Monday Cannon Fodder: so what now

One shoe dropped yesterday. 12 of the biggest football clubs in the world announced their plans to breakaway from the Champions League to form their own competition, the European Super League. The details of the breakaway are in the linked article, and Aidan has already penned his thoughts on the league.

Personally, I’m reserving judgment until we get a bit more clarity on what the entire footballing landscape is going to look like, more details on how the Super League is going to operate, and so on. A lot of digital ink has been spilled in anger (which is fine, people are entitled), but I’m still not convinced the ESL actually gets off the ground. The big clubs want more from UEFA and the Champions League (like guaranteed places), and this could be the latest and furthest step to date in the brinkmanship designed to extract those commitments.

I also think that a good deal of the vitriol against the ESL is coming out of what people think is going to happen and how a Super League would play out. On one hand, that’s fine. That’s how we evaluate things as human beings. On the other hand, it might all...just not play out how we think. It’s a gigantic, super-complicated structure that has tons of moving parts.

Obviously, this is all still developing, and there is a whole mess of stuff that’s going to come out over the next few days. We’ll do our best to keep you updated on the accurate, verified news that breaks (sidenote: be extra vigilant on social media because there is A LOT of inaccurate stuff flying around).

I’ve got more thoughts on all of this that I may share in the comments or in a separate post once I find a decent way to organize them. But I’ll leave you with this: if the Super League is going to happen, it’s better for Arsenal Football Club to be in it than not.