The European Super League has returned – Uefa is just calling it something else

It is probably a source of minor encouragement that the Ricketts family – currently on the shortlist of potential buyers for Chelsea – have promised sceptical fans that they will not join a European Super League. Perhaps, by way of further commitment, the Ricketts will spurn other competitions that do not exist. Chelsea will never play in a future Anglo-Italian Cup. Chelsea wants no part of the Makita Trophy. Chelsea will never enter Pop Idol.

Of course, prospective owners always arrive with a lavish manifesto of pledges and blandishments, lest anybody guess what they actually plan to do once they get through the door. Mike Ashley arrived at Newcastle promising “fun and trophies”, although crucially he never actually specified who for. Meanwhile, Ken Bates would probably have received a far cooler welcome from Chelsea fans in 1982 had he disclosed that within a few years he would be plotting to electrocute them with barbed wire fences.

And so it is probably wise to treat the words of the Ricketts family – currently in smiling PR overdrive after some of their number were revealed to have said some extremely racist and homophobic things – with a few teaspoons of salt. In a way, their pre-emptive rebuff to a European Super League is less a concrete policy and more a form of robotised self-branding. Hello, fellow football lovers. We hear there is a “Super League” you dislike. We too dislike this thing, whatever it is. Be friends?

With the threat of insurrection apparently seen off, we can now chortle at the forlorn attempts of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus to reanimate the original defunct Super League concept, like lonely men continuing to insist that the punctured blow-up doll sitting next to them in Prezzo is, in