Even if you're not into sport, or football itself, you might be aware that there's been one massive story going around this week — and people are rightly furious.
Proposals for a European Super League have been met with a colossal amount of backlash this week. The new league would see six leading English Premier League teams (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Tottenham), joining Spain's Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, and Barcelona and Italy's AC Milan, Inter Milan, and Juventus to create a breakaway tournament.
While club owners have claimed the move would "save football" and boost audiences, blaming a year affected by the coronavirus pandemic, fans have expressed anger, even protesting at a match, saying the decision was driven only by greed, and that this separate, exclusive league would shut out other Premier League teams from playing in the top European competition.
The Premier League's all-time leading goalscorer Alan Shearer even told the BBC that the 'Big Six' should be punished if the European Super League goes ahead. "The fans have spoken — we don't want this," he said. And now Prime Minister Boris Johnson has condemned the move.
Over in Los Angeles, The Late Late Show host and major football fan James Corden explained the situation to his audience and staff.
"They have changed a game that millions and millions of people across the world have grown up loving and adoring," explains Corden. "And you might think, understandably, that a European Super League with all of the best teams who compete it in it every season sounds amazing and it is. And the reason that it's amazing is that it already exists: it's called the Champions League."
Corden goes on to explain how important and historic the Champions League competition is, and how the proposed European Super League would remove this opportunity for clubs to compete in place of a "private club where only these self-chosen teams will really consistently be the ones that are in." Corden accused the notably wealthy owners of the clubs of disregarding the hundreds of other football teams across the UK and Europe, along with their fan bases.
"These are the biggest teams in the world and this decision is monumental. And I'm genuinely heartbroken by it, because the owners of these teams have displayed the worst kind of greed I've ever seen in sport," Corden continued. "Many football teams in Britain are over 100 years old, and these teams were started by working class people — dock workers, builders. They were built by and for the communities that they play in, they're not franchises.
"But these new billionaire owners have over the past 10, 12, 15 years have been buying up all the top teams, and slowly but surely they've moved them away from the communities and foundations on which these teams were built," Corden continued. "Yesterday, the realisation basically hit every football fan hard, and it's not just that they don't understand football, or what it means to be a fan of a football club, it was simply the realisation that they don't care...They want a closed shop where the rich get richer."
Corden slammed the statement from the owners of the clubs who'll be included in the European Super League, especially their use of the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification to form it. "Three times they mention the pandemic as a reason to do this, a pandemic that's been just catastrophic for clubs and communities across Britain. It's hard to express like how much these communities rely on football not just financially, which is considerable, but football's like a focal point of a town's hopes and dreams," he said. "The reason these dreams have been shattered and discarded is so that a group of billionaires can buy themselves a bigger boat."
