Dan Snow's History Hit - Football, Money and the European Super League

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

The attempt to create a new European Super League might have been short-lived with the attempt to form a breakaway competition collapsing in the face of widespread protests and denunciations from fans, but what led to this point? In this episode, Dan is joined by Jonathan Wilson of the Guardian Football Weekly and author of Inverting the Pyramid. Jonathan takes us from the origins of the sport over a hundred years ago through to the big business of the modern game. This historical perspective helps to shed light on what might have caused clubs to try and break away.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This week we had the very short-lived experiment in European Super League football. It was exciting, it lasted 36 hours I think it was. We hardly got to know the Super League, but what people did find out about it, they almost universally hated. Very unusually, it even provoked the royal family, Prince William, to break his usual silence about contemporary politics and condemn it as well as politicians right across the political spectrum here in the UK. Someone on twitter.com got in touch with me yesterday saying, you need to interview Jonathan Wilson, the very famous English football writer, about the history of how we got to this point.

You need to do an emergency podcast. And so I said, okay. Within 10 minutes, I'd hooked up with Jonathan on the internet. We'd arranged a time to talk and we recorded this fantastic conversation in which he talked me through the history of the sport from the days of English public schoolboys. Public schoolboys, for all my North American listeners, are private schoolboys. It's one of the many strange terminological weirdnesses of British life. Anyway, so those public slash private schoolboys kicking the ball around to where we are at the present, which is players being bought, sold for tens, hundreds of millions of pounds. What a world. Anyway, Jonathan Wilson is a total legend. He writes for The Guardian. He writes for various other places. He's written wonderful books about the history of football. He is also a Sunderland fan.

Good on him. And in this conversation, he tells you everything you need to know about the history of the beautiful game. It's going to be good. The breakaway league in Uruguay, Italia 90, Gaza crying. It's all here. After you've listened to this podcast, it is essential that you do what I tell you. Note this down.

You need to go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv, and sign up to our new digital history channel. Tens of thousands of people are now subscribed. We are making documentaries all the time. I'm filming with the Royal Navy tomorrow for our big 80th anniversary of the Bismarck documentary. You're going to love it.

So please head over there and become a subscriber. But in the meantime, listen to the brilliant Jonathan Wilson. Jonathan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Cheers, thank you very much for having me. It's a big week in football, in soccer over here in Europe at the moment and around the world.

I found this not particularly surprising. For me, the European Super League, a la kind of North American sports, feels to me like it's been a hoving interview for about 30 years, hasn't it? Yeah, I think that is true. There's a whole series of legislative reasons why it's very difficult for it to happen. And so I think we got used to the pattern where the big clubs say, well, we're going to break away, give us more. And so UEFA then backed down and go, okay, you can have a bit more. And they had made those concessions.

The format of the Champions League is up for discussion from 2024. Proposals were there to increase the size of Group C, to increase the share of revenues going to the big clubs, to open up two places for the clubs with the best previous record who hadn't qualified through the previous year's tournament and those were ratified on Monday so those were in place and so I think we'd all sort of thought the sort of posturing of six months ago was about that decision she should have been

ratified two weeks earlier and the fact it wasn't think, led a lot of us to think something's going on here. But again, I thought that was about getting more than 50% share. At the minute, it's split 50% between UEFA, the governing body of European football, and the clubs. And I thought this was about trying to force more than 50% for the clubs so they have control. And then suddenly on Sunday, this breaks. No, it's a breakaway Super League. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the coup that has been averted would have been the biggest change in football since fifa was founded in 1904 right well let's dig into that big history if that's all right because you've got some history fans this podcast when did the rot set in i mean as soon as you start paying

players take me through the big milestones on this journey that almost led us to a kind of World Series style US league in Europe. One of the things I found interesting in the last sort of month while these discussions have been going on is trying to think at each of these key points, which side would I have been on? Because it's very easy to assume that the structure you grow up with is the natural structure and that's right. And anything else is slightly ridiculous. And it begins, yeah, as you say, paying paying players so the football association is founded in 1863 essentially by public school boys university teams professional teams from london and it's founded because each school has its different version of football they get to university and they spend half their time arguing about what are the laws? What are the rules?

