The seeds of the downfall came early as the breakaway’s enemies piled in and secrecy undermined the project
As the last clubs crawled from the smouldering wreck of the European Super League, the £4.5bn competition that promised to turn
Football on its head only to crash and burn inside 50 hours, the blame game was already beginning. Insiders tell of a disastrous public relations strategy, of little earthquakes inside clubs, and of the 12 clubs being unable to get their message across amid a continual onslaught: from fans, governments and football’s governing bodies. “It was like shouting into a
Hurricane,” one well-placed Super League source says.
So what did go wrong? The seeds of the downfall came early, when the story broke in the
New York Times and the Times at lunchtime on Sunday. That surprised the breakaway 12 clubs, who were leaden-footed and failed to make an official announcement until late that evening. “It went from: ‘Is this coming?’ to: ‘Shit it’s on, it’s happening,’ very quickly,” says one source. “But for hours and hours there was no official statement. And so the Super League’s enemies were allowed to pile in. No one was putting the positive case.”