The Tempest ... or Much Ado About Nothing?

My teacher said, that everything in life, comes down to a Shakespeare play. So, is the Super League, 'The Tempest' or 'Much Ado About Nothing'? My view is, it's somewhere in-between...

Those well-salaried place-holders at FIFA and UEFA seem to have no sense of irony, when they explode into apoplectic rage at businessmen being... well... businessmen. If you encourage foxes into the chicken coop it's never going to end well.

Let's be clear, I am firmly against the Super League which has been announced; However and it's a big however, this is a problem which could and should have been addressed years ago.

The Champions League has to make money. It must have been clear, that the armchair soccer fan in the Far East is unlikely to tune in to a contest, between the team placed 2nd in Finland and the winners in Montenegro. However, he, and increasingly, she, IS likely to tune in, to Everton v Feyenoord or Aston Villa v PSV.

So, arrangements should have been made 20 years ago, to admit the 'nearly men' of England, Holland, Germany etc. to the 'VIP section', which is the Champions League. I suspect that Barca and Real would have been only too pleased, to have come across Everton, Aston Villa or West Ham in the early stages. Not only would those teams provide a competitive contest and a good TV audience, but they would have taken 10,000 fans, who would have spent their money in Spanish bars and Spanish hotels.

But the bloated bureaucrats of Zurich and Basel, were too slow and conceited to see what was coming, with the globalisation of football.

They already had a good and competitive product; it just needed tweaking, but they missed their moment.

The Europa League was an inadequate sop to the '2nd rank' clubs of the bigger countries. It was never properly funded and it took 19 matches to get from qualifying to winning. No wonder, many English clubs saw it as the 'curse' of the Europa. In 2008, Rangers made the final of the Europa League and, famously, received less prize money than Celtic, who went out in the 1st round proper of the Champions League.

So UEFA allowed this sore to fester over many years. Then, came the 'big money'. American and Russian investors bought football clubs, not because they had supported them as a child, but as ruthlessly efficient money-making operations.

The likes of Stan Kroenke and Abramovitch don't put a billion dollars into a venture because it's a plaything; they intend to see, at some point, a very considerable return on their investment. And, they want their asset to be saleable.

Large-scale investors like certainty, predictability and a continuous income stream, against which they can, if necessary, borrow.

They almost certainly will have similar scale investments in other parts of the world e.g. Fenway Sports, with the Boston Red Sox.

Fenway will have done their sums and realised, that their 'armchair' fans in China and the Far East, buy more merchandise and pay for more TV viewings, than anyone on Merseyside possibly could. Even Klopp, said he was stunned, when LFC played in Hong Kong and 60,000 people in Liverpool tops turned up.

Therefore, they [Fenway] don't actually care, if all the fans in Liverpool boycott them and move away; these are the lowest 'dollar per head' fans in their world; and Fenway will cry crocodile tears for a week, before putting up the prices of their replica kits in Singapore.

The money men regard us Scousers as rather 'quaint'; we're OK to add a little spice and colour to the proceedings, but at the end of the day, we don't spend much, so we can be quietly jettisoned.

So, what's to be done? Well, a knee jerk 'get rid of the traitors' reaction, though understandable, would probably be the worst thing possible.

Why? Because these are shrewd businessmen; they will have anticipated and factored into their calculations, the outrage of supporters and they will, in my view, be quite willing to be expelled from their 'home' leagues.

To declare a completely separate League structure, would be currently too radical and possibly unlawful. They will wait and then say, 'We had no choice, we were thrown out'. Make no mistake, the longer term plan of the Twinkling Twelve IS to establish a totally separate entity, with its own TV and streaming deals.

At that stage, the rest of us will have to decide, whether to 'beat 'em or join 'em'. It won't be an easy choice. For the immediate future, while the 12 stay within the present structures, this is not a disaster. Five years from now, however, existentially vital decisions will have to be made.

There may be some comfort to be had from cricket. Kerry Packer and the IPL have done something similar. The IPL is now, arguably, in terms of a TV audience, the biggest sporting show on the planet. And yet, Test Match cricket is thriving. All 5 days of the India Test at Old Trafford in September are sold out already. Live attendances for the county 20-over tournament in summer 2019 topped one million. A live-stream from the Oval of a Surrey-Middlesex match recently, attracted 240,000 viewers.

The one thing I think the 12 had not anticipated, was the direct involvement of governments; Both Johnson and Macron have said they are ready to enact legislation to protect football, if necessary. That could be a game-changer.

So, what do we, as Evertonians do? Well, as they say: 'Keep Calm and Carry On'. For the moment, we should encourage the Dirty Dozen to stay within the existing league structures; and we should see where the cards are going to fall, before we take any action.

This is the moment, to stress and trumpet the fact that we are 'The People's Club'; there will be thousands or even millions of disenchanted fans around the world, who will rally to that idea and find us their ideal port in a storm.

But, let's not kid ourselves; things have changed forever this week and will never be the same again. The wolves have thrown off their disguises and are now running amok amongst the poultry!

The people who watch their TVs and screens in China and America are those who now count. Those who attend religiously at grounds in northern industrial towns, are neither here nor there.

So, let us hope, that in Shakespeare's words, we don't sell out to 'The Merchant of Venice' we can enjoy 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and we end up with 'All's Well that Ends Well'.

Nick Ryan.

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