Football sold its soul long before the Super League

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

In the old days, when football teams lined out from one to eleven and if you added all those numbers up, the combined total came to 66; when Liverpool played Aston Villa in the Carabao Cup last year, the aggregate number of their starting eleven came to 737.

And, yes, it was a youth team but when squad numbers included one Thomas Hill, playing up front in the number 99 jersey, you see how football has changed.

There was a time in our youth where, if you followed an English football team, you could name their starting eleven in your sleep; now many of them have squad numbers that surpass their IQ.

Equally, if you put posters of footballers on your bedroom wall, you’d get five or six seasons out of one, because the players didn’t change clubs and the strips didn’t change every season.

But then along came Sky Sports and turned the whole thing on its head – and what was once the preserve of the working classes was now big business, with clubs owned by Russian oligarchs, dodgy Middle Eastern Sheikhs and American hedge funds.

Which is why this week’s announcement of plans for a European Super League should have surprised no one, and why the melodramatic outrage of former footballers – multi-millionaires to a man – is a little difficult to take.

After all, they owe their fortunes to the arrival of the Premier League, which came into being when the old First Division decided to break with the English FA at the start of the nineties.

The big clubs were behind this and they did it for two reasons – they saw the potential to develop the television product and they didn’t want to share the profits with the little guys.

Sound vaguely familiar?

The Champions League was the European Cup until 1992 – same year that the Premier League came into being – when UEFA, that bastion of the Corinthian spirit, decided that more games would mean more money. . .and that was more important than the fact that the competition would now be filled with teams who weren’t champions at all, because finishing fourth in your domestic league was enough to get in.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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