The Unify League (UL), previously known as the European Super League (ESL), was a proposed seasonal football competition for clubs in Europe."European Super League promoters launch Unify League, call on UEFA to recognise it", Reuters (17 Dec, 2024) It was supposed to be organised by the European Super League Company SL, a commercial enterprise created to rival or replace the UEFA Champions League. The initial iteration of the league entailed 20 teams, with 15 of them being founding members of the competition. Almost all teams had withdrawn immediately in April 2021 owing to public backlash; by 2025, following Barcelona's withdrawal, only Real Madrid had remained in the proposed competition format, withdrawing in February 2026.
The leadership behind the UL was Florentino Pérez (president of Real Madrid). The other founders, Andrea Agnelli (chairman of Juventus), Joel Glazer (co-owner of Manchester United), John W. Henry (owner of Liverpool) and Stan Kroenke (owner of Arsenal), withdrew shortly thereafter in the face of rejection by their clubs. By 2023, Pérez and Joan Laporta (president of Barcelona) remained the strongest advocates of the UL.
The European Super League announcement in April 2021 was met with significant opposition from various groups: fans, players, managers and football clubs. The league also faced opposition from UEFA, FIFA and some national governments. Critics of the league raised concerns regarding potential exclusivity and reduced competitiveness within the ESL, as the league would consist of high-ranking teams from selected European countries who would be permanent contestants in a semi-closed league format.
The backlash against the announcement of the league's plans resulted in nine of the clubs that were supposed to participate, including all six English clubs, announcing their intention to withdraw. However, eight clubs maintain a degree of involvement in the project as stakeholders. In April 2021, the ESL announced that it was suspending its operations, and a legal dispute followed. National courts have ruled that FIFA and UEFA must not interfere with the development of the ESL.
In October 2022, A22 Sports Management, a company formed to "sponsor and assist" in the creation of the European Super League, announced it would be exploring plans to relaunch the competition. On 21 December 2023, the European Court of Justice issued a ruling that a ban on the ESL could be in conflict with certain European Union regulations.
Background
Concept
In 1968, then UEFA general secretary Hans Bangerter proposed the creation of a new "super-league" competition for European clubs that would replace the European Champions Cup and the Cup Winners' Cup and form the "European Football League Championship", a unique club-competition combining group and knockout matches, a novelty at the time.Published in the UEFA Official Bulletin (September 1968 edition), cf. The proposal was never seriously entertained and, in the same year, UEFA agreed to expand clubs' access to its competitions by creating a third seasonal tournament, the UEFA Cup, whose inaugural season took place three years later. The idea for a unique pan-European club competition was again discussed in the 1970s and gained legal traction at the end of the following decade.
In 1987, Milan, Real Madrid and Rangers executives planned a league competition with a single round-robin format – dubbed a "Super League" by European mass media since the proposed format of the tournament was the same as that used in league championships, contrasted with the format of the European competitions, based on knockout phases since the mid-1950s – that would be more attractive for international television broadcasters, and would ostensibly allow the participating clubs to earn more income for "economic and management guarantees". The competition was supposed to run parallel to the then three European competitions from the 1991–92 season onwards, but the project was abandoned in 1991 after UEFA announced sporting sanctions sine die for the clubs involved. UEFA also reformed the European Champions Cup introducing a group stage for the 1991–92 season, increasing the overall number of games, and rebranding the competition as the Champions League since 1992. The following year, then UEFA president Lennart Johansson proposed, unsuccessfully, to merge the Champions League, the Cup Winners' Cup and the UEFA Cup into a unique championship.
Three years later, Ajax, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester United secretly planned a "Super League", to rival the Champions League. It would have 36 "prominent" clubs split into three groups and a play-off stage for the title at the end of the season. There would also be a second competition for a further 96 teams, called "ProCup", which would replace the UEFA's Cup Winners' Cup and the UEFA Cup. The planned tournaments, based on the North American sports system, would have been sponsored by Italian corporation Media Partners. The project was abandoned after UEFA and its affiliated national associations and FIFA announced sanctions against all involved clubs. In 1998, the concept was still being promoted by Media Partners but it never progressed past the planning stage after UEFA moved to expand the UEFA Champions League. Various other proposals were brought forward but all equally failed to achieve popular approval.
In 2009, Florentino Pérez, president of Real Madrid, began planning for a "super-league competition," stating that the Champions League was too "obsolete and problematic" for the quality of the sport, and was "an obstacle preventing clubs from growing their businesses and developing infrastructure".
In 2018, Pérez began discussions with other clubs in Europe, mostly clubs from Spain, England and Italy, about the idea of a "breakaway" competition meant to provide "strong financial backing" for all the clubs involved. The clubs who participated in the discussions, conducted in