The Super League Idea Refuses to Die — And That Should Worry Everyone

There is a particular tone English football took in the spring of 2021. You could hear it on phone-ins, see it on hand-painted bedsheets, read it in the columns of writers who had spent decades sneering at the working-class supporter and now needed him as a moral prop. It was the tone of a culture that had discovered, very suddenly, that it cared. The European Super League had been announced on the evening of 18 April. By the early hours of 21 April, it was, for all visible purposes, dead. Manchester City went first. Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool followed within hours. Boris Johnson promised a “legislative bomb.” Pep Guardiola, of all people, looked queasy on a touchline in front of a microphone. The whole grotesque architecture, three years in private construction, lasted a little over forty-eight hours in public.

It is now five years on, almost to the day. In February of this year, Barcelona formally walked away from the project. Real Madrid followed within forty-eight hours of that — a different forty-eight hours, this one ending not in protest but in a private settlement with UEFA, mediated, of all unlikely brokers, by Nasser Al-Khelaifi. By the end of April, the reconciliation was being briefed as definitive. The Super League is dead. Again. The second death, conducted with lawyers rather than fans, is being treated by parts of the press as proof that the system worked. I want to suggest, as carefully as I can, that the system did not work. The system was lucky.

What the 2021 collapse was actually about

It is worth being honest about what stopped the original Super League. It was not the law. It was not UEFA. It was not the moral argument, which barely had time to form a sentence. It was a particular and probably non-repeatable confluence of street protest, government threat, and broadcast humiliation, applied in the only football market in Europe where ownership groups still feel the heat of public opinion as something physical. The English clubs withdrew because they had to live in the country. The Italian clubs followed the English. The Spanish clubs, who do not have that problem in the same way — Spanish football culture relates to its giants through identification rather than negotiation — did not.

This matters because the conventional story, the one rehearsed every time the topic re-surfaces, is that fans defeated the Super League. They did, in the sense that they were the proximate cause. But they defeated it under conditions that may not exist again. The protests at Stamford Bridge worked because the Super League was a surprise — because the cynicism it required had not yet been priced in. The next iteration will not be a surprise. It will be a long, patient, technocratic negotiation over years, conducted in courtrooms and subscription dashboards, and there is nothing for a fan to stand outside.

What the European Court of Justice actually said

The judgment of 21 December 2023 in Case C-333/21 has been mis-described in both directions, depending on the politics of the describer. UEFA’s friends called it a non-event; A22 Sports called it a green light. Both were wrong, in a way that matters.

The Grand Chamber found that FIFA and UEFA, holding a dominant position in the organisation of European interclub football, were obliged to operate any prior-approval regime for rival competitions on a basis that is transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate. Their existing rules were not. The Court located the violations under Articles 101, 102 and 56 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union — competition law and the freedom to provide services. The ruling did not declare a Super League legal. It did not order UEFA to authorise one. What it did was strip UEFA of the right to refuse one on its own unwritten say-so. The governing body must now operate as something closer to a regulator than a gatekeeper, and the standards by which a refusal can be challenged are the standards of European competition law, not of footballing custom.

This is the part that English coverage tends to underplay. The Premier League’s lawyers understood it immediately, which is why the Football Governance Act 2025 was drafted with the precise care that it was. But the wider cultural assumption — that the matter was settled in 2021 and reaffirmed in 2023 — is wrong. The matter was reopened in 2023. It is the door, not the verdict, that counts.

The Unify League shape-shift

A22 Sports Management, the corporate vehicle that survives the original twelve-club coalition, announced its second formal proposal on 17 December 2024. The name is now the Unify League, which sounds like a vitamin supplement and was probably tested through the same focus-group process. The shape, however, is more interesting than the name.

There are four divisions. A top tier of thirty-two clubs, split into a Star League and a Gold League of sixteen each. Below that, a Blue League of thirty-two. Below that, a Union League of thirty-two. Ninety-six clubs in total, with a parallel women’s competition of thirty-two clubs across two divisions. Promotion and relegation between tiers, with entry from domestic performance. A fourteen-game league phase running September to April. A direct-to-consumer streaming platform — the “Unify” platform — built into the proposition itself, which is the actual product.

