The Superlega is the “secession” of the rich and the definitive passage of football from sport to TV show, which can do without the fans at the stadium as long as, from home or in the pub, they continue and see the games and pay the season ticket. . For Fausto Bertinotti, former president of the Chamber and Rossoneri sympathizer, the project of the 12 most titled and indebted clubs in the world “is a sign of the times”. “The secession of the rich in football – Bertinotti said – is accompanied by two facts, full of consequences. The first is the definitive transition from football from sport to show. A model in which it is no longer the fans who go to the stadium to support the team but users, subscribers to TV channels, who watch and cheer in front of the screen “.
“Then there is a more general fact linked to the progress of society: trade wars become a manifestation of what in the last century was the class conflict which, however, has reversed the direction of travel: no longer from below ‘other, but vice versa. And in the specific case of the Super League, of those who are very, very high against all those who are below. It is an alarming clash, not only the institutions like Fifa and Uefa that govern football and that are hit by this earthquake, but also significantly the world of politics “.
“It struck me a lot – he continues – that Macron, Johnson and even Draghi immediately took a stand against this secession. Because all three know very well that an alliance between finance and technology can revolutionize, indeed build, a new market, by escaping to the general rules of the market and even doing without the State and its articulations, primarily the government “.
‘Now we will also do without the national team’ – ‘No Draghi? If you do without stages, you can do without governments’
“I can do it – adds Bertinotti – who thought of the Superlega thinks because I have a planetary show to sell, I have someone who finances the project, so I’m strong. The fans? They will follow us, you will see, no longer at the stadium, but in front of the TV . Did the leagues have their own history, a tradition, a deep-rooted society? Okay, water of the past. Now let’s replace the local dimension with the global one. And the national football team? Well, it can be done without. The subjects of new technologies they will soon adapt to the new canons.
“It doesn’t matter that Fifa, Uefa, national governments, supporters and the world of sport are against it. The risk – and here we return to the firm stance of Macron, Johnson and Draghi – is that the attack that the football, tomorrow it can happen to the institutions, or that finance and technology can do without stadiums as well as governments “.
Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, one of the promoters of the project, warned that if the great teams do not earn more and cannot redistribute resources to large, medium and small and football will die. “I am familiar with this discourse is the ‘trickle’ theory so dear to liberalism: we allow the rich to get rich as much as they want and the income produced will trickle down towards the middle class. A failed theory that, as we have seen, has increased dramatically the gap between rich and non-rich, exponentially widening poverty. But it is clear that Florentino Perez’s is only a captatio benevolentiae “.
‘Regressive innovation, it evaporates the people and replaces them with the users’
“For some time – underlines the former Speaker of the Chamber – football has changed its nature. The time of presidents like Agnelli, Moratti or even Berlusconi, who had an economic enterprise and among these the football team was just one of the family businesses , it is part of an outdated reality. Today, just look at Andrea Agnelli, there are those who deal only with society. As long as football was only a sport, the patrons of the past would have needed the consent, of the people, or rather of the fans filling the stadium This operation evaporates the people and replaces them with the users.
The Covid, which imposed the closure of the stadiums, emptied the stands and transformed football into a televised event, “was a formidable accelerator of the transformation we are witnessing. Consensus becomes an optional, if necessary it can be built afterwards. , co-opting the users who will pay you for the television subscription. Finally, it seems clear to me that the emptying of the stadiums has similarities with the loss of participation that politics has suffered which, coincidentally, like sport or entertainment, counts precisely on participation, presence, direct intervention “.
“How will it end? Who can say? Of course something that seemed impossible just a week ago is instead of a process that has started. Is it a transformation or a destruction? Economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that in destruction there can be an element. of dynamic and the ability to regenerate. To me, more modestly, it seems only a regressive innovation “. (by Luca Rufino)