Ken Early: Arrogance of owners is most galling aspect of Super League

The angry crowd, chanting defiance, the Stars and Stripes going up in flames... the images transported you back to the 1980s, when this exact scene was the staple of Western TV news reports from The Arab Street, established shorthand for irrational extremism. But this time the street was Matt Busby Way and the crowd was made up of Manchester United fans protesting against the Glazers.

What the United fans were doing felt quite natural during a historic week that saw an explosion of righteous anger from football fans against... greed? That doesn’t seem quite right. Of course we all hate greed, yet though it saturates our world we seldom seem to get that worked up about it. The attitude many of us have towards this most relatable of vices might be expressed by adapting the United fans’ anti-Glazer slogan: Love Money, Hate Greed.

For 48 glorious hours the people of football rose up against their supposed rulers until the rulers ran for the hills

No, there was something even more explosively offensive than the greed, and that was the arrogance. The arrogance of a group of billionaires who believed they were entitled to go away and hatch a secret plot together, and announce it to the world as a fait accompli, and that everyone else would then just have to accept it, because they are the Owners, and whatever they say goes.

The idea that this tiny group of rich and powerful people could simply decide to tear up the existing structure of the sport and replace it with one more suited to their dismal specifications, without even pretending to seek permission or consult with the hundreds of millions of us whose emotional involvement makes this game a matter of consequence: that was what people were so angry about. The Super League owners perfectly personified the remote malign force that haunts the imagination of our time: the distant, unaccountable elite that makes all the decisions we hate but somehow have to go along with. This force had briefly assumed a specific, tangible and villainous form, and for 48 glorious hours the people of football rose up against their supposed rulers until the rulers ran for the hills.

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White knight

The post-Super League world is full of unlikely heroes. The crisis was the making of Uefa’s president Aleksander Ceferin, author of a desperately dull set of Champions League reforms and, famously, godfather to the daughter of Juventus’ Andrea Agnelli. Ten days ago, the second fact might have hinted troublingly at regulatory capture; today it illustrates the dastardliness of the Super League conspirators. Manchester City, the first club officially to withdraw, were thanked by Uefa for their courage and intelligence. Roman Abramovich also emerged as a white knight and true friend of the game. PSG’s president, Nasser al-Khelaifi, resisted the blandishments of the plotters with foresight and wisdom and has been rewarded with the presidency of the European Club Administration. And Ceferin reserved some of his warmest praise for Boris Johnson, whose government had taken such a strong line against the Super League within hours of realising just how incredibly unpopular it was.

Johnson told a BBC Question Time audience in 2005 that “if a chap wants to buy Manchester United then it is basic Conservative philosophy that he should be allowed to buy it. And I wouldn’t want to stand in his way.” Apparently that basic Conservative philosophy that saw a football club as no different from any other item a chap might buy or sell has since developed into a holistic view of clubs as social and collective entities, inextricably bound up with their cities and communities in both space and time.

Perhaps the strangest and most hallucinatory chapter of the saga unfolded at Manchester United, whose luckless executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward has emerged as the closest thing this farce has to a tragic figure. Woodward had initially been widely assumed to be one of the main ideas men behind the Super League, but sources with knowledge of Woodward briefed UK papers that in fact, the United executive did not know of the plan until Saturday, April 17th, the day before it launched.

Try as he might, he simply could not come to terms with the anti-competitive logic of the idea, which was anathema to everything he held dear about sport

That the new league was being set up with £3.5bn of funding from JP Morgan, the bank where Woodward worked for six years: coincidence. That four days before the Super League was announced, Woodward went to 10 Downing Street to meet with Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, Dan Rosenfield, who has been described as an obsessive Manchester United fan: also coincidence. The UK government claims the Super League was not discussed at that meeting, which was focused on ongoing pilot schemes for the return of fans to stadiums - though the opposition’s demands for the publication of the minutes have so far gone unheeded.

That Woodward’s resignation was announced the same evening the English clubs all pulled out and it was clear the Super League had collapsed, torching the reputations of everyone involved... this should not be interpreted as Woodward accepting responsibility for the failure of a scheme to which he had been integral. In fact, sources close to Woodward say, he had been agonising over whether to walk away from his £3 million-a-year job ever since the moment on Saturday when he heard the plan was to be green-lighted. Try as he might, he simply could not come to terms with the anti-competitive logic of the idea, which was anathema to everything he held dear about sport.

Political support

In these astonishing circumstances, the only surprise is that it took until Tuesday for news of Woodward’s resignation to become public. Think about it from his point of view. You’re an executive with a very particular set of skills. Meanwhile, your employers of the last 16 years are trying to source funding from an investment bank for a major new project. They might also like to gauge the level of political support for the project, since it is guaranteed to become a major international story. Your skills seem almost uncannily tailored to helping them navigate this exact predicament! And yet they keep you in the dark until the day before they announce it to the whole world. This would be a blow to anyone’s corporate self-esteem.

Imagine the anguished conversation that might have ensued between Woodward and Joel Glazer. “But Joel, for the life of me I’ll never understand why you didn’t just tell me about it! I was at Number 10 on Wednesday for God’s sake, for that meeting about ongoing pilot schemes for the return of fans to stadiums... if only I’d known about the Super League stuff, I could have run it by them then, at which point we know what would have happened: they would immediately have voiced their passionate and principled objections, making it clear that there was no point in us going ahead with the announcement! We could have saved ourselves all this trouble - if only you had bloody told me about it!”

This farcical communications breakdown may yet mean United and their co-conspirators face punishment at the hands of the Premier League and Uefa, but at least Glazer and Woodward have learned a valuable lesson: it’s good to talk. And one suspects that the people who lived the drama of the Super League fiasco haven’t finished talking about it yet.