How are we playing this game? So they wanted a unified set of laws and just various attempts. But 1863 is when this begins and Football Association is founded. It's at this point an entirely amateur game. And do you get, for example, Eton College are able to beat Blackburn Rovers in the final of the FA Cup in 1882. It's one of my favourite facts. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. But I mean, that begins to tell you of the clash that was already beginning, that you also had working class clubs who really had no opportunity to organise anything beyond a very local level. And there's very little documentary evidence of what discussions they were having. We know there were the Sheffield laws, which were fairly influential, and that they very quickly come on board with the Football Association. There's a series of games

between FA teams and teams who played under the Sheffield laws, and the FA adopts some of the Sheffield laws, and the negotiation goes on. And pretty quickly, we get to something resembling the game we have today. But then, yeah, professionalism is where everything begins to change, which is legalised in 1885. And the change there i mean you can sort of say oh this is awful we're letting money into the game but it's not just about sport it's not just about sort of some corinthian ideal of competition but of course if you have working people who want to play you have to pay them if they have to take time off work then they need money they need to be paid to train and to not be in the mills or in the pits or in the shipyards so i think paying players it's very easy to sort of recoil at that

but it's clearly completely necessary for the game to develop you then get the league begins in 1888 which is essentially a way of guaranteeing regular fixtures so that the clubs can generate revenue to pay the players and that immediately you see the game's been taken away from those public school clubs to the Midlands and the North West. So you look at the 12 founder members of the league, they're all Midlands, North West clubs. Sunderland are finally allowed in after two seasons, having initially been banned from being too far away. And as you know, that's a particular concern to me. I'm not sure we should count the first two seasons of the Football League as a real league.

That was a soft launch. Yeah, so I would take away Preston's two league titles. I'm sorry, Preston, but it's not a national league. If you're banning people from being too far away, that's not a national league. The game then spreads incredibly rapidly, largely the British taking it around the world. Although interestingly, it seems to grow not in the empire.

Yeah, like Argentina and Italy and stuff. It's fascinating that those British expat clubs, but not in the empire. Yeah, I've looked into this and I can't really find an explanation other than class. I mean, Argentina is the first non-British country to have a league, begins in the early 1890s, but they are all British people involved in it. It's a Scottish school teacher called Alexander Watson Hutton who founds it and is very much the driving force of that you're one of the teams who competes I think it's in the third Argentinian league season is a team of Scottish engineers drainage experts who are putting in the sewage system in Buenos Aires and they put a team into the league so it's not until 1913 you have an

Argentinian league winner but it spreads incredibly rapidly. Argentina, Uruguay and also Central Europe, Austria-Hungary and then that spreads into Italy,

into Germany, into Scandinavia, into former Yugoslavia. FIFA is founded in 1904 as a sort of world governing body. The British federations are very sceptical of that.

They think, what's our game. Why would foreigners tell us what to do? And that then leads to serious negotiations. The British federations join FIFA. The legacy that you see with IFAB, which is the body which sets the laws of a game, and it has eight members. It has four from the rest of the world, one from England, one from Scotland, one from Wales, one from Northern Ireland, because it's still our game. And that's still true today. And the British Football Federations

leave FIFA in late 20s in a dispute over broken time payments, which is to what extent can amateur players be compensated for going to play in the Olympics? And this then directly leads to the foundation of the World Cup in 1930 with no British involvement and British Federations don't get involved after the Second World War. Well, the foundation of the World Cup in 1930 with no British involvement and British Federation to only get involved after the Second World War.

Well, it's not a World Cup if British teams aren't involved, obviously. Tell that to Uruguayan. Yeah, well, exactly. Tell that to the many successful tournaments that have been held without British representation. At what stage do you start transferring players and paying them loads of money and star players get bought and sold

and move from Sunderland down to London or something like that? Well, I mean, that begins right from the start. The first time we have a transfer fee that we're confident

what it is, is I think it's 1891 and we have records from then on of what transfers were. But it was clearly happening before that. How official it was,

there were clearly payments being made under the counter to induce players even before professionalism to move. If you've got a secure mill job in Scotland, why do you suddenly up sticks and move to Blackburn? Well, because somebody's bunged you some cash and made you promises about what cash they'll continue to give you. So right from the beginning of the game, transfers are there.

