Soccer’s Super League Back From Dead As Unify League

The contentious European Super League is relaunching with a new name.

A22 Sports Management, the Madrid-based promoter that launched the original league, announced Tuesday it has submitted a new proposal to UEFA and FIFA for the Unify League.

The Super League originally launched in April 2021 with the support of 12 major European clubs, but backlash from fans, the U.K. government, and the Premier League quickly led the English clubs to drop out. “I want to apologize to all the fans, supporters of Liverpool Football Club for the disruption I caused over the last 48 hours,” owner John Henry said when backing out. “It goes without saying, but should be said, that the project put forward was never going to stand without the fans. No one ever thought differently in England.” And despite a favorable ruling in December 2023 that cleared the way for a new league, most of the remaining clubs took UEFA’s side after fan outrage at a prospective closed league.

Twelve clubs originally latched on to the Super League: Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, AC Milan, Inter Milan, and Juventus. Now, only Real Madrid and Barcelona remain publicly committed to the project of a Champions League competitor.

The Super League failed the first time largely because it wanted to establish 15 permanent teams, giving more money and stability to the biggest clubs while making it harder for smaller ones to qualify.

Now, A22 is trying again, and doing away with that permanent model. The Unify League would have free, ad-supported, direct-to-consumer streaming (on a platform called Unify) and a new qualification process based on annual domestic league performance. The promoter also changed its plans to 96 clubs spread among four leagues—which it said Tuesday will be called Star, Gold, Blue, and Union—with 16 teams in each of the first two leagues and 32 in each of the second.

Last December, the European Court of Justice ruled UEFA and FIFA had illegally been “abusing a dominant position” by threatening clubs and players who played in the Super League, setting up Tuesday’s announcement.

“Today a Europe of freedoms has triumphed, and also football and its fans have triumphed,” Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez said after December’s ruling. “We are facing a great opportunity to improve European club football.”

Pérez has close ties to A22, but the company has important opponents. King Charles proposed a bill in the U.K. in November 2023 that could prevent English teams from joining any kind of new league. In addition, the former Super League teams have rejoined the European Club Association. The ECA is chaired by Paris Saint-Germain president Nasser Al Khelaifi. Along with Bayern Munich, PSG was the most notable absence from the original Super League lineup; its Qatari owners also run beIN Sports, a broadcaster that partners with UEFA to air the Champions League.

LaLiga president Javier Tebas has been a steadfast opponent of the A22 project from the start and rejected the new league in typically colorful terms Tuesday.

“Those from A22 Sports are back with a new idea: they produce formats as if they were churros, without analyzing or studying the economic and sporting effects on the competitions,” Tebas tweeted in Spanish on Tuesday. “The television model they propose only favors the big clubs, (and they know it…) while endangering the economic stability of the national leagues and their clubs.”

A22 is also proposing a similar product with 32 women’s teams. The top European women’s teams currently qualify for the Women’s Champions League.