for the Super League in the minds of its proponents. The dozen clubs involved suffered a combined 13 per cent drop in revenues to €5.6 billion in the 2019-20 season, according to the accountancy firm Deloitte. Fan-owned Barcelona lost €128 million before tax. (At the time of writing, Barcelona are performing financial contortions to sign a new deal with their €133 million-a-season Argentine talisman Lionel Messi, currently a free agent.) Real Madrid saw profits shrink from €53.5 million to €1.9 million. Juventus lost €81.7 million. In the background, broadcast rights have been deflating after years of boom as younger viewers show less interest.
Super League clubs would be able to use their €300 million upfront grants to offset Covid-related losses, according to a summary of the draft agreement produced by a team that considered joining. Most desperately needed the money. The launch was also scrambled to get ahead of a Uefa meeting, due on Monday, April 19, rubber-stamping an expansion of the Champions League from 2024. The Super League's organisers agreed to sign up the teams over the weekend of April 17-18 and announce it on the Monday morning.
Sources involved describe a frantic weekend of phone calls. People close to the Super League are alleged to have told both Bayern Munich and PSG that the other had signed up, only for the two clubs to find out that neither had. "There were a hell of a lot of calls flying around, and a lot of hoodwinking," says one person involved. "It's like any large, complex transaction," says another. "It all comes together at the 11th hour, and people sign at the 11th hour."
On the Saturday afternoon, as Super League clubs exchanged messages, Aleksander Ceferin, the president of Uefa, sniffed something in the wind. He called Agnelli, who until that point had signalled his support for the Champions League reforms. According to Ceferin, Agnelli told him talk of a Super League announcement was "only rumours". Ceferin added: "And then he said, 'I'll call you in one hour.' He turned off his phone." Martyn Ziegler of The Times broke the Super League news at lunchtime on the Sunday, as striker Eddie Nketiah tapped home a stoppage-time equaliser for Arsenal against Fulham.
It took almost half a day for the confirmation announcement to come from the organisers. They were waiting to file an application for an injunction with a Madrid court aimed at stopping Uefa and Fifa from taking retaliatory measures, such as banning teams from the Champions League or players from the World Cup. In the interim period, critical voices filled the vacuum. Man United defender-turned-pundit Gary Neville, who was on air at the time, delivered a passionate rant to camera describing the Premier League's big six as "imposters" with "no loyalty to this country". "It's absolutely embarrassing — it's never going to happen," he said. His comments went viral online. Boris Johnson tweeted that the Super League would be "very damaging for football". By the time a press release on behalf of the Super League surfaced shortly after 11pm, the project was already half dead.
The outpouring of anger from supporters' groups was immediate. By Monday morning fans were hoisting banners outside grounds: "Created by the poor, stolen by the rich" at Old Trafford; "Shame on you AFC" at the Emirates stadium, home of Arsenal. The Liverpool team, due to play Leeds United that evening, were greeted by a saxophonist playing Abba's Money, Money, Money as they boarded their bus. On Tuesday afternoon, furious Chelsea fans descended on Stamford Bridge, blocking the team's coach and chanting, "F*** the Super League." Their roars turned to cheers as news broke that Chelsea were about to pull out.
Ceferin described the Super League plotters as "snakes" and "liars". The Slovenian former lawyer, who is godfather to one of Agnelli's children, reserved special ire for the Juventus president, who resigned from Uefa and as chairman of the European Club Association. "I've never seen a person who would lie so many times, so persistently," Ceferin said. The six English rebel clubs apologised for their involvement — with varying degrees of contrition — and paid a combined £22 million of "goodwill" fines to the Premier League, sparing them any further punishment such as the docking of points. Liverpool's Henry said sorry the most profusely, putting out a rare video in which he declared: "I alone am responsible for the unnecessary negativity brought forward." Ed Woodward, Man United's chief executive, resigned.
But for the three Super League holdouts, the fight goes on. Barcelona, Juventus and Real Madrid are pushing ahead with court action against Uefa and Fifa, hoping that success might encourage other clubs to challenge the status quo again. They want to persuade the ECJ that by blocking new contests, football's governing bodies are violating EU competition law.
If they win, they may secure permanent protection against punitive action by Uefa, such as banning rebel teams from the Champions League. The three clubs put out a joint statement in May attacking Uefa's "monopoly" and warning: "Either we reform football or we will have to watch its inevitable downfall."
Pérez and the people around him remain convinced they will win the ECJ case — and that they need to win. "The balance sheets of the big clubs are full of ghosts," says one. "It's like the financial system in 2008. The system is bankrupt. "
While the Super League is unlikely to return in the same form, Barcelona president Joan Laporta says he is "confident a format that works for all clubs and stakeholders will be part of a solution that brings back competitiveness, sustainability and good governance to football". Barcelona, Juventus and Real Madrid say they want to initiate a "dialogue" with football's governing bodies this autumn about ways to transform the sport. Ceferin gives that suggestion short shrift.
"It's really a strange way to start a dialogue," says the former criminal lawyer. "You come out in the middle of the night saying that you're leaving the competition. You hide, you don't communicate with anybody. And then, after everything collapses, you say, 'But I just want a dialogue!' It's like me slapping you in the face, going away and then, when you report me to the police, I say, 'No, I just want a dialogue' "
Written by: Oliver Shah
© The Times of London
