LAST week the media was alive with images of football fans cheering in the streets and celebrating the supposed collapse of ESL, the much-despised European Super League.

The most frenzied reports talked of “fan power” implying that the core values of football had been preserved and that supporters, backed by players, had rallied to stop the breakaway juggernaut in its tracks.

Well, you can tell that to the ghost of Bill Shankly. It is a fiction that not even the most imaginative dramatist would invent.

There may indeed be a thing called “fan power” in the same way that there is ­“customer choice” in a ­supermarket but to believe that the ­beautiful game was even momentarily saved is pure romanticism.

What we witnessed in the last few weeks was classic kite-flying, the elite clubs from the big leagues in Europe are testing Uefa about how far they can push their own agenda. They have argued for a closed-shop league for years, and now they intend to push harder to get it or to negotiate concessions that advantage only them.

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Football is a game that has long since sold its soul. It is never going back to ­basics and all we have left are the ­memories. It was not a victory for fan power but rather a road bump on the way to another ­horrible inevitability.

Football has gorged on the rules of ­global capitalism for decades now and last week was just a spasm in the death throes of what we once thought was the people’s game. As fans gathered outside grounds to protest, it was not the peasants’ revolt nor the Poll Tax demonstrations, it was supporters of fabulously wealthy clubs who want to squeeze even more juice from the wealthiest national leagues.

The European Super League tried to rush forward its big plan and so exposed some of the cardinal concepts of free ­market capitalism. The inconvenient fact that they failed, does not mean that they are not already regrouping and destined eventually to win.

First up, they are determined to ­minimise and eventually eliminate ­competition. By excluding clubs from smaller nations they have successfully ­denied once successful European clubs like Ajax and Feyenoord of the Netherlands, Celtic of Scotland, and Benfica of Portugal. By defining Europe by its western landscape, they also effectively exclude teams like Zenit St Petersburg, Sparta Prague, Dinamo Zagreb from Croatia and FC Dynamo Kiev from Ukraine. They are shaping a cartel not a league.

Scottish Football is far from perfect and at its worst it has flirted with some of the European Super League’s affronts to ­democracy but what Scottish football has in part achieved, is a pyramid system that allows new blood. The Super League intends to restrain new entrants to market and create a cartel of clubs whose self-preservation is paramount.

Ross County are now a Scottish Premiership club, Inverness Caley Thistle are a successful Championship side and Annan Athletic in League Two. It is not so long ago that they were seen as ­peripheral clubs from the marginalised regional leagues across Scotland. Each division within Scottish football has a similar ­story to tell, for example new entrants Cove Rangers are currently on Partick Thistle’s tails in what is a fascinating four-way title fight with Falkirk and Airdrie in Scottish League One

One of the unfinished pieces of business in this Covid-ravaged season has the potential to bring even more new ­entrants, the play-offs that would allow ­either Brora Rangers or Kelty Hearts to do battle with Brechin City for senior league membership.

Closing the doors to new entrants and creating obscure rules to shelter wealth is a core concept of the free-market – no laws, encumbrances or red-tape should restrict the freedom to trade.

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Another central plank of the Super League strategy was born in American sport where the franchise concept is ­already well established. Although Florentino Perez and Andrea Agnelli, presidents of Real Madrid and Juventus respectively, are the architects of the European Super League they listened closely to American club owners, Malcolm Glazer of Manchester United and John Henry of Liverpool.

THE Super League already has mighty backers, and the US financial giant JP Morgan was entrusted to handle investments and cradle the cash. The investment has not gone away, and the money will return another day. It may deceive some fans but many already know that when it comes to the bottom-line, they are less valued than the sweeping markets of China, India, and South East Asia where the potential for growth is phenomenal.

To rhapsodise about Jock Stein’s Celtic or Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest is to give ground to the prison of nostalgia. It might comfort the soul of a young ­Liverpool fan to design banners with ­socialist slogans by Bill Shankly, but ­capitalism is hard-wired to ignore romance as it plans to get inside the bedrooms of faraway kids, in Taiwan or South Korea.

We are frequently reminded of the old Jock Stein quote “without fans football is nothing”. It may seem like an abiding truth, but what exactly is a fan? Stein grew up in an era where working men had a free Saturday afternoon to attend games. He never imagined that fans might become three million people in ­Busan with hand-held streaming devices.

Football has now cleaved into two ­irreconcilable markets – the global and the local. This is particularly challenging for fans of Celtic and Rangers who exist along the faultline, largely dominating local competition but keen to exploit their “brands” overseas.

For those of us who support local Scottish clubs and measure success against more modest benchmarks, the European Super League was at best an irrelevance, and also a timely reminder that big clubs frequently use benevolence as a decoy.

The ESL bosses made the untested and highly questionable claim that the more money they earn, then more would come into the football market and so the more would find its way to lower leagues.

Students of American politics will remember the supposed “trickle-down” economics of the Reagan era, which argued that low taxation of top earners would mean they had more wealth which when spent would filter down through society to the poorest. This was the kind of voodoo nonsense that the Super League were pedalling last week.

Scottish football is a different beast but it is not entirely free of faux benevolence either. One of the debates currently doing the rounds is the so-called colts team issue, whether younger age-group teams from Celtic and Rangers should be allowed to enter the professional league.

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Rather than concede that it is self-serving, the big Glasgow clubs have allowed their many apologists to take to the airwaves and social media claiming it is for the greater good.

Others say it is purely about developing talent, allowing young Scots to succeed and so enrich talent the Scottish national team. This from two clubs who persist in signing players from every corner of the globe which by some magical logic, is not a barrier to local talent.

Football clubs are wonderful story tellers, but they are not always democrats, and they are very rarely socialists.

Those days have long gone.