It really takes off with Italian clubs in the early 50s. That's when you suddenly get huge fees. Maybe that's not quite true. There's a really interesting example of the US league in the 1920s, which creates this huge scandal because they're signing European players, particularly Jewish players from Central Europe, who I guess even at that point recognise a need to get out of Europe. And there's various discussions at FIFA of, can we ban this? Can we stop this? And what kills it is the Wall Street crash and the Depression. Suddenly money goes out of the American game and the league collapses. So yeah, maybe the 1920s is the first moral panic over transfer fees. And you started that brilliant description of the history

of the entire professional game by saying, at what stage put yourself into all those moments, those turning points? At what side would you have been on? So when Jonathan Wilson was watching all those moments, the establishment of the World Cup, the 1920s, of paying people in their 50s, would you have said, yeah, this is good. This will be a more entertaining, better game, good for the sport. At what stage does the time-travelling, where's Wally, Jonathan Wilson go? No, this is the beginning of a cancer that will just transform this game beyond recognition. I think probably the moment, I think it's 1981,

this is in English terms, when it becomes legal for directors to derive a profit from the work they do with clubs. And so suddenly you're running the club to make a profit to pay yourself, not to elevate the club. Now, you can argue quite legitimately that if you're putting a huge amount of time and effort into running a football club, you do deserve a share of the profits. But I think the unregulated nature of that creates a problem.

And it leads ultimately to the creation of the Premier League in 1992. And that's the first place where I have a real sort of, I don't know what was right there. Because you have a game that, again, this is talking very much in english terms a game that's dying essentially that you've had all the horrors of the 80s you've had heisel you've had the bradford fire you've had the hillsborough disaster so all these tragedies either to do with hooliganism or to do with poor stadium design and poor stadium maintenance because nobody's got any money and it seems to me now, looking back, vaguely incredible that football remains as popular as it was. It seems to me totally bizarre

that my parents let me go to football. What were they thinking? That was bad parenting. It was dangerous. And the quality of football wasn't particularly good. And so I guess that creates the environment in which there can be a takeover. There's a perceived need for change that it's very hard to argue for the status quo. What the Premier League does is it concentrates power with the biggest clubs. So there's five sort of rebels there who are Liverpool, Everton, Tottenham, Arsenal, Manchester United. So Everton, I guess, are the interesting one from a modern point of view that they've fallen away and their statement on Monday attacking the European Super League in the context of what they did in 1992 was interesting but you know things change but of course off the back of this you get the input of Sky and Satellite TV which

increases revenues in the game but also sort of takes it off free-to-air TV. So it reduces the audience. It makes the audience wealthier. You get a change in the stadiums from, I think, 1994. All top flight stadiums have to be all-seater, which again leads to higher prices. Although if you look at the Taylor Report, which was the government review into football after Hillsborough, Lord Justice Taylor specifies there's no economic argument for this to lead to an increase in ticket prices. But in reality, they doubled overnight. And again, that changes

the makeup of people in the stadium. And that has profound consequences. You also have the incredible fortune of Italia 90. If you're the Premier League, the incredible good fortune of Italia 90, that you have this tournament where England for once do well. You have Paul Gascoigne crying when he's booked in the semi-final, which means he can't play in the final had England got there. And that is used in a series of wet liberal think pieces, which are not necessarily wrong.

To say, oh, look, here's a softer masculinity. Football's not just about violence. It can be about the emotion of this great footballing genius. And opera. And yeah, the whole setting, these new stadiums,

which we now know with Jerry Bilton, they're all falling apart and with disaster. But at the time, they look brilliant. And yeah, the whole setting, these new stadiums, which we now know were jerry-built and they're all falling apart and a disaster. But at the time, they looked brilliant. And yeah, the opera, the sense of football is sort of part of culture, which I think is sort of the first time in the popular imagination that is true. And that helped stimulate this boom that you see through the early 90s. And so talk to me quickly about the formation of the Premiership. So the richest clubs said we do not wish to play in a bigger first division. We want a more elite, smaller premiership, which will then, there'll be more money to go around, et cetera.

