The Government is wrong – let the Big Six clear off!

By Simon Leyland

It was interesting to hear David Sullivan`s view on this new Government White Paper, I think he is dead right. It is not going to change anything really!

The Big Six are the top six.  Everything is as it should be. Since the Premier League arrived, drunk and with money falling out of its pockets, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City or Manchester United have won 28 of 30 league titles and 26 of 30 FA Cups.

This is the status quo. All hail the elite.

So why the objection to the European Super League? All it does is put the elite in one place. They’re already the elite. We just make them play each other, ad infinitum, and the rest of us can get on with our lives. Is that so bad?

In an ideal world, if the Big Six were in the ESL West Ham would be fighting it out with Wolves for the league title, except they probably wouldn’t be because everyone would have more of a chance to win more games and the order of the division would be quite different.

The league would be less like a pyramid with a sharp point and more like an orange. It would be super competitive, more like the Championship, where anyone really can beat anyone else.

Why is that not better than what we’ve got now?

And we know that those six club owners want an ESL. Of course they do. It makes business sense to them. They will make more profit and that is all that matters.

They know that plenty of the fanbase would be happy enough to be playing some big European teams every week and even those who aren’t would get used to it.

Football fans can get used to anything, will put up with anything, will pay for anything. Football fans are mugs. Look at what we already tolerate.

We already know that many fans of clubs are easy to buy off. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be where we are. Fans have welcomed murderous regimes as owners into their clubs, they have welcomed anyone with money, no matter how steeped in sin they are.

In the last 30 years the Premier League has, like the broader economics of society, transformed happiness from being an existential quality into a transactional one: we buy feeling good.

In football this is best illustrated by transfer culture which is basically more shopping than football. Only it never makes anyone happy, or not for long. Nor does paying ever more for tickets on the basis you’re watching elite entertainment.

But even so, it is the only reality many know and the European Super League is the biggest football shopping mall on earth, what’s more it is only for the elite and we bloody love the elite. We even love just saying the word, elite.

There is no point in fighting it. OK so we won’t see Arsenal be sh*te at home against Brighton, we’ll see them be sh*te at home to Inter Milan instead. It’s all the same really.

The European Super League notion accepts that we live in a greedy, selfish world dominated by a small number of people who have almost all the money.

No-one ‘saved the Premier League’ as the Chelsea fan’s banner had it, we just got confused about our role in this psychodrama. So don’t just wait for it to happen, let’s call for the start of the ESL now, not to do so is against modernity, is against elitism, is against the very nature of life in 2022.

What are we holding out for? We should be embracing this brave new world, telling them to get on with it and quickly, not hanging on to the old one out of nostalgia. or out of belief in some sort of alternative narrative which imagines the elite will stop being the elite.

Because maybe, just maybe, when we have put the elite clubs behind the velvet rope in the VIP lounge, we can get on making something much, much better without them.