Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish: European Super League was an attempted coup to steal football

BY RICHARD CAWLEY AND ANDREW MCSTEEN
richard@slpmedia.co.uk

Steve Parish has slammed the European Super League and reckons that UEFA need to start acting in the best interests of football.

The news broke on Sunday night that 12 teams had agreed to set up a new midweek competition.

But a furious public backlash saw the six English clubs – Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham – all withdraw by Tuesday evening.

The ESL plan had been for 15 founding clubs to govern the competition and they could not be relegated, effectively locking in huge guaranteed income instead of being reliant on qualifying for the Champions League.

But UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin had threatened to throw participants out of their domestic tournaments as well as banning players from representing their countries.

And Palace chairman Parish described the ESL move as “an attempted coup to try and steal football”.

He told BBC Breakfast: “What was fascinating was the fans, the players and the staff said: ‘We’re going to fight for the right to lose. We don’t want to be in some kind of elite where there’s no jeopardy and no risk’. The best banner I saw [at a protest by Chelsea fans on Tuesday] was ‘we want our rainy, cold nights in Stoke’ – and the miscalculation of this is quite spectacular.

“This has got to be the end of special voting rights, people at clubs who sit next to Mr Ceferin on committees that they shouldn’t be on; all of the privileges, coefficients that award them extra money based on an arbitrary view of history.

“What UEFA need to do now is start looking after the game, and stop pandering to these people and trying desperately to keep them inside the tent – because they’re going to be inside the tent now, whatever happens.

“And the Ajax’s and the Warsaw’s shouldn’t be playing qualification tournaments in the summer when they’ve won their leagues in favour of an Arsenal or Tottenham, who leapfrog an Aston Villa or a Leicester into the Champions League, because it’s better to get those teams in for one year’s TV revenue.

“This is a fantastic day for football, but let’s not rest here, and allow them to bank the gains that they’ve got before. Football fans, they want to win, and they want to win fairly and they want to win well.”

Liverpool’s Jordan Henderson had planned a meeting of Premier League captains for Wednesday with most of the Reds players posting a message on their social media which said: “We don’t like it and we don’t want it to happen. This is our collective position.”

Parish, who was a driving force in the consortium which took Palace out of administration in 2010 as well as securing the freehold to Selhurst Park, said: “We [owners] are here for a limited period of time. Perhaps because I’ve supported this club since I was four years old and I’m a fan, maybe I get it more than anybody else.

“I understand it’s difficult (for owners), there are business pressures on all of us. We need to always remember that – and I think this is a message that people must take on board – we must never see any of this again.

“Let’s separate the people and the football clubs. There’s no animosity that I’ve got, in fact I’ve got nothing but respect for all the fans, and these football clubs and what they stood up for and what they stand for. I’ve been saying for a while this is about a very small group of people, a tiny group of people, that have decided that they know best.

“That actually commissioned research that said something like 72 per cent of the public in Spain wanted this, 59 per cent of the British public wanted it. It’s extraordinary what we’ve been living through, frankly patronising.

“Of course some of those relationships will be difficult to repair because people have lied to us. They’ve sat in committees, haven’t told the truth and haven’t come clean.

“They’ve been off in a kind of Zoom paradise, a Zoom bubble plotting everybody’s downfall and we do want more contrition from them.”