Andrea Agnelli has rarely seemed troubled by a false sense of modesty. Not content with trying to hijack football for all the wrong reasons, he claimed he was speaking on behalf of much of the planet.
“Our 12 founder clubs represent billions of fans across the globe and 99 European trophies,” said the president of Juventus. Juve are below Atalanta – who have no European silverware – in the Serie A table and Agnelli has not consulted those billions of supporters.
But if the proposed European Super League ignored such inconvenient realities, there is one way to deprive its co-conspirators of some of the status they have used to try and confer legitimacy on their sordid plot. UEFA should strip those 12 clubs of their 99 titles: every Champions League and European Cup, every Europa League and UEFA Cup, every Cup Winners’ Cup. Even every Super Cup.
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That would penalise some more than others. Real Madrid have been able to luxuriate in a position as European football’s most decorated club since Alfredo Di Stefano led them to the first of five successive European Cups in the 1950s. No more.
When they are struck from the official records, the six-time winners Bayern Munich assume that mantle, followed by the four-time champions from Ajax. Real’s 13 titles are gone, replaced by a quest for a first European Super League crown. Liverpool can’t be deemed the most successful English club any more: if their European titles are not recognised, they slip to second behind Manchester United, who have more domestic silverware. In contrast, Magdeburg, Ipswich, Aberdeen and Mechelen have won European trophies more recently than Manchester City, but presumably their invitations to join the Super League got lost in the post.
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But punish the guilty and at a stroke many of the greatest moments in these renegade clubs’ history are rendered unofficial. Ronald Koeman’s free kick for Barcelona at Wembley in the 1992 final, AC Milan’s demolition of Johan Cruyff’s Dream Team in 1994, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s injury-time intervention for United against Bayern Munich in 1999, Steven Gerrard’s tour de force in Istanbul. They still happened, but much of their meaning has been removed.
These 12 clubs, who have sought to vandalise the global game, cannot complain. They have shown they care so little for football’s past, its heritage and traditions and competitions, that they have no right to object. They are more interested in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow than the silverware great players and managers secured, sometimes in seemingly immortal fashion. The actions of the increasingly ugly game’s dirty dozen have been an attack on the legacy and achievements of every former footballer who propelled his club to glory; their own deeds are being diminished by the clubs trying to supplant and in effect end the competitions they won. They should, like Gary Neville, be leading the assault on the owners who have used a pandemic to destroy much of the game for their own greed.
Perhaps UEFA would be shooting itself in the foot by expelling the disloyal dozen now. It would make Paris Saint-Germain this season’s Champions League winners, which is not something that would sit well with everyone, and create a Europa League final of Roma versus Villarreal, but it would nonetheless send a message. They should certainly be exploring withholding prize money from the defectors. Finance may be the only language they really understand but sport has always been about something more, about an identity, about something bigger and broader that fans bought into it and which these plotters have tried to capitalise on. And, in many cases, it involved winning.
Take their titles away and UEFA’s honours board may look bare, bar for Bayern in recent years, and the governing body may find that embarrassing. There is a question of what happens to them – do Benfica, who have lost four European Cup finals to members of the band of betrayers, suddenly become six-time champions? – but if these 12 clubs valued some of the game’s greatest prizes, they would not be fashioning rival leagues.
So AC Milan would have as many European Cups as Accrington Stanley, Real Madrid as many as Raith Rovers. They would be the footballing equivalents of Lance Armstrong, who can still claim he won the Tour de France seven times but who, in the official versions, has been stripped of all. They would be the pariah clubs, who have cost themselves their previous accolades.
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