Florentino Perez insists the idea of the Super League isn’t dusted, despite a majority of clubs opting to pull out from the initiative.
The Super League is far from dead and its clubs have not given up on the idea of the breakaway competition despite having to shelve the project just a few days after it was announced, Florentino Perez has said.
The Real Madrid president, who would have been the new league’s founding chairman, said the clubs behind the Super League will continue working on a way to make the competition work, even if changes have to be made to its format.
Perez said the Super League is on “standby” and the group is open to discussing ideas with European football’s governing body and other entities to help the game amid the coronavirus pandemic. He said he was certain that a “very similar” competition would soon be created.
“We are going to keep working,” Perez told Spanish radio program El Larguero. “We are looking for ways of getting this done. It would be a shame not to get it done.”
The Super League was announced on Sunday but essentially folded after the English clubs involved in the project pulled out on Tuesday amid escalating backlash from their supporters and warnings from the British government that legislation could be introduced to thwart them.
On Wednesday, Atletico Madrid and the three Italian clubs in the project – Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan – also opted out. That left Real Madrid and Barcelona as the only clubs still officially in the new league. Regardless, Perez said no one was really leaving.
“They haven’t left,” the Madrid president said. “We are all still together, thinking of ways of making this happen.”
Perez admitted that they should have explained the project better, and said he was disappointed with the criticism that surfaced everywhere.
“Each president was prepared to speak, but then the next day we got killed” he said. “We weren’t expecting it. It was like we had launched an atomic bomb. It looked like that they already knew about it and were waiting for us.”
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