Let the ESL debacle be a warning for money-hungry businessman

For many in business, the initials PR and ESG are anathemas. They simply don’t take them seriously – often, despite professing to the contrary. The specialists in PR or communications or “comms” and ESG or environment, social and governance or goodness or doing the right thing are regarded as peripheral. They don’t receive a place on the mainboard, frequently they’re not afforded a seat on the key executive committee. They’re add-ons, nice things to have but not essential.  

Well, another set of initials should put an end to that way of thinking, once and for all: ESL. If ever there was an example of why PR and ESG matter it was the debacle of the would-be European Super League.  

Within 48 hours of it being announced the new football league of some of Europe’s top clubs was scrapped. Why? Because those involved paid nowhere near enough attention to the public relations and wider impacts of what they were proposing.  

I will wager a pint and a pie (who said I’m not generous) at a football ground of anyone’s choosing that the ESL founders got all the legalities sorted but failed to give due consideration as to how their plan would go down with the fans, excluded clubs, media and politicians. 

They assumed they would get their way, that their desire to form a competition of their own with a guarantee for each of them of a slot for the first 23 years and access to greater fortunes in TV rights would be waved through. 

Sure, they would have said, there is bound to be some dissension but nothing that we haven’t seen before. The other clubs and their supporters won’t like it, the existing leagues and the sport’s authorities will also cavil, but we will win through – as we always do. 

What they did not reckon with was their own fans demonstrating outside their grounds; the game’s governing bodies barring their players from appearing in national teams; their star players voicing their opposition; even their managers expressing misgivings; and the prime minister promising to drop a “legislative bomb” on the scheme. 

As PR campaigns go it was non-existent, a shocker. Not only did the news drop out of the sky and come as a surprise, so no one was prepared, nobody was “softened up”, not one single journalist or pundit had any detail as to why the new league made sense but when it did break, barely any positive justification was offered. We were told it would help those clubs recover the losses they’d incurred from Covid; players’ salaries would be capped; more money would come into the game and trickle down.  

That was all. The ESL architects had not seemingly weighed up the possibility that thousands of businesses have suffered in the pandemic so the desire to plug their own deficits would not impress and make them appear selfish and self-centred – particular as it entailed barring others. Neither did they imagine, apparently, that the world has moved on, that football salaries no longer raise eyebrows, we’ve got used to them. As for more cash entering the game, that would be treated as crumbs falling from their banqueting table.  

Reasons why anyone should “buy” their product were thin. Nor had they foreseen the political reaction to their clever deal-making. They may not acknowledge so, preferring to see themselves as the rightful owners of the game, but football is enshrined as the “people’s sport”.  

For a politician wanting to connect with ordinary folk the prospect of a super-rich bunch setting out to make themselves richer and using football as their vehicle was an open goal. Add to that Boris Johnson’s desire to be hailed as reaching out to the north and Midlands, to those who elected him and to those who might be persuaded to vote Conservative next time, and you had a galvanised prime minister, determined to scupper their plot.  

Then, in this age of caring and togetherness, the vision of billionaires turning their backs on the less fortunate, the smaller, frequently struggling clubs, and rigging their new league so that no one could be relegated, was too much, even for those who have no interest in football.  

Everyone could see the ESL for what it was, and despised it. What is odd is that for supposedly sophisticated businesspeople, who are certainly successful, there is nothing here that wasn’t entirely predictable. JP Morgan, too, as the banking ringmaster for the project, should have known better. But instead of drawing up a carefully thought-out strategy that would head off all the perceived threats, they went their arrogant, tone-deaf way, and lost.  

Worse, they’ve been shamed and all those opponents now have the upper hand, to the extent they’re been dropped from committee positions by the ruling bodies, they’ve lost their say in the running of the game, no one takes them seriously and there is talk of moves to ensure the fans gain majority control of the clubs. 

To think that a week ago, they were presumably crowing that their quest for supremacy would soon come to fruition. The fact it hasn’t and they now find themselves reduced to laughing stocks, is down to their hubris. ESL, three letters that every boss should be made to learn and to remember.