They have paid for the legal advice, and consulted their public relations experts, and the decision after months of plotting is that, in spite of the near-universal opprobrium for the idea, they shall press on. Over the next few days we will be told that this new competition, run for the elite clubs, by the elite clubs, will give football’s pyramid €10 billion in solidarity over the next 23 years. That is the argument they plan to run to convince sovereign governments and the European Union of its merits, although if you believe that the three in charge of this enterprise care about the world outside their tinted chauffeur-driven window then you have not been paying attention.
The basis of (k123 note: a prior "reform" proposal) Project Big Picture (PBP) in October was to distribute the revenue of a diminished Premier League to buy off the rest of the English game, while the elite transferred its chief wealth creation model elsewhere. The authors of that document were giving away the broadcast revenue critical for the likes of Leicester City and Southampton in order to facilitate them earning more at another source. This European project of stupendous greed is the source. One that tolerates no regulator or oversight other than the clubs who seek to dominate the world’s game.
The pressure in recent weeks to agree a public consensus on the Super League and announce its founders has come almost exclusively from Spain where Pérez’s Real and Barcelona are burdened with debts so severe it threatens to take them under. In both cases more than €1 billion with no way out in a depressed pandemic transfer-market. Real are committed to a costly long-term stadium rebuild; Barcelona struggled to meet their six-monthly wage obligations in January. Pérez has long sought to eliminate the financial supremacy of the Premier League, built on the equality that Spain’s Liga will not tolerate, and he has found a way in via the soft underbelly of the American ownerships.
The Glazers at Manchester United, Liverpool’s Fenway Group, and the hapless Kroenke family ownership at Arsenal own the three most valuable heritage pieces of English football. Unlike the US sports franchises under their control whose value and revenue is protected by the closed-shop nature of US sport leagues, there is no such stability in the English game. The jeopardy of the sport is what confers its intrinsic value and also what makes it such a challenge to its owners. Those owners would much rather the Major League Soccer system, where each franchise is guaranteed its place in the league year in and year out and holds its value for an investor.
Although there is a consequence to that too – MLS has high franchise valuations but a paltry annual broadcast deal of €90 million. Football fans can smell the absence of risk and the confected nature of a competition where there is no relegation and they treat it accordingly. Yet this is the model that the great European game would follow.
A Super League is, tragically, a great victory for Pérez, a man who controls Real despite investing no more money in the club than his annual socio fee of €150. So too for Agnelli, the unremarkable scion of one of Italy’s great industrialist families who, like Joel Glazer or that renowned football expert Josh Kroenke inherited all their power and wealth from mum and dad. The Spanish and Italian clubs who have trampled competition in their own leagues have finally unlocked the door to the one competitor whom they could not rein in: the Premier League, where a democracy of sorts existed and the super-majority of 14 meant that everyone shared the decision-making.
) ownership. These debate articles are very interesting to me because we are so conditioned to a closed league structure (fish in water, etc), while this debate clarifies some first principles that we take as given/assumptions of how pro sports leagues are set up. 
