 After only 48 hours since coming into existence, the European Super League collapsed. The plan to create the breakaway at European Championship had been concocted by billionaire club owners who assumed they held all the cards and who believed that by acting unilaterally, they could force the hands of the Football Association who opposed the move. How wrong they were and how prophetically incompetent they all now seem. Let's take a quick look at the sequence of events that led to this most dramatic of unravelings. We're going to go through this quite quickly, but it's worth running down. On Sunday at midnight, the Super League was announced with no PR, no public appearance from anyone defending it, just a statement by three teams each from Spain and Italy and Liverpool, Man United, Man City, Chelsea, Tottenham and Arsenal. You can see here the tweet from Liverpool. No one came out. As I said, no one came out to defend this, just a few tweets from a few clubs. However, while the owners supporting the plan were silent, the opponents of the Super League were not. By Monday morning, as we discussed on Monday's show, politicians, pundits and fan groups all came out against the Super League. By the evening, it was the turn of the teams themselves live on Sky News after their game against Leeds. Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp and Vice Captain James Milner were the first to express their opposition to the Super League. On Tuesday, it was the turn of Chelsea's owners to hear the disquiet among the team and fans. Here's goalkeeper Petychek pleading with fans who had blockaded the team coach from entering the stand. Petychek there was saying, give us time, pleading with the fans, give us time for us to sort this out. And the fans didn't need to wait long. And the BBC sports editor tweeted, I understand Chelsea are now preparing documentation to request withdrawing from the European Super League. And once one domino fell, they all began to collapse because not long after that Manchester City followed suit. And then all six of the English teams had quit by midnight. There's an example of the statements that came out Arsenal tweeted the following. As a result of listening to you and the wider football community over recent days, we are withdrawing from the proposed Super League. We made a mistake and we apologize for it. Most dramatic on Tuesday evening was that Manchester United's withdrawal came alongside the news that their chairman would resign with immediate effect, would have been due to resign at the end of the year. But the controversy over the Super League meant that decision was brought forward. So a remarkable unraveling. Aaron, I want to know, were you surprised at how quickly this whole thing fell apart? I think everybody thought it would last longer, with the exception of you. I mean, I think your take was your Insta analysis was, this won't work. But what we knew on the night when the story broke, which is on Sunday, was that contracts have been signed, that people were now in for a penny and for a pound. So you think, well, there is no going back. And there's precedent there in the Champions League, which is the present elite competition amongst European football clubs. That was founded in a similar-ish way. It was expanded beyond just the winners of domestic leagues. That happened in a similar-ish way. So you can see how unilaterally the biggest clubs try and take the game in a certain direction, but it's never been done like this. This unilaterally, with no consultation with players, with fans, with associations, UA for FIFA, the FA, nobody knew about this. So there was a kind of double feeling, right? On the one hand, well, people have signed documents. On the other hand, wow, we've never seen anything like this. How the hell can this go through? I didn't think it would fall apart in 72 hours, though, no. Well, what seemed so surprising, I suppose, is because on Monday, when I had Ash on the show, we were talking about there's some game theory going on here. Who's going to fold first? Presumably, I assumed, they wouldn't have done this. They wouldn't have launched the European Super League, unless they'd put in place the steps which would allow for it to happen. Because yes, there have been dramatic developments since the announcement on Sunday, but they could kind of all have been predicted. None of them were surprising, but they seemingly hadn't foreseen any of them. I don't understand what they expected to happen that would have been different from what actually did happen. So I have to disagree with you there slightly, because what I don't think they foresaw was the intervention of politicians in the way that we did see. So Boris Johnson comes up very quickly. He's saying, I will use a legislative bomb to stop this from happening. He was saying, I will impose potentially new legislation. He didn't say this explicitly. That's the pretext, the pretext, the subtext. I will impose legislation whereby you would lose equity in these football clubs, because he would introduce something like 50 plus one in Germany, where actually fans have a majority of equity in the football clubs, effectively expropriation. Now, that may just have been rhetorical, but if you're Abramovich or if you're the shakes at the top of Manchester City, you think, I don't need this. This is a really valuable asset. I don't need this. You've got a bidding war almost between the leader of the opposition, the prime minister, about who can sort of bring football back to the people. You've got Prince William tweeting about how it's not acceptable. And I think at a certain point, those kinds of political interventions probably did rattle people. And even yesterday, you saw it in the statement that came out from Manchester United, there's been pushback from fans, from players. And I think they did say explicitly from government. And I think the government bit was the bit they didn't expect. And this is folding the way that it has because of the six English clubs, not because they're so wonderful and they're so much more enlightened than the other clubs, but for two reasons, really. Firstly, the Premier League is already very lucrative. AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus need this a lot more than the English clubs do. Their debt piles aren't quite as big, but at the same time, they're not making as much money as they would like. And then secondly, what was super interesting was that the fans most opposed to this tended to be fans of English clubs. And the only club whose fans supported the European Super League, and by a tiny, slitherer majority, was Juventus, like 52-48. But for all the English clubs, it was a tiny minority that wanted this whatsoever. So I think the absence of consent from fans, the intervention of politicians, and the fact that the Premier League is already so lucrative, I don't think the incentives lined up for them. Even though some clubs really did need this to happen, they looked at the European Super League as a kind of bailout. Manchester United and Tottenham in particular, are facing massive, massive