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It’s official. Liverpool are out of the Super League. And they’re grudgingly willing to acknowledge it by way of a limp and lifeless 47-word statement on the matter.
Since we wouldn’t want to steal their thunder completely by writing a lead-in significantly more robust than the statement itself, without any further ado, here it is in all its glory:
Liverpool Football Club can confirm that our involvement in proposed plans to form a European Super League has been discontinued.
In recent days, the club has received representations from various key stakeholders, both internally and externally, and we would like to thank them for their valuable contributions.
It’s not much, and it probably won’t help to mend the newly opened rift between Fenway Sports Group and the club’s legacy fans that has taken place over the past 48 hours as the owners burnt through a decade of hard-earned goodwill pushing a massively unpopular proposal, but at least they’re out.
Now, the question turns to how fans of Liverpool and the other English clubs, both the six that pushed for the formation of a Super League and the rest, react.
It’s all well and good to say this unpopular Super League proposal—a proposal spearheaded by Liverpool, Manchester United, Real Madrid, and Juventus—appears dead, but UEFA’s proposals for an expanded Champions League hardly seem any better.
Meanwhile, the game is rife with festering issues of finances, access, and equality all the way down the pyramid. If there’s a time to try to address any of them, that time is probably now.
And given the unhappiness this debacle has inspired, there does seem a real chance right now for fans of the game to earn real concessions—perhaps even to push for reforms that would include fan ownership based on the German 50+1 model.
For now, though, at least the Super League appears off the table. For the time being at least. Even if the club couldn’t even stretch as far as Arsenal by mentioning the fans or offering any kind of an apology.