Well, no, initially they said that they were going to reduce the size of it to reduce the number of games, which they claimed, oh, it's going to help being the national team players be less tight. That never happened. We have 20 teams now in the top flight

as we had 20 teams in, and there was even a time when it went up to 22. So all that was cant. It was all nonsense. But what it did do was rather than having a football league of 92 teams, you had the Premier League of 20 and then the 72. And so when you have meetings, when you have votes, the rich clubs are governing themselves rather than having to concern

themselves with what Darlington or Hartlepool or Bury want to do. And what that means is that the television revenues coming into the game are not spread out through the league as they've previously been, but they go predominantly to those top clubs. So it's a bit rich, as you say, Everton now complaining about the formation of the Super League. Yeah, but because alongside this, I think you have to have certain sympathy because this is not happening in isolation.

So I think the big driver to where we are now is silvio bellasconi takes over ac milan in 85 or 86 they are one of the biggest clubs in european history on the verge of bankruptcy silvio bellasconi comes in and i think he was a fan but he clearly has a very business mindset and in 1987 Napoli are drawn against Real Madrid in the first round of the European Cup so in those days

it was a straight knockout competition totally free draw and Speliscone says well this is madness you have the teams from the two biggest markets in the world because England were banned

at this point and one of them's going out after one tie two games we can't allow this to happen I like the purity of the old European Cup but I also see a business argument for that and one of them's going out after one tie, two games. We can't allow this to happen. I like the purity of the old European Cup, but I also see a business argument for that.

There has to be some kind of compromise there. And so he leads the charge towards the Champions League so that rather than it being a straight knockout, you have group stages. And actually in its early stages in the 90s, that was a phenomenal competition because there was this broader quality across Europe. And you'd have teams like Spartak Moscow or Nantes or Panathinaikos, who would be really, really difficult teams to play against. And you had a series of incredibly tough fixtures that

were incredibly good to watch. But the problem is that if you set up a structure that rewards the teams at the top, you get a self-perpetuating elite. And so you get what we now call the superclubs pulling away. But that's actually not what's caused Monday. I mean, this is where we get to the real complication. I think football changes radically the moment Roman Bramwich buys Chelsea in 2003. Now, we've got to be slightly careful about this

because Roman Bramwich has become recently incredibly litigious. But it is fair to say, and the Guardian lawyers confirmed this with me last week after a series of discussions, it is fair to say that his wealth is not derived from football. He's extraordinarily wealthy in a way that football had never known before, and he's bought a club. And that allows him to buy players whenever he wants and if a player doesn't work doesn't matter because 40 50 million to him move on buy the next one and you then have Sheikh Mansour and Abu Dhabi using the sovereign wealth of Abu Dhabi to buy Manchester City and you have the same with Qatar buying Paris Saint-Germain and the traditional elites of the likes of Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona,

AC Milan, Juventus, they are very threatened by this. And so they introduce financial fair play, which is a way of trying to stop the inflationary cycle that this is causing. And those regulations, they've changed a lot,

but essentially they were introduced sort of 15 years ago and they keep changing. But then what brings us to crisis points is two things. So one is PSG, using the Qatari money, signed Neymar from Barcelona and pay €222 million for him, which is not merely a world record transfer fee,

but it more than doubles the previous record. Now, there's never been a step like that. We've never seen the record more than double since the 1890s when you're talking about going to 100 quid to 200 quid. So it's an enormous sum of money. And whether they did this deliberately or not, you can argue about, but what that does is it just breaks the market. It sort of says to traditional clubs, you'll never make enough money in the normal way to compete with us. And we can come in, even to Barcelona, even to arguably the most successful side of the past decade, and we can pluck away their best talent.

So that's the first real driver. Then the second one, I think, comes last summer, when Manchester City had been found to have breached financial fair play regulations. They were initially banned for two years from the Champions League, which would have been devastating for them. And then that's overturned on appeal at the Court of Obstruction for support. So the traditional leads, I think, see from that moment, FFP has no teeth.

It doesn't work. Whether that's because you can't legislate about that or whether because UEFA don't have the desire to legislate properly. And so they think, right, we need a way of guaranteeing ourselves more money. And I think the key point is guaranteeing it. Because the problem you have, if you're a business, you're trying to run a football club, you can't predict your income.

