Exclusive: Super League rebel trio to revive doomed plot with closed-shop concept scrapped

The three remaining European Super League (ESL) rebels will relaunch their doomed project this week with the promise to scrap the original proposal to make certain clubs permanent members, in what is shaping up to another direct attack on Uefa’s pre-eminence in European football.

The Juventus president Andrea Agnelli is due to speak on Thursday at a sports industry summit in which he is expected to outline new Super League proposals from his club – and Real Madrid and Barcelona – that will remove the deeply unpopular idea of permanent members, and replace it with traditional domestic league qualification.

While Uefa considers the ESL dead, and the six original English club members have apologised and accepted fines from the Premier League for their brief and disastrous participation in April last year, it lives on in the minds of the three from Spain and Italy. 

In a document that was authored in September, the ESL backers also claim that their new model will allow the creation of competitive clubs in European cities that do not currently have them – citing Luxembourg and Dublin as examples.

The move to try to relaunch the ESL prefaces a hearing in the European Court of Justice later this year in which the three rebels will challenge what it calls Uefa’s “monopolistic” position on European football. While the three clubs have been dismissed by Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin as “charlatans”, the Super League still exists as a corporate entity, known as A22, and has instructed legal counsel and a Brussels lobby group.

In part of a push to change public perceptions of the ESL, which was abandoned by the six Premier League backers within days of its botched launch, A22 and Agnelli will say this week that it is ditching