So the European Super league has come and gone, quicker than a Kardashian wedding (and consequent divorce).

I was on a film shoot the whole time, and barely had a chance to read more than the headlines. But that pretty much told me everything I needed to know about this abomination, and come to the conclusion that:

Maybe there is actually some good in the world.

If you’re reading this blog then you probably know what the ESL is and need no explanation; and if you don’t know, or don’t care, then you're definitely not reading this blog. So I won’t go into the details of it, but here it is in the shell of a nut:

Florentino Perez, the President of Real Madrid, tried to create a ‘Super League’ of the biggest teams in Europe, who would leave their home leagues to join a mega-league, the sole purpose of which was to make (even more) money.

On the surface, you might think “Oh that sounds great. It’ll be the big clubs at it every week.” No more Super Club vs Newly Relegated Minnow With Players Nobody’s Heard Of, the latter providing a performance that would only ever be described as ‘Gritty’ or ‘Woeful’. It’s like the All Blacks against the Springboks every fortnight. Hulk Hogan toe-to-toe with The Undertaker before the wounds have even healed from the last bout. Amazing.

But it’s not. If you think that, you're wrong. For two major reasons:

(1) Sure, some of the Premier League encounters as outlined above might be a walkover for the ‘bigger’ clubs, but if you had so-called ‘super’ clubs battling each other regularly, it’d lose its appeal. Like Christmas at the end of every month. Itchy & Scratchy is great … in small, sweet doses. But if you had it every show, taking up most of the show, then it just wouldn’t be the same.

Man Utd vs AC Milan every month would get boring. It WILL get boring, I guarantee you. It just won’t have the same impact as a Champions League match which might only happen every 5-10 years. The players will quickly learn about each other, there’ll be no surprises, and it’ll be *yawn* yet another Barcelona-Bayern match. How boring.

(2) Elitism. Having a closed Super League of ‘big clubs’ - from which nobody can be relegated, and therefore no team can be promoted to - is pure, rancid elitism. It sends a clear statement to the so-called smaller clubs:

“You’ll never be as big as us. No matter how much money you invest, no matter how hard you work, how great a season you have - you can never reach our level. You will forever be beneath us.”

For that alone, Perez should be placed in stocks and lashed until every sliver of skin has parted from his flesh.

The Mighty Gills, formed 1893. Soon to be a ‘Big Club’.

What defines a ‘big’ club? Its history? Its shirt sales? Its global value? I’m sure it’s largely decided by recent accomplishments at home and abroad, and the club’s global pull. But given the recent poor performances of Spurs and Arsenal, that’s rather generous to them, and considerably unfair to other teams who’ve done better than them in recent seasons. You could well argue that certainly Leicester, and perhaps even Sheffield United should be in the mix instead of those two North London clubs.

Or why not Nottingham Forest, who had big European success back in the days when footballers didn’t cry when they got tackled? Or what about teams like Aston Villa, West Ham, Wolves etc - they’ve been around since the early days of ‘Association Football’, founded by local factories, iron works and the like for their employees and local communities. Plenty of history and success there.

And that’s part of the point: Success is cyclical. Sure, it’s unlikely my home club of Gillingham will be winning the PL or CL any time soon, but aforementioned teams like Forest and Wolves etc did have major success in previous decades. Liverpool hadn’t won the top league for 30 years, with merely a couple of FA Cups to stick in their cabinet: did they stop becoming a ‘big club’?

Manchester City were even worse, being slightly good in the 80s, but then doing sod-all until recently, and even then it took a few years after the multi-million-pound cash injection for them to become ‘big’.

And that brings us back to the reason for all of this: MONEY.

The sole reason that Florentino Perez put this Frankenstein’s Monster together. The man even said: “We’ve created this league to save football”. Listen you slimy satanic c***: Football doesn’t need saving; it’s still good. Even with squabbles over VAR and what ‘Offside’ or ‘Handball’ actually is; despite diving, which seems to have taken a bit of a downturn recently; football is still good. Our system is good. Man City could beat Real Madrid in the Champions League, but 3 days later lose a hard-fought match at Stoke in the rain.

It’s Beautiful.

And the tier structure we have in the UK (and most of Europe) works great. You keep winning, you get promoted to play against bigger, better-funded teams. If you hang in there, finish mid-table, win a few cup games, get more money from TV rights etc, maybe you can improve your stadium and stick around. Maybe you can go even higher. And if you reach the peak, the top of the Premier League (or what I still like to call ‘Division One’), THEN you enter a temporary Super League called the Champions League, in which you play against the other ‘big’ teams, or rather the big performers. A meritocracy purely based on who did well last season. Not the last five seasons, or at some point in the 80s. Last season.

Imagine for a second that the CL was a closed shop like the ESL. Leicester or, say, West Ham (doing very well at the moment) finish in the top 5, but are told they can’t come into the Champions League because they’re ‘not big clubs’. But Arsenal and Spurs are allowed in, slinking through the red rope while the other two are kicked out by the bouncers in front of everybody.

It’s disgusting. reprehensible. And - gladly - fans, managers and Gary Neville reacted and all the English clubs pulled out. Praise the Lord.

So that’s hopefully the end of that. However … Perez says the ESL’s not dead and the clubs involved are legally bound. BUT - and we all love a big but - the fans aren’t bound. And if the fans do as I believe most of them would do, and boycott these games (if they were ever to happen), then the money that Perez and his minions crave will not come flooding in. Sure, some might watch it on TV, at least to start with - no doubt on some extortionate pay-per-view or ‘Sky ESL Channel’ - but that won’t last. If nobody turns up to the games … if the viewers in the pubs aren’t interested … if the pubs who pay huge prices to broadcast it aren’t reaping the dividends… if Sky or whoever don’t renew their contract … it’ll die in the water, like an ugly bloated blowfish.

The European Super League is the most ill-conceived event since Josef Fritzl’s parents shared a ‘special kiss’. And hopefully this whole thing will be buried deep, deep down, and swiftly and permanently forgotten.

On the plus side, this whole thing has inevitably spawned some amusing memes, most of them centred around Arsenal and Spurs, some of which are below. (I don’t own the copyright; I’m not sure if anyone does to memes; where do memes even come from anyway?) Enjoy.

E.S.L.