Farewell, European Super League; we hardly knew ye.
Beginning with the announcement of your existence on Sunday, you lifted global soccer above your head and promised to send it all crashing down. For less than 60 hours, your international cabal consisting of the biggest soccer brands from England, Spain, and Italy threatened to override the sport’s premier competition, the Champions League, and supplant its central structure of rewarding teams that perform well and punishing those that do poorly. By Tuesday afternoon, your dream of “saving” global soccer by building a permanent dominant caste of teams that, regardless of their performance, would hoover most of the sport’s available money into itself using techniques borrowed from college and professional football and EuroLeague basketball had collapsed. What happened to ye?