The 2021 Super League was a closed shop with a fig leaf of qualifying places. The 2024 Unify League is, on paper, an open pyramid. This is not a small change, and it is not an accidental one. A22 has read Case C-333/21 with great care. The new proposal is built precisely to satisfy the proportionality test the Court demanded — to look like something UEFA could not refuse on objective grounds. The breakaway has learned to dress as a competition.

There is also the platform itself. The Unify League is not, fundamentally, a football competition; it is a streaming product that requires a football competition to exist. The matches are content. The clubs are franchises. The fans are subscribers. The Champions League, for all its bloat, still works in the older grammar — the matches happen, the broadcasters bid, the supporters go. The Unify League begins from the platform and reasons backward.

Why Real Madrid kept it alive for so long

Florentino Pérez has been mocked for his persistence on this question for five years, and it is worth understanding why he persisted, because the mockery has tended to assume he was foolish. He was not foolish. He was making a structural argument about European football that the rest of European football has refused to engage with on its merits.

Pérez’s case, stripped of the rhetoric, is this. The Champions League’s economic model rewards a small number of clubs disproportionately while spreading enough money around to suppress dissent. UEFA is not a regulator: it is the largest commercial promoter in the sport, and it sets the terms of the only product its biggest members are allowed to sell. The 2024-25 Champions League reform — thirty-six clubs, eight league-phase fixtures each, a single table — was designed precisely to absorb the pressure of the Super League proposal by giving the biggest clubs more matches against each other under the existing roof. It worked, commercially. The first season of the new format completed last May with broadcast revenues and engagement metrics that vindicated Aleksander Čeferin’s gamble. But it worked by adopting, in part, the logic Pérez had been arguing for since 2018.

Barcelona’s position was always more complicated. Joan Laporta needed the Super League partly because Barcelona’s books needed it: a guaranteed revenue floor, a renegotiated television split, a lever against La Liga’s collective-sale regime. When the financial situation began to ease — the stadium reopened, the wage bill compressed, the Negreira affair receded into the rear-view — the strategic case for the breakaway weakened. By October last year Laporta was publicly describing it as a project he wished to leave. By February he had left it. The Catalan exit is what made the Madrid one inevitable.

Pérez, by his own account, was “more convinced than ever” of the Super League’s necessity right up until he settled. The settlement is not a recantation. It is a tactical retreat from a particular legal-commercial vehicle. The argument he was making — that the existing governance of European football is not designed to survive its own incentives — has not been refuted. It has been postponed.

The Premier League’s awkward position

The Premier League’s official line, repeated through the long debates over the Football Governance Act, is that it is opposed to a closed European Super League and proud to have been so since 2021. The Act, which came into force in July 2025 and now operates through the Independent Football Regulator, formalises this. Regulated clubs cannot participate in “prohibited competitions”; clubs that have been regulated within the previous ten years carry the prohibition with them. It is a serious piece of statute, and it does what its drafters intended it to do.

But there is a tension, and the tension is the most interesting thing about the English position. The Premier League is, structurally, the closest thing to a Super League that European football has ever produced. Its broadcast revenue is decoupling from the rest of the continent at a rate that looks irreversible: domestic and international rights cycles that the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 cannot approach, ownership groups that draw sovereign-wealth and American private capital in volumes nobody else attracts, a fixture list whose every Saturday afternoon is a global product. To oppose the Super League while running the Premier League is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is a kind of strategic positioning. England’s clubs do not need a Super League. They have one already, and the moat is widening.

This is the asymmetry. A continental Super League fails in England because it would not be enough of an upgrade to risk the politics. It succeeds — or threatens to succeed — in Spain, Italy and possibly Germany because it would be. The Football Governance Act is, in this reading, less a defence of European football than an enclosure of the English market. We have built the wall to keep the Premier League’s clubs in, not to keep the breakaway out, and the two are not the same thing.

