In this weekend edition of In Focus we discuss sports and look at the controversial rise and rapid implosion of the European super league.
Right off the bat, there are a couple of odd things about this story. The first is that it seemed to run an entire cycle in just a few days. Plans for the super league or ESL as it was dubbed, were announced last weekend. The backlash by players, fans, pundits, nearly everyone involved in football was so intense and so immediate that it became clear in just a couple of days that this was a non starter and would have to be wound up.
The other unique thing about this story is that in an era of corporate control over sport this was a huge and clear victory for fans, for the intrinsically local sentiment in football prevailing over this attempt to create a closed league of superpowers.
So what was the ESL, why did it fail, what has been the fallout of that failure and is the idea now dead or could it rear its head again in the future? These are the questions we’ll take up in this episode.
Guest: Ashwin Achal, Sports Correspondent, The Hindu