The European Super League was launched on Sunday and came crashing down on Tuesday, much to the glee of soccer fans around the world. Essentially a way for greedy billionaires to protect their assets at the expense of more than a century of football traditions, the backlash was swift. As of yesterday, several of the 12 founding clubs from England, Spain and Italy have reportedly pulled out of the proposed league, with Manchester City the first to make it official. Four of the six English teams involved—Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham and Arsenal—are in danger of missing out on next year’s Champions League, whereas they’d have a guaranteed spot in the ESL, no matter how poor a team they fielded. Supporters clubs, players, managers and pundits all spoke out against this new anti-competitive league, while the organizing bodies for world and European football—FIFA and EUFA—threatened to exclude the teams from participation. After two days of protests, the clubs began to withdraw from the new league, one by one. It quickly became clear that the predicted soccer apocalypse would be avoided, and fans took to Twitter to celebrate. Here are our favorite tweets.
“Super League” is a pretty funny name for a thing that totally disintegrated 12 hours after I heard about it for the first time, but maybe next time we go with Eternal Kings of Sport or The Infinity Conference.
Fair play to Florentino Pérez. He said modern attention spans were getting shorter, looked at the 123-year-old Football League, realised that wouldn’t do, and devised a competition that was done and dusted 48 hours after it began.