The fan-democratic case, and its half-life

The protests of April 2021 are now folklore, and like all folklore they have been smoothed in the retelling. The reality is that they worked because they were photogenic, sudden, and supported by a Conservative government that needed a popular cause. None of those conditions are stable. The next breakaway, if it comes, will be slow. It will be sold not as a betrayal but as a reform — A22’s branding around “unify” and an open pyramid is precisely calibrated to deny supporters the moral clarity they had four years ago. And it will, crucially, arrive in a different media environment, one in which the broadcasting of football is fragmenting across direct-to-consumer platforms whose subscriber bases overlap only partially with the traditional supporter culture.

You cannot hold a bus up outside a streaming service. The protest was a Stamford Bridge phenomenon. Football’s culture wars increasingly happen on phones held by people who have never been to Stamford Bridge. The fan-democratic argument is real, and I think it is right, but its weapons are tied to a particular geography of attendance that the Super League’s commercial logic is designed to bypass.

The structural risk

What does a real Super League — under any name — actually do to football’s economic geography? It is worth being specific. It does not destroy the Premier League. It probably does not destroy La Liga. What it destroys, slowly, is the second tier of European clubs whose entire business model depends on occasional, unpredictable participation in the Champions League: the Atalantas, the Sporting Lisbons, the Eintracht Frankfurts, the Lille of 2021. These clubs survive on a calendar in which the qualifying ladder is genuinely open. A Unify-style structure with permanent or quasi-permanent participation hardens that ladder into a wall. Below the wall, the second tier becomes a feeder system. Above it, mobility ossifies.

What it also destroys is the local fixture as a serious sporting proposition. If Real Madrid plays fourteen high-stakes European matches between September and April, the Clásico becomes scheduling. La Liga becomes scheduling. The Saturday-afternoon-domestic-derby tradition that gave European football its grain — Athletic at home, Roma at the Olimpico, Marseille on a Sunday night — flattens into pre-season for the real product. It is not death. It is desaturation. The sport survives. It just stops mattering quite so much.

What football is actually for

I studied philosophy alongside Spanish at Leeds, which is a confession I do not often make in print, and the only thing it equipped me to do that scouting reports do not is ask the question that football administration has spent twenty years trying to avoid. What is the sport actually for? Not for whom — that is the easy version, and the answer (the broadcasters, the sovereign funds, the platforms) is now banal. But for what.

There is a strain of thought, going back at least to MacIntyre, that distinguishes between practices and institutions. A practice has internal goods — the things that make it the activity it is. An institution is the structure that sustains the practice and tends, over time, to corrupt it by attaching external goods to it. Football’s external goods have grown so large that the institutions which serve them — UEFA, the Premier League, FIFA, A22 — can no longer credibly claim to be in the business of protecting the practice. The Super League, in its various costumes, is what happens when the institutional logic stops pretending to defer to the practice it inherited.

This is why the Super League idea will not die, and why I do not think the April 2026 settlement is the end of anything. The conditions that produced the proposal — the gap between what European football is and what it pretends to be — have not changed. They have, if anything, deepened. Pérez is seventy-eight. A22 is a corporate entity that will outlive him. The Court’s door, opened in December 2023, has not been closed; it has only had no-one come through it for a season. The Football Governance Act prevents English participation, which removes the most photogenic clubs from the proposition but does not remove the proposition. Eight to twelve continental clubs, an open-pyramid format calibrated to the Court’s proportionality test, a streaming platform pre-built, and a UEFA whose 2024 reform has already adopted enough of the Super League’s logic to make principled refusal harder — that is a structure waiting for its moment.

The question every supporter, every administrator, every working journalist needs to keep asking — louder than we have been asking it, because the case has been getting weaker for want of a defender — is the older one. What is the sport for? If we cannot answer that, we will get the league we deserve. And the league we deserve will not look like 2021’s farce. It will look like an upgrade.

Sources:

super leagueuefaeuropean court of justicea22 sportsunify leaguereal madridbarcelonafootball politicsjames hargreaves