The European Super League and the Theft of the People’s Game

The ESL Idea Won’t Die Because The Current Business Model Is Unsustainable

The 2021 proposal regarding the creation of a European ‘super league’ provoked mass protests from fans across England. It seemed to the many who turned out to protest in front of the grounds of the ‘big six’ and others that this was the final phase in a long war waged against working-class football fans. The sad truth though is the push towards the super league is likely to return in newer forms because many of the clubs pushing it are stuck in a crisis of their own making and the super league is seen as their way back to profitability. The ESL was not an aberration but the logical end point of where football has been going for over 30 years. 

Contemporary European football, at the highest level, is a perfectly articulated machine of late-stage capital, a glittering monument to the alienation of labor and the extraction of surplus value. It is a realm where the working-class communities that forged the sport’s identity are now largely excluded from. The proposed European Super League (ESL), in both its crude 2021 incarnation and its cunningly repackaged 2024 model, is not an aberration. It is the logical culmination of this process—the point where the bourgeoisie finally discards the pretense of sport and reveals its desire for a purely financial instrument.

This is not just a story about a sport. It is a manifestation of the class war being waged relentlessly against us by the capitalist class. 

The 2021 Proposal: The Bourgeoisie Sheds Its Mask

The initial Super League proposal of April 2021 was a moment of rare, crystalline clarity. For decades, the footballing ruling class—the owners of the continent’s largest clubs—had maintained the ideological fiction of a ‘football family,’ a system where a Leicester City could, through merit and collective effort, rise to become champions. This myth of meritocracy served to obscure the accelerating centralisation of capital within the game.

The 2021 plan shattered this illusion. Its core tenet was permanence: 15 ‘founding members’ would be insulated from the supposed risks of competition, their status guaranteed not by sporting achievement, but by their access to capital. This was the creation of a cartel, a protected bourgeois class within football itself. In short it was the institutionalisation of a footballing oligarchy. The reaction from the fans came in the form of a spontaneous and powerful protest movement that was inherently proletarian. The fans were hit by the realisation that the game was being yanked away from them by a cabal of bankers and crooked football officials. 

The spectacular collapse of the project within 72 hours, driven by fan protests and state intervention, was a temporary victory. But it was a victory that merely forced the architects of the super league to retreat, to regroup, and to devise a more sophisticated strategy. They had learned an important lesson, similar to that which the British ruling class learned in the 1970s, when taking on the working class be sure to not go for a frontal assault but try more underhand tactics.

The Legal Superstructure: The ECJ Ruling as a Bourgeois Victory

The ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in December 2023 was hailed by the ESL’s backers as a triumph for ‘free competition.’ And indeed, it was. The court found that UEFA and FIFA, the game’s longstanding governing bodies, had acted as monopolists, using their power to suppress a rival commodity. This is the essential logic of capital: it must constantly break down old monopolies to create new markets for its own expansion.

The ECJ did not rule on the desirability of the Super League; it ruled on the right of capital to create new products. In doing so, it exposed UEFA not as a guardian of sport, but as a competing capitalist entity itself. The fight between UEFA and the ESL is not a battle between good and evil; it is an intra-class struggle between two factions of the bourgeoisie over who controls the means of revenue generation—its tournaments, its broadcasting rights, its revenue streams. The working-class fan is not part of this; we are merely expected to pay either exorbitant ticket prices and/or for different TV packages to enable us to watch our clubs. 

The ‘Unify League’: A More Perfect Commodity

The response from A22 Sports Management, the ESL’s corporate vehicle, demonstrates a keen understanding of ideological warfare. The 2024 ‘Unify League’ proposal is a masterclass in co-opting the language of the opposition to advance the same class interests.

Where the 2021 model was a blunt instrument of exclusion, the Unify League presents itself as an ‘open’ and ‘meritocratic’ pyramid. It speaks of free-to-air broadcasting, positioning itself against the’ greed’ of pay-TV conglomerates. This is a brilliant tactical manoeuvre. It seeks to pit the fan-as-consumer against the fan-as-community-member, offering a cheaper product while still aiming to eviscerate the cultural foundations of the sport.

Do not be fooled. This ‘open’ model is a more efficient, more insidious form of enclosure. By creating a multi-tiered continental system that runs parallel to domestic leagues, it seeks to become the primary locus of value and attention. The ‘Unify’ platform is not a benevolent gift; it is a direct-to-consumer data extraction and advertising engine, designed to bypass traditional broadcasters and capture 100% of the advertising revenue. It is the platform-capital model applied to football: a sleek, digital-friendly interface for the same process of accumulation.

The Real Contradictions: Why the Project Stalls

Despite its legal and rhetorical victories, the new League faces profound obstacles, not out of moral compunction, but due to the inherent contradictions of its own position.

1. The Problem of Monopoly Capital: The English Premier League, particularly, is already such a successful, globally dominant capitalist product that its constituent clubs see no need to risk its stable revenue for an unproven venture. The English bourgeoisie, for now, finds its interests best served within the existing superstructure. The British government’s threat of a regulator that would block breakaways is the state acting to protect a lucrative national industry from a rival continental capital bloc.
2. The Bankruptcy of its Vanguard: The fact that the primary drivers of this project are Real Madrid and Barcelona is deeply revealing. These are not capitalist innovators; they are classic examples of an ancien régime in crisis. They are ‘member-owned’ clubs structurally incapable of attracting the passive investment of a hedge fund or sovereign wealth fund, now drowning in debt accrued in a desperate arms race. Their push for the ESL is the death rattle of an older form of football capital, trying to use a new structure to solve the crises created by the old.
3. The Fetishism of the Product: The greatest threat to the Super League is that its product would be exposed as a hollowed-out commodity. The intensity, the history, the visceral passion that gives football its immense exchange-value is derived from its use-value as a meaningful community ritual. Sever the ties to local competition, to the threat of relegation, to the shared history of specific places, and you are left with a bland, globalised entertainment product. The capital within the game is, in its relentless drive for short-term profit, threatening to destroy the very social relations that produce the value it seeks to capture.

Conclusion: The Spectre Haunting Football

The European Super League is a phoenix not because it is immortal, but because it is an inevitable spectre born from the contradictions of football under capitalism. It will continue to rise from the ashes in new forms because the underlying economic dynamics demand it.

The true conflict is not between the ESL and UEFA. It is between the logic of capital, which seeks to turn every human activity into a profitable commodity, and the working class, social nature of football, which exists as a form of collective identity and non-alienated creativity. The ‘Unify’ League is simply the next, more advanced stage in this process. The fans who protested in 2021 intuitively understood this. Their struggle was not to save UEFA, but to defend a what was left of the people’s game from total extinction. 

The future of football does not lie in choosing between the cartel of UEFA or the cartel of A22. It lies in the difficult, long-term project of rebuilding football as a working-class sport—through fan ownership, supporter trusts, and cooperative models that re-embed clubs in their communities and subordinate capital to the game, rather than the game to capital. The battle over the Super League is just one front in this larger class war.