How the Super League Fell Apart

Frantic phone calls, secret meetings and high-stakes threats: The inside story of how a billion-dollar European soccer superleague was born, and then collapsed, in less than a week.

LONDON — For 48 hours, soccer stood on the brink. Fans took to the streets. Players broke into open revolt. Chaos stalked the game’s corridors of power, unleashing a shock wave that resonated around the world, from Manchester to Manila, Barcelona to Beijing, and Liverpool to Los Angeles. That internationalism is what has turned European soccer, over the last 30 years, into a global obsession. The elite teams of western Europe are stocked with stars drawn from Africa, South America and all points in between. They draw fans not just from England, Italy and Spain, but China, India and Australia in numbers large enough to tempt broadcasters across the planet to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights to show their games. But while soccer is now the biggest business in sports, it remains, at heart, an intensely local affair. Teams rooted in neighborhoods and based in small towns compete in domestic leagues that have existed for more than a century, competitions in which the great and the good share the field — and at least some of the finances — with the minor and the makeweight.