A dozen of the world’s richest and most storied soccer clubs on Sunday announced that they had formed a breakaway European club competition that would, if it comes to fruition, upend the structures, economics and relationships that have bound global soccer for nearly a century.

After months of secret talks, the breakaway teams — which include Real Madrid and Barcelona in Spain; Manchester United and Liverpool in England; and Juventus and A.C. Milan in Italy — confirmed their plans late Sunday. They said they planned to add at least three more founding members, hold midweek matches that would put the league in direct competition with the existing Champions League, and begin play “as soon as practicable.”

“We will help football at every level and take it to its rightful place in the world,” said Real Madrid President Florentino Pérez, who was named the first chairman of what the clubs were calling The Super League.

The league they have agreed to form — an alliance of top clubs closer in concept to closed leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. than soccer’s current model — would bring about the most significant restructuring of elite European soccer since the 1950s, and could herald the largest transfer of wealth to a small set of teams in modern sports history.

In its current form, European soccer supplements domestic league play — an English league for English teams, a Spanish one for Spanish clubs — with Continental competitions between the best clubs. The most prestigious of those, the Champions League, brings together the best teams from each domestic league each year to play for the title of Europe’s, and arguably the world’s, best club.

The current system funnels hundreds of millions of dollars of annual television and sponsorship revenue to the world’s richest clubs, who supplement their domestic revenue with multimillion-dollar payouts from the Champions League. But the format also sustains smaller teams in each country, who benefit from the gloss of their encounters with the giants and share in the money those teams bring in from broadcasters.

The new super league model would change that, by stripping the Champions League of its most attractive and most successful teams and effectively walling off the richest clubs in their own closed competition — and allowing them to split the billions of dollars in annual revenue among themselves. According to the Super League’s announcement, the founding clubs will split 3.5 billion euros (almost $4.2 billion) for signing on to establish “a sustainable financial foundation.” The per-team figure means each founding club will receive about $400 million — more than four times what the Champions League winner took home in 2020.

The 12 teams that signed up as founders are, for the moment, limited to a dozen clubs from Spain, Italy and England. A cohort of six teams from the Premier League — United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham — represents the biggest grouping from a single country. Atlético Madrid is the other team from Spain that is said to have endorsed the project, while the Milan rivals Internazionale and A.C. Milan would join Juventus as Italy’s representatives.

Three more clubs will join as founding — and thus permanent — members, organizers said, and a qualifying mechanism will be created to fill the five other places in the 20-team Super League each season.

A women’s league will be launched as well, the announcement said, presumably including the women’s sides of many of the same clubs.

European soccer officials moved quickly to try to block the project. The Premier League condemned the concept in a statement on Sunday and also sent a letter to its 20 member clubs warning them not to take part. Officials at European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, which runs the Champions League, labeled the proposal for a closed super league a “cynical project” in a statement.

The missive was co-signed by the Premier League, La Liga in Spain and Italy’s Serie A, as well as the soccer federations of each country. Within hours, France’s federation and the French league had added their voices to the growing opposition inside key European soccer circles. Politicians, including Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, also weighed in to denounce the plans.

But UEFA was taking the threat seriously. Its leaders spent the weekend in discussions about how to block the plan, including banning the breakaway teams from their domestic leagues and blocking their players from competing for their national teams in events like the World Cup. European officials also pointedly reminded the prospective super-league clubs (and, effectively, their players) that soccer’s global governing body, FIFA, has backed their threats of expulsion.

FIFA on Sunday expressed its “disapproval” of the concept of a closed league, but refrained from the type of threats being lobbed by top officials in Europe.

“We will consider all measures available to us, at all levels, both judicial and sporting in order to prevent this happening,” the UEFA statement said. “Football is based on open competitions and sporting merit; it cannot be any other way.”

https://twitter.com/realmadrid/status/1383909135054299136

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/sports/soccer/super-league-united-liverpool-juventus-madrid.html