The Leaders Council exists to celebrate and support the successes of leadership. It is not typically in our nature to mock or pour scorn on the failures. And yet, The European Super League has left us with little choice.
In less than forty-eight hours, this groundbreaking new idea was announced, condemned and destroyed, to leave several of football’s most high-profile leaders rolling around on the ground clutching their ankles. For football fans everywhere it was an initially distressing but, ultimately, rather enjoyable spectacle. Here are some of the best responses from across the British newspapers:
Writing in The Times, Daniel Finkelstein sought to explain the key flaws behind the idea. One such flaw was what Malcolm Gladwell has dubbed ‘the sip test error.’ As Finkelstein explains:
‘In his book Blink Malcolm Gladwell describes how consumer testing led Coca-Cola to disaster. Consumers appeared to prefer Pepsi, so they created New Coke, which tasted more like it. But it flopped and Coke had to return to its old formula. It turned out that while people preferred Pepsi when given a sip, they didn’t want to drink a whole can of it. This mistake is made all the time in politics. Some of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies tested well, such as free broadband, but people didn’t want to drink a whole can of them.
‘The Super League made the same mistake. Their research told them that people loved Manchester United playing Real Madrid so they should put it on every week. But the one doesn’t follow from the other. What makes the game exciting is precisely that this doesn’t happen every week. A sip of it tastes great, a can of it does not. The Super League was the New Coke of sport.’
In the same paper, Alyson Rudd described the scenes at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday evening as Chelsea fans gathered to oppose the new league:
‘The air was heavy with irony. Chelsea fans are viewed as spoilt. They follow a club prepared to spend £72 million on a goalkeeper that few regard as particularly special. They can afford to pay millions in compensation to a succession of sacked managers. Chelsea fans regularly see their team at Wembley or dancing and gurning under sprayed champagne after winning the Premier League title, yet here they were chanting like miners suffering under Margaret Thatcher or French revolutionaries taunting Marie Antoinette.
‘Yet these fans of a rich club situated in a very expensive part of west London took a stand and changed Chelsea’s history.’
In the Guardian, Barney Ronay painted a surrealist portrait: ‘As the sun dipped below the roof-line of Stamford Bridge something strange began to happen. The birds flew backwards through the sky, the cats barked, the trees turned a tangerine hue, and Roman Abramovich became, at a stroke, the protector of the people’s game, enemy of the elites, the oligarch of the masses.’
And speaking on Newsnight, comedian and Chelsea fan David Baddiel said he was ‘pleased as a football fan because it was literally the worst idea, possibly in the history of anything, but certainly in the history of the football.’
