The concept of a Super League will return, but for now, let’s enjoy laughing at rich people
We all grew up reading stories about underdogs. David vs Goliath and the type. Every second kids movie in the 1990s was based upon this premise, whether it was The Mighty Ducks or The Little Rascals.
These movies, and stories like them, give people hope. They teach kids that no matter how your life begins, you can make anything of yourself. All you have to do is work hard, pull up your socks, do something with your boot straps – whatever the fuck they are.
But the reason they give us hope is not because everyone who works hard can or will succeed – in fact, it’s the opposite. The reason stories of underdogs defeating titans resonate so much with humans is because, on balance, most people struggle through their lives.
Most people work their arses off, earning just about enough while making someone more wealthy than they will ever be even wealthier. Most people begin as underdogs and remain as underdogs until the day they die.
And for every underdog – every dozen or hundred Davids out there – there is a Goliath, succeeding because of their struggle.
Today is a day we find out who is easily pleased and quickly pacified, and who is still fuming and ready to fight for change.
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) April 21, 2021
That’s why we love those stories; because the Goliath almost always wins in life. That’s why he’s so big.
But not now, not for this briefest of moments.
And it will be brief. The Super League is gone in its current form, but it will be back. Growth in our world knows no bounds, and the concept will be wheeled back into the conference room before too long.
But now we can, and to be honest are obliged to, bask in what has happened. Because it’s rare.
On Sunday night, the wealthiest people in world football – some of the wealthiest people in the world – decided to announce their theft of a working class sport from the people that made it what it is.
In announcing the formation of their anti-competitive, ring-fenced league, the people behind the Super League showed their arrogance, disregarding more than a hundred years of sporting tradition for nothing more than their own enrichment.
The Super League have issued a statement 🚨
“We're proposing a new competition, because current one isn't working. English clubs have been forced to leave, due to outside pressure”. pic.twitter.com/M72GOgZzDH
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) April 20, 2021
Teams founded by schoolboys, by tradespeople, by the working class for their communities, ripped away from those who made it by people who view them as consumers and nothing more.
They thought they could do it, and for a little while we all did too. The immediate reaction, while outraged, was one of resignation. This is the world we live in, after all.
Even when it became clear they didn’t really have a plan beyond their shite logo and awful concept, it just seemed like it would happen. We have grown accustomed to injustice, after all, to theft by the powerful, to the many strings to the capitalist bow.
We have also grown accustomed to division, to everyone picking a different side and staying there. The Super League probably bet on this, on the fact that the plebs are so caught up in their own shit that they couldn’t possibly agree on an opinion on it all.
Do you want a European Super League?
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) April 18, 2021
They had reason to think this too. The face of football has been mutilated so many times in recent decades under the guise of progress, growth and investment that after a while, we became numb to it all.
A World Cup held in a country ran by a dictator? Cool. How about four years later we go somewhere in which it’s illegal to be gay? Absolutely. We should’ve known things were as bad as they are when some billionaires were considered relative good guys purely because they weren’t part of murderous and oppressive regimes.
All of these things happened and contributed to the obvious groundswell of confidence that led to the Super League being discussed, conceived and announced.
“Ed Woodward is the chunk of the tree. We now need to go for the roots"
⛏️ Gary Neville pic.twitter.com/jUcc0tNsuH
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) April 20, 2021
The ‘Dirty Dozen’ felt untouchable. But it would be this arrogance that would lead them all to forget that some things actually are a little bit sacred. People can bend, sway, contort themselves to live with something they love in the face of perverse change. Clubs can be changed, altered to what their owners want, but at the end of the day, they belong to supporters, and these people forgot that. In fact, they likely never even considered it.
In the end it was this ownership, the collective ownership and protectiveness that we all feel about this game that forced them to stop their plans before they had even started.
It was the power of feeling attached to a sport they sought to drain emotion out of that would spell its demise. It was love, passion and community that halted the best laid plans of people to whom the only thing worth caring about is money.
— Jordan Henderson (@JHenderson) April 20, 2021
So as we watch the fallout continue, as we watch John W. Henry attempt to grovel his way back into Liverpool supporters’ good books, and as we see Ed Woodward resign from Manchester United after finally giving up trying to understand football, let us bask in this rare event.
Let us imagine the fury of the likes of Stan Kroenke and Joel Glazer, people to whom defeat (off the pitch, of course) is unimaginable, because it rarely if ever happens.
The Super League will be back, in some form. And these people will return to winning, as they always do. But for now their plans are dead thanks to the collective action of millions of people who actually care about something.
That’s something to savour.
