Football won, okay, but what exactly did he win?

RIP small Super League party too fast. In less time than it takes to say “stupid idea”, the pharaonic project of the magnates of world football to privatize this sport, our sport, will have made a splash, to the cheers of supporters that we have too much. long taken for good pears and who this time said stop. It is by a terse press release published at 2:11 am on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday that the members of the Super League have acted, at the option of the successive withdrawals of their British bridgeheads, if not the cancellation, at least the suspension. of their baby.

2:11, so we said. Sneakily, almost silently, the way these same club presidents had announced the birth of their secret project. The fans of the continent have not waited so late to blow the champagne and crack the smoke. In London, on the edge of Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, hundreds of Blues fans were screaming their joy as rumors of the cancellation passed through the ranks. On Twitter too, it was going there. In short, the message was “Hooray, football has won”. Did he win, really?

Let us know how to keep

As much as there was enough to do with white hair on Sunday evening when the bourgeois putsch was announced, so this time we will perhaps avoid tearing our shirts and getting on the table to dance the polka. Let us be clear that this fight waged on all sides and by all components of society was not in vain.

“On the one hand it’s a victory, we can’t say the opposite, because the supporters mobilized, took to the streets to fight against a radical change in sport, greets Ronan Evain, the general manager of the Football Supporters Europe association (FSE). We saw a unity on a subject that touches on the governance of football: political unity, we saw players and coaches stepping up to the plate, we saw the media, broadcasters too. It means that there is still an idea of ​​the common good and the need to protect football. “

And then we must say what is, seeing the Machiavellian Andrea Agnelli getting slapped on the fingers by all the leaders of clubs in Serie A does not lack a certain salt. Like seeing the Real Madrid staff in PLS at the idea of ​​being robbed by the referee in the semi-finals of the still alive Champions League next week. No really, we will have had a good laugh (yellow). But now, what do we do?

Because Aleksander Ceferin may well be mounted on the platform Tuesday evening to denounce, with tremolos in his voice, “selfishness” which has replaced “solidarity”, money which “has become more important than glory, greed more important than loyalty and dividends more important than passion, ”it’s hard to suppress a smirk. Actually, it looks like he’s reciting one of the many pamphlets that we can regularly see blooming on the offices of supporters’ associations against UEFA or Fifa. UEFA and Fifa which, barely 72 hours ago, were still the big bad wolves in the eyes of fans on the continent. And who should soon become so once this Super League is buried in the cemetery of abominations.

Let’s not forget that Gianni Infantino has been trying for years to give us his Club World Cup 2.0. An Infantino who, from a source close to the Super League file, “would have encouraged the creation of this Super League with the hope that it would lead to a Club World Cup organized by Fifa which would have enabled the latter to regain control of the world. ‘UEFA’. Enemy the day before yesterday, allies yesterday, the two entities and their respective president will soon shoot each other again in the months to come.

To better understand the differences between the competition formats that have been talking about social networks since last night, @team made this infographic.

So what do you think ?

You are rather new format of the #UCL or Super League? pic.twitter.com/qdetIHxft1

– Instant Foot ⚽️ (@lnstantFoot) April 19, 2021

So it will be cholera, hip, hip, hip, hurray

Eric Champel, journalist specializing in football authorities and author of FIFAGATE: How Qatar blew up the Blatter system,
quickly put our feet back on the ground. And reminds us to what extent this alliance of circumstances between UEFA and the supporters is unnatural and therefore, in fact, not destined to last. “UEFA has found an ally it no longer expected: the people, the football fans. While this is a competition that excludes a large majority of small nations and small clubs, it is the people of football, the supporters, bearers of values, who have saved a competition which is already a closed League. not even accessible to the general public other than through pay channels. The hardest part is not the fall, it is the landing.

Same cold realism on the side of Jean-Baptiste Guégan, teacher specializing in the geopolitics of sport and author of Geopolitics of sport, another explanation of the world : “Everyone thinks that we have just won a victory over silver football when in truth it is he who has triumphed. We are escaping the plague but we will not avoid cholera. The failure of the Super League does not prevent UEFA from imagining an increasingly closed Champions League focused on money. The new formula will be even more focused on profitability and redistribution between big clubs. There the big clubs will still see their quotas increase and I’m not sure that favors the championships and the secondary teams. Worse, he tells us, “Fifa and UEFA will use the emotion aroused by this coup attempt to get this project accepted, which is very far from the popular football that we love”.

“The fight has only just begun”

So what, all this for that? Not necessarily. Ronan Evain draws up the fights to come: “I am happy to see that the collective action worked but also worried because what has just happened confirms all the fundamental problems of the structuring of European football: the distortion of competitions , the concentration of money and power in the hands of a very limited number of clubs and the absence of a real regulator at European level. What all this shows is that we need a strong UEFA that plays its role of regulator, that we need the federations also to play their role of counter-power, because all this was lacking in European football for the past 30 years. Football is going through an unprecedented crisis which cannot lead to a return to normalcy because it has exposed the flaws in the system. “

For sports economist Jean-Pascal Gayant, “there will be some good if there is collective reflection and the will of the political authorities to coordinate and bring everyone around the table to establish a real regulation of the sport. modern football. “Let us hope that the political leaders have become aware of the specificity of the sports spectacle and that they put in place legal and regulatory provisions which can be adapted”, he continues. For that, it would still be necessary that European law allows it, which is far from being won as we explained to you in a previous paper.

Everything is not to be thrown away, however, because, as Jean-Baptiste Guégan underlines, a political or protest space has arisen from this mobilization, as powerful as it is spontaneous, of supporters from all over the continent. The twelve bastards learned it the hard way. “There is a red line that has been drawn,” he admits. The clubs now know that if they continue to want to treat supporters only as consumers, they will be faced with collective mobilizations which can also be very effective politically. “

Chelsea fans have also warned their management that despite Tuesday night’s victory, they had “no confidence” in them. Finally, as often when it comes to supporters, it is the FSE association which best summed up the situation after the disappearance of the late Super League: “The fight has only just begun”.