Outrage About European Super League Is Muffled by Our Cheers

A breakaway league would remake European soccer to benefit a few rich teams, but we will watch it anyway.

Real Madrid’s players pumped fists and exchanged hugs. A scoreless tie at Liverpool on Wednesday night had assured that the Spanish club had taken what it saw as its rightful place in the semifinals of the Champions League. All of a sudden, a 14th European Cup title hung tantalizingly close. No club has quite so much of its identity bound up with the Champions League as Real Madrid. It regards the tournament as its personal fief. Its sees its pursuit of continental primacy as its central, animating force. At much the same time as Zinedine Zidane’s team was celebrating victory, though, the club’s president, Florentino Pérez, was putting the finishing touches to a plan designed, in effect, to destroy the competition forever. Pérez spent the tail end of last week making calls and lobbying support and quieting nerves among some of European soccer’s most powerful executives for a plan years in the making.