Why the Champions League clubs’ brazen attempt to set up their own closed shop is no surprise

Elite European football's prevailing direction of travel is unmistakable: a walled city drifting away on the high seas

“Half of the world’s surface is unclaimed by any government.” So begins the introductory video on the website of The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit organisation that aims to solve all of humanity’s problems by creating autonomous floating communities at sea. Set up in 2008 by Patri Friedman, the grandson of the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, it has attracted millions of dollars in tech investment, most notably from the billionaire disaster-crab Peter Thiel: Facebook board member, co-founder of PayPal and Donald Trump campaign donor.

For the seasteaders, traditional land-based models of society have finally failed humanity. With the planet overheating, the world’s population growing and nation-states on the verge of meltdown, the only solution is to cut loose, raise anchor, and start your own floating utopia: free of regulation, free of government interference, free of any lingering sense of responsibility towards your fellow humans, and – most importantly of all, you suspect – free of taxes.

If all of this sounds vaguely like the plot of a Simpsons episode (all together now: “There’ll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans, under the sea...”), then be assured that there are plenty of people in the rec rooms of Silicon Valley who take this stuff entirely seriously. Albeit, largely the sort of people who buy powdered protein supplements off the internet with names like Iso-Fuel and Mind Juice, and seem to have derived their entire world view from the one Ayn Rand book they read in college.

And besides, seasteading is really just one of the many manifestations of a broader trend, in which the world’s super-rich are increasingly seeking to insulate themselves against the vicissitudes of the future by seceding from wider society altogether. Already, billionaire survivalists are establishing remote bunkers in places like Kansas and rural New Zealand to protect themselves against the possible effects of climate change. Only on Thursday, meanwhile, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unveiled a plan to build enormous orbiting space colonies using materials mined from the Moon. (Customers who looked at “Building Gigantic Space Colonies” also enjoyed: “Exploiting Workers” and “Not Paying Their Taxes”.)

It thus felt strangely fitting that on the very same day, plans emerged of a dramatic reimagining of the Champions League, developed and crafted by European football’s very own seasteaders. In the new-look competition, the New York Times reported, from 2024 as few as four of the 32 spots in the group stage would be open to qualification. The rest would mostly be occupied by the existing elite drawn from Europe’s five biggest leagues: playing each other all through the week, with clubs from smaller nations consigned to second and third-tier competitions.

The thing is, there is a sort of brutal internal logic to the new proposals, even in their bold, crystalline evilness. The diagnosis of the problems facing European football – a widening gap between the elite sides and the rest, increasingly uncompetitive national leagues in countries like Italy, France and Germany – is correct. But the solution – to parachute the biggest clubs out of their irritating domestic obligations and spirit them away into their own autonomous floating homestead – is an idea that could have been ripped wholesale from the Silicon Valley playbook, a spasm of naked libertarianism explicitly designed to sever the final fraying threads between the elite European game and the pyramid below it.

At which point, a few caveats are necessary. This might still not happen: Uefa are still deep in discussion with the leading European clubs who are pushing the new plan. “At the moment, we have only ideas and opinions,” insists Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin. And it’s entirely possible that this is simply an audacious opening bid, an attempt by the big clubs to secure what they actually want by proposing something so horrific that any compromise will feel like a victory.

But the prevailing direction of travel is unmistakable. In cementing and deepening their own competitive and financial advantage, the big clubs would effectively ensure that the Champions League became a closed shop. You can forget about teams like Ajax or even Tottenham reaching the latter stages of any new competition: with a perverse circular justice, only the very richest will be allowed to thrive. If you want a vision of the future of football, imagine a boot stamping on the face of Donny van de Beek – forever.

Ajax and Tottenham would suffer under the proposed new system (Getty) (UEFA via Getty Images)

It’s easy to write all this off as the preening internal politics of a few jumped-up billionaires. But what’s happening here is more fundamental, its relationship with wider society more than analogous. What links the biggest clubs in football to the Silicon Valley seasteaders to the cologned clowns of Davos to the sequestered offshore tax havens of corporate finance? It’s a growing sense that the fates and privations of others are of no interest to them, other than in the context of their own personal gain. The idea that those at the top are part of something larger – that they are in any way tied to those below them or bear the slightest responsibility for their plight – is simply melting away. Many would argue it did so long ago.

For years, the biggest clubs have been disingenuously arguing a form of trickle-down economics: that creating the best possible elite spectacle is in the interests of everyone, generating revenues that will benefit the sport as a whole. Now, even that pretence is fast being shed, in football as elsewhere. As the writer Naomi Klein puts it in her book No Is Not Enough: “What is worrying about the entire top-of-the-line survivalist phenomenon – apart from its general weirdness – is that as the wealthy create their own luxury escape hatches, there is diminishing incentive to maintain any kind of infrastructure that exists to help everyone.”

In a way, elite football has been floating away from its roots for decades. The pace and physicality of the game, the skill of the best players, is no longer in any way analogous to the game so many of us play in parks and streets and playgrounds. Its practitioners are spirited out of our communities in childhood and raised in hermetically-sealed academies. The immense wealth flooding into the game has funnelled ruthlessly to the top. Consumerism and digital media have turned the simple act of fandom into a sort of highly lucrative rage cult. Throughout all this, we could cling to the consolation that football was still, ostensibly, a fluid system. That in theory at least, any club with a little time and a little luck could rise through the divisions and reach the pinnacle.

Perhaps that’s not been true for a while. But in a future where, say, Barcelona no longer play in La Liga, or Juventus maintain only the most cursory of presences in Serie A, it’ll never be true again. The survivalists will have perfected their utopia. They’ll have realised their vision: a walled city drifting away on the high seas, leaving behind the earthly problems it worked so hard to create.