If you finish fifth in the Premier League, then you don't get in the Champions League, and that cuts off immediately 130 million quid. So it's very hard to plan for the future. They want the guaranteed cash. And that, I think, is what's driven the Super League. That plus the pandemic, which obviously has caused financial problems for everybody. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive We'll see you next time. There are new episodes every week. Abramovich, when he came in, I'll never forget when he dropped 100 million quid on players that first season and he had all those mad stars, we couldn't believe it. And Ranieri couldn't win a match with all these amazing stars.

Do you remember that? It was brilliant. They basically signed half of West Ham you know we never seen anything like that and I think to give some context for that Arsenal just put in place plans to move from Highbury to what we now know as the Emirates and that was a totally logical move they had a stadium that was I don't know 35,000 capacity but very limited in terms of what they could do with sponsors boxes and corporate entertainment and so logical, move to a much bigger ground. It's what clubs have done throughout history, is they've expanded their ground to increase their revenue-making capacity.

By the time the Emirates is built, that model of football's gone. What you need is an oligarch or a sheikh or a hedge fund to take over, which, of course, is what ends up happening with Arsenal. They get the hedge fund. As John Barnes famously said this week, this is not a victory for the fans, it's a victory for the hedge fund. As John Barnes famously said this week, this is not a victory for the fans, it's a victory for the status quo. The status quo was already pretty unsatisfactory,

I guess, right, for football. What does this mean if we're not going to go Super League, which always felt, I think, where we were heading? What are the big clubs going to try and do, do you think, based on this historical story that you've just charted out? Well, I think they're probably assessing that right now and it's very difficult to know.

They clearly had planned this incredibly badly. That's the first thing. You're always worried with something like this, what happens in a year when they've actually worked out what they need to do. The finances never made any sense. And they were never properly explained. Joel Glazer, the co-chairman of Manchester United, was saying this new tournament would generate 5 billion euros a year in revenue.

But from where? There's nowhere to explain how they could get a leap from the last Champions League season pre-pandemic, generate 3.3 billion. How do you make that 50% leap? Particularly when we know the broadcast rights are at best plateauing and probably going into decline, which is something Florentino Perez,

the president of Real Madrid, mentioned on Monday. That was his argument why we need a Super League, because TV rights are going backwards. So where's that money coming from? Maybe a digital platform, maybe they would see possibility to make money there. But you're talking probably an investment of around about 10 billion euros over three years for a product that's not proven in a time of incredible economic uncertainty, and with the very strong likelihood of a boycott from pre-existing fans.

An organised boycott, not just not interested, but actually campaigning against it. So the finance of it just makes no sense and it was never explained. There was never any detail given. And Perez was there saying, oh, we will make solidarity payments to the teams who are left behind.

But how much? Well, we haven't decided that yet. But for how long? Is it guaranteed? Well, we're still talking about details. So why have you launched it if you're still talking about details? The PR of this was horrendous. As you say, there's plenty wrong with the present system. It needed weeks of pointing that out and saying, this isn't working. We need to change. We need to change. There was none of that. The PR war was lost in 15 minutes. It was an extraordinarily inept attempt to launch something. So, I mean, they've got to put all that right. But the other thing that occurred to me, because I sort of thought, well, it is odd that we've never had a breakaway league before. How has FIFA held this together for 117 years? How is

that possible? No other sport has done that. And so I thought, well, there has been one Super League. Do you know the story of the El Dorado League in Colombia? Oh, tell us. So it's an incredible story. I think 9th of April 1948, the Colombian opposition leader, the liberal leader, Jorge Elicier Gaitan,

leaves his office. He's expected to win the next election. And he's got a meeting scheduled with, of all people, Fidel Castro later that afternoon. But he goes out to get lunch before his meeting with Castro. Castro's 21 at the time, just a Cuban lawyer. And he's assassinated on the street on his way to lunch, which the Colombian government quite rightly realised

this is going to cause civil war, which it ultimately does, and a quarter of a million deaths in the 10 years that follow. But the Colombian government's response to this is is let's distract the people by setting up a massive football tournament so in four months they put together a professional league the first national professional league in colombia and this happens to coincide with a player strike in argentina and so you have colombian businessmen going with briefcases full of cash to buenos aires to lure away these Argentinian stars to persuade them to break their contracts. And this then spreads across the world. So you

get Uruguayans, Paraguayans, Brazilians. You also get five British players who go, including Neil Franklin, who was an England regular. I think there's 13 Hungarians go. There's sort of 20-odd go from Europe. And the players are being persuaded to break contracts. So FIFA outlaws the league. And it sort of staggers on. If for two or three years it's really successful, really high quality of football, they do a deal with FIFA that's, okay, we will start to respect contracts. People will return by 1954.

