The Super League Is Gone. What Now?

The plan hatched by Europe’s elite clubs was wrong on almost every level, but its architects got one thing right: Soccer’s economy, as it stands, does not work.

Sign up for Rory Smith’s weekly newsletter on world soccer, delivered every Friday, at nytimes.com/rory. After all that, there is one thing we still do not know. We know what the dozen venture capitalists and industrialists and petrochemical princelings behind the Super League intended to do. We know what the future they had mapped out would have looked like. We know, or we can at least imagine, the damage they might have done. What we do not know, not really, is why.