debt piles. And they really need this to happen because, you know, the Champions League is not bringing enough money for them to kind of continue as they are. So it applies to Real Madrid, which is why Florentino Perez has been the kind of the driving force with this whole thing. So many dynamics at work. But what's really instructive is that the two English clubs that broke first were Manchester City and Chelsea. And of course, they're the two clubs that are sort of independently wealthy. You know, they're not based on shareholders and debt leverage buyouts and loans from JPMorgan, their own, well, one's astronomically wealthy Russian oil oligarch. The other one is a shake, you know, from the Arabian Peninsula, effectively, a sovereign state that's involved in Manchester City, like the Paris-Azure man. So there are a lot of dynamics at work. And I think that's why that's why the English clubs, you know, pulled away first. The moment the weakest links fell, the whole edifice crumbled, right? The moment Manchester City and Chelsea, who didn't really need it, dropped out, the whole thing fell apart. Apparently, Chelsea and Man City weren't that keen to sign up in the first place. They were incredibly angry at the other clubs who launched it. Because I think, I mean, the subtext for me seemed to be that they assumed that those clubs kind of sorted out some sequence of events that would make this thing actually happen. They signed up because they didn't want to be left out of it. And they assumed that the Manchester United and the Juventuses and the Real Madrid had sort of worked out a way to make this work. And they clearly hadn't. I want to focus on the players for a second. We showed you a couple of clips of Petticec and James Milner. They weren't the only players to speak out against this before the whole thing collapsed. Manchester United's Marcus Rashford tweeted this image, which says football is nothing without fans. This is a quote from Sir Matt Busby. And then Liverpool players put out this collective statement at 9 p.m. So this was a statement they all agreed of each other. We don't like it and we don't want it to happen. This is our collective position, our commitment to this football club and its supporters is absolute and unconditional. You'll never walk alone. Aaron, you sort of said that the politicians getting involved was one of the unforeseen things by the owners. I mean, I think they probably could have foreseen that because if the fans hate it, the players hate it, the managers hate it, then there's a real opportunity for politicians to come in and also hate it. But the collective action among players was really interesting because I think what many people assumed was, look, these people won't bite the hand that feeds them. They're essentially paid by, well, either these oligarchs or these businessmen who wanted to join a super league, but they came out and felt able and willing to speak out against it. Were you surprised at how, I suppose, vocal players and managers were? Yeah, that's super interesting. And again, that's another stakeholder, which wasn't consulted. And I think you're right. I think they certainly wouldn't have seen what has happened. I think a lot of it does ball down to changes in technology. And I think particularly with the Glazers, Manchester United was purchased by Malcolm Glazer. He completed the purchase of Manchester United in 2005. And that, you know, presaged huge, huge protests, massive protests, the biggest protests that, you know, I think to this day, I think they're the biggest protests we've seen in sort of elite English football. I could be wrong, maybe I'm forgetting something, but I think they were just giant protests. You know, a whole new club, you know, FC United was founded out of those protests. And it's a perfectly successful, you know, sort of non-league club. It's doing pretty well, lower down the football pyramid. And I think, well, they thought 2005, yeah, there was loads of kickback, but ultimately, we managed to get through that and we bought a club for 800 million. It's now worth four billion. You know, that was definitely a win for us. We've taken a billion pounds out of the club ever since. You know, we managed to buy it with loans guaranteed against the assets of the club we were buying. Wow. I mean, it's almost criminal when you think about the Glazers' purchase of Manchester United, but, you know, they managed to get through it. And I presumed there was a sort of a recency bias, right, which is the last time we did something this absurd. We got away with it and it was very lucrative for us. So why will this time be any different? Well, this time is different because I think of technology, social media. And I think the players lost their inhibitions because they saw Twitter, they saw Instagram, and then, of course, you're seeing television. And it helps that, you know, Sky had a vested interest in screwing this up, probably. I mean, maybe not. I mean, maybe Sky would have, you know, still bid for the TV rights. You know, I don't know. The people have said that, but that's difficult to qualify, but they certainly didn't want it to go ahead. And so you've got on Monday Night Football, Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher, who are very established figures in football punditry saying these things. You've got BBC pundit saying something similar on Sunday Night. So if you're a player, you're looking at the pundits, you're looking at the fans, you're just getting abuse on your Instagram account, whatever you sort of say or do anything. And so I think that does take the inhibitions away. And it's a very different context, 2005, pre-social media, you know, pre-YouTube, pre-Twitter, pre-Instagram. And again, I think that's where the glazes fell apart. And people say, well, surely they foresaw this. You know, I think we really shouldn't overestimate the extent to which these people are detached from reality. The glazes look at Manchester United. I can't speak for John Henry in Liverpool or any of the others. I think John Henry actually doesn't apply to them whatsoever. He did a relatively impressive, I think the bare minimum groveling apology, you know, but he's the only one to really do that. But the glazes are completely detached from reality. They are American. They are the children, the prinslings of an American sports billionaire who really don't know the rest from their elbow, never worked down their lives and look at this football club like a piggy bank. And they thought that this deal with the Super League would make that piggy bank even bigger. And I think their eyes grew bigger than their capacity to fight this fight. Their father was around the last time he wasn't now. So a bunch of things at work. But I think the big, big, big one is how we conduct these debates, the capacity for collective action and growing out of social media just wasn't there 15 years ago. And it makes you think, you know, would the glazes have been able to buy Manchester United in 2005? I would wager after the last week looking at what's happened. No, they would not.