So in 1954, partly because the violence has got so bad and partly because the money runs out, the league ends. But for five years, it's an incredible standard of football. But the difference between then and now is that back then, players were downtrodden. Players were desperate for money. The players strike in Argentina. There was industrial action in Uruguay as well

because they weren't being paid enough. English players at the time, I think the maximum wage then was £15 a week. And there was also the retain and transfer system, which basically gave the club complete power to stop replaying for any other club. So the players were desperate to break that. Neil Franklin quadrupled his wage because he went from £15 a week to £60 a week, but he's also given £2,000 in a signing on fee. So it would have taken him three or four years at Stoke to earn that. It's just given to him in a lump sum.

What we're seeing with players now is they're incredibly well remunerated. And their immediate reaction is, why not? Why are we not being consulted? Why are you doing this behind our backs? And they are genuinely scared of losing the right to represent their country, the right to play in a World Cup. But also, they've got a very good position at the minute. They're getting paid a lot of money. Why do they want to take a risk to move to this new entity,

particularly when they know the new entity will almost certainly put in place a salary cap so that the Petro clubs don't have the same advantages that they have in the present system? So the huge difference now to 1948, I mean, there are many differences, but the players are in a very different position. It is not in the interest of the players now to join a rebel league, which it was back then. Yeah, that's the interesting thing about the North American model, which is imperfect, is that there, there is a salary cap and there's a draft. So it strikes me this new Super League had all the, call them disadvantage if you want, of the kind of North American very corporate

system and of the unbelievable free marketeering of the European system. It was a pretty dangerous looking hybrid. Yeah, and I guess it comes down ultimately to what do you think sports should be? What should a football club be? Should it be a tool for making money? Is it purely the business of entertainment? Or does a football club represent something more than that? I've sort of always had this romantic idea that for all its many, many faults, there is still something romantic about that.

Part of my identity is bound up with Sunderland Football Club. And when Sunderland win a game or lose a game, that is somehow projecting the identity of my town and my background. And there's a whole amount of my relationship with my family, with my home, bound up in that, which I think you can never get in a franchise model.

I was hoping you were going to give me a pause to insert the joke there about Sunderland winning a game. Yeah, well, four games without now, but we're not going to go automatically. But you know, when Sunderland fans, when they got to the playoff final and the Chequered Trade final two years ago, even the Chequered Trade final, which for people who don't know, is a pretty crappy cup competition for teams in the third and fourth flights, and the academy teams of top flight teams nobody really should care about but 30 odd thousand 40 thousands came down to london took over to falgar square and covent garden

because this was a chance for sunderland to express itself on a national stage to say yeah we might not have the mines we might have the shipyards we might not economically matter at all anymore but we are still here remember us you sense that pride and that projection and football is pretty much the only prism that Sunderland has and other post-industrial northern cities have to project themselves to the world. But sorry, to go back to your point about this awkward hybrid, if you're starting from scratch and you're setting up a franchise model,

which you see, for instance, in the IPL, the Indian 2020 cricket, you start off, you get bids from the city saying, we want a franchise in our city, and you spread them out. You don't have two teams from Delhi or two from Mumbai. In Australia, for the Big Bash, they do have two from Sydney and two from Melbourne to try and generate some rivalry, but

Australia is an unusual case of very few population centres. If you're creating, say, a 32 franchise model across Europe, you don't stick three of them in London and two of them in Manchester. That makes no sense at all. So the problem of trying to take this organic model that's grown up over the course of 160 years and sort of shove it through a template of a franchise, it just doesn't work.

It makes no sense. You get these very strange imbalances. How can it be a European league if of the 12 teams who signed up, only three countries are represented? It is challenging. I would like to finish by asking you, the politicians started jumping up and down on this because they saw that rarest of things in the political world. They saw an easy win and they saw broad popular support for something. So they were slavering. What, if any, has the role of old fashioned politics, passing actual laws through parliament, been in this story of football?

Almost nil. And that is a real sadness, I think. The political situation is, I think, more complex than we're seeing. Again, I've got to be slightly careful what I say about this. I'd be interested to know if anybody from the government spoke to any of the English clubs involved in this last week. And I'd be interested to know how those conversations went. But yeah, a very popular passing bandwagon, everybody leaps aboard, brilliant. And there's talk now about a full review of football and about trying to guarantee some kind of fan ownership,

which is a great idea, but it should have happened 40 years ago. How do you do it? How do you take a business worth a couple of billion pounds and forcibly nationalise part of it? I mean, it's what Christina Kirsten was doing with the oil fields in Argentina. It's really not a popular move or an easy thing to do. It should have been recognised much earlier that football clubs are not normal businesses. They do have a community role. From a very sort of, almost a trite point of view, look at how football clubs have become the people who organise food banks. Why is that the role of football clubs

to organise food banks? That's ridiculous. So they are modern businesses, but quite how you enshrine that in law, how you guarantee that, I don't know. My suspicion is that this review will happen and recommendations will be made and absolutely nothing will happen because the bandwagon's moved on and it's too complicated and too difficult but what could happen is legislation could be introduced to prevent a breakaway i think that is possible that you could say you know these are community assets and they must be retained within an english framework and i think that is possible to do legislatively but whether it happens or not i'm skeptical i always thought the smart move for the big clubs

was to just colonise the Champions League and just force it to become the thing that you wanted to become, which looked like it was going to happen. It kind of has happened. Yeah, exactly. That has happened,

but not in England. I think that's the problem. If you're Real Madrid, you're 99% certain to be in the Champions League and getting those revenues. Juve, Bayern Munich. Bayern Munich are an interesting example

because they are rapaciously capitalistic. But because of laws in Germany, they're 51% fan-owned and they're fans of a militant against what they see as the over-corporatisation of modern football. So the reason Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, Borussia Dortmund may not have been invited,

but we're assuming that they're one of the three who refused with PSG. The reason why Bayern didn't agree is because they would have had to go to a vote of their members who would have turned it down absolutely. They knew they couldn't sign up until there was a fait accompli,

at which point you have to join them. So the point I was making, and you see this this season, in England, because we still have notionally six big teams, but also the likes of Leicester and West Ham, Everton, who can make something of a challenge, finishing the top four is not guaranteed.

I mean, by definition, if you have six big clubs, two of them are not going to finish in the top four. So even Liverpool, who won the league incredibly impressively last season, who won the Champions League a year before that, there's a very good chance they won't finish in the top four this season. And I guess if you're a hedge fund manager from New York he doesn't really grasp that or Boston I think he's from

Boston isn't he then you can see why that's incredibly disconcerting and you don't quite understand why that's the way it should be. Champions League with eight English clubs problem sorted Jonathan you never know Sunderland they've got shout in that case you might just get their Champions League football for the first time yeah I think we're way off that yet. We do now have our Swiss billionaire owner now, so we're moving in the right direction. Oh, don't talk to me about billionaire. For the people listening to this abroad,

the excitement around some weird nameless billionaire buying your club. As a Forest fan, I've been there and I've got the t-shirt. Thank you very much, Jonathan, for coming on, giving so much of your time. Tell me how everyone can listen to more of you or read or engage more with your stuff. Well, I write for The Guardian regularly,

write for Sports Illustrated, and I write books. So Inventing the Pyramid is probably the best known of those, which is a history of football tactics and how they evolved. I mean, really, it's a story about how information travels. It's not a dry tactical textbook. Don't think that. But it's brilliant. It's great. Or, you know, if you want to learn more about Argentinian football,

I wrote a history of Argentinian football called End of dirty faces which again it's really about telling the story of argentina through football so yeah there's plenty of books if you look for me a lover of history and football you're welcome on this podcast anytime man thank you very much cheers thank you really enjoyed that i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review,

purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you