A day after Europe’s top 12 football clubs have broken away to join the newly-formed European Super League in a bid to ramp up their earnings and be in a league of their own, fans all over the world are furious. Among the various leagues left behind, fans of the English Premier League—which enjoys a large support base in Mumbai—are especially angry as they think the new mega league will no longer be about the football but just about earning more money for top clubs. 
The proposed ESL includes clubs from three leagues at this stage – English Premier League, Spanish League La Liga and the Italian league Serie A. While Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur are the six English clubs, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid are the three Spanish clubs to have joined. Italian giants AC Milan, Inter Milan and Juventus, have also joined the league. It will have 20 participating clubs with 15 founding members and a qualifying mechanism for the other five teams, who will participate based on their achievements in the previous season.

While announcing the decision, Real Madrid president Florentino Perez, chairman of the European Super League, said the new league is being formed to ‘save football at this critical moment’, according to a BBC report. Forty percent of young people aren’t interested in football anymore and with Covid-19 pandemic, his Spanish club had lost 400 million euros, he claimed. Perez was also critical of the current format of the UEFA Champions League, saying it was interesting only after the quarterfinals. Pitched as an attempt to keep the interest in football alive, the planned new league seems to have backfired, as fans world over are not happy with its exclusionary nature. This has reportedly prompted at least one team to reconsider moving and the UK government to say it will attempt to stop the breakaway.