Rebel clubs will get guaranteed dollars as fans get predictability

LONDON • Real Madrid's players pumped fists and exchanged hugs. A scoreless tie at Liverpool last Wednesday had assured that the Spanish club took what they saw as their rightful place in the semi-finals of the Champions League.

All of a sudden, a 14th European Cup title hung tantalisingly close.

No club has quite so much of its identity bound up with the Champions League as Real Madrid. They regard the tournament as their personal fief.

At much the same time as Zinedine Zidane's team were celebrating victory, though, the club's president, Florentino Perez, was putting the finishing touches to a plan designed, in effect, to destroy the competition forever.

Perez spent the tail end of last week making calls and lobbying support and quieting nerves among some of European football's most powerful executives for a plan years in the making.

On Sunday, the fruits of that labour were revealed: A dozen leading clubs - Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea, Tottenham, Juventus, Inter Milan, AC Milan, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid - had agreed to become founding members of a breakaway super league.

A further three clubs are expected to join ahead of the inaugural season, which "is intended to commence as soon as practicable", with Sky reporting it could start as early as August.

Perez and his allies must have known what the reaction would be: a great torrent of caustic condemnations, each one flecked with scarcely concealed rage.

Uefa released a statement, also signed by the Premier League, Spain's La Liga and Italy's Serie A, threatening the conspirators with expulsion if they continued down this dark and murky path.

Executives from teams that would be cut adrift spoke gravely of the need to protect football's pyramid. Fan groups rejected any rupture en masse and outright. So, too, did various national associations, pundits, former players and politicians.

That none of these parties can be considered truly dispassionate goes without saying.

Of course Uefa does not want the Champions League to be usurped. Of course the major domestic leagues cannot countenance the idea of seeing their competitions diminished.

Of course executives at those clubs who would be excluded do not want to see the gravy train they are riding overtaken by an express.

They are all compromised in one way or another, but that does not render their outrage unjustified.

They might be no less avaricious or cynical in their thinking than the rebel clubs.

Their calls to arms over the sanctity of football's pyramid might ring deafeningly hollow. But the problem with the plan is not that it accentuates money; it is that it eliminates risk.

For the dozen founding members, the appeal of a Super League is that it is predictable.

There would no longer be any need to worry about qualifying for the Champions League - it is possible that at least four of the signatories will miss out on next season's edition simply through not being good enough in their domestic leagues - in order to have access to football's most lucrative prize pot.

The income would, instead, be guaranteed.

The problem with that, of course, is that unpredictability - what is rather grandly known in the sport's argot as competitive balance - is at least part of the secret of football's appeal. In March, Porto knocked Juventus out of the Champions League in the round of 16.

Remove the stakes, and it is highly likely that the product will suffer. To American sensibilities, of course, none of this is alien.

The major professional leagues of North America all function as closed shops, unencumbered by the spectre of promotion and relegation.

Their example has percolated into the thinking of not only those European clubs, whose owners have interests in the National Football League or Major League Baseball, but of those who look on enviously both at the broadcast deals they can command and the cost control measures at their disposal.

Here too, though, there is a misunderstanding. Football is, as historian David Goldblatt has written, a global cultural phenomenon of almost unparalleled scale.

To the major clubs, this is a point in their favour; they are the teams, after all, that people across the planet pay to watch. Why should they spread the wealth they generate to everyone else?

The riposte is quite simple: They have not built their popularity alone.

What football has become is testament to the richness of its heritage, to the stories told not by a handful of clubs but by hundreds of them.

By seeking to sever the link between the elite and the masses, the dozen rebel clubs are effectively trying to reap for themselves rewards that are due the collective at what is, effectively, an arbitrary point in history.

It is possible, of course, that all of this will come to nothing, that letters of intent will prove rather easier than actually conjuring a super league into being.

A gauntlet of obstacles awaits, both from football's authorities and from those that lie above them, in the form of national governments and the European Union.

But even if this plan stumbles, the concept will be back, sooner rather than later, in some vaguely modified form.

A super league is, in effect, inevitable; European football has been drifting, inexorably, to this point for years.

And it is here that those who hope to benefit from shutting the door, from fixing the rules of engagement, cannot take all of the blame.

Many of those who spent Sunday spitting fury at the greed of the conspirators have been complicit, over the past 30 years or so, in making this - or something very much like it - the only conclusion possible.

That is true of the Premier League, which waved in money from anyone and everyone who could afford to buy a club, never stopping to ask whether any of it was good for the game.

It is true of the Spanish authorities, who made it clear that the rules did not really apply to Madrid or Barcelona.

It is true, perhaps most of all, of Uefa, which has grown fat and rich on the proceeds of the Champions League, from bowing to the demands of its most powerful constituent clubs, giving more and more power away just to keep the show on the road.

It is true, even, of the rest of us in football's thrall who celebrated the multi-million dollar transfers and the massive television deals and the conspicuous consumption of money, and did not stop to ask where it would all go.

It is no surprise, really, that the rebels believe that their plan might work, that there is no such thing as a red line, that whatever they do, we will all keep watching and the ball will keep rolling.

It is no surprise that they think they can do whatever they like.

That is what they have done for years, after all, and nobody has stopped them yet.

NYTIMES