ECA helps clubs flex their muscles and increase their influence

Something of the ridiculousness of modern elite football could be found on the streets of central Vienna on Monday night as hundreds of the game’s power-brokers were escorted across the city to make sure they didn’t miss their dinner. Oliver Kahn was hugger-mugger with Michael Ballack, Uefa president Alexander Ceferin was being pursued by the Leeds owner Andrea Radrizzani, and Ajax’s Edwin van der Sar was trying to find out whether Roman Abramovich had been poisoned. They were all part of a cohort that resembled a bunch of exchange students as they followed a big sign saying “ECA” to a grand restaurant where the food was later described as “disappointing”.

The European Club Association is, depending on who you listen to, the secretive power broker at the heart of the continental game or a collaborative collective that seeks to make clubs’ voices heard amid the grinding bureaucracies of football’s governing bodies, Uefa in particular. This week they were holding their general congress in Sigmund Freud’s home town, a year on from apparently embracing their own death drive.

From the heart of the ECA had come the idea of the European Super League, a prospect that sought to offer “significantly greater… support for European football” by placing its biggest clubs in a competition specifically closed to the rest. That idea never quite became reality and this year the ECA, according to its new leader, Paris Saint-Germain’s Nasser Al-Khelaifi, was able to declare that that the Super League, in fact, “does not exist”.

Ongoing legal proceedings in the European court of justice may suggest otherwise, but the point Khelaifi was really making was that he felt confident enough that his organisation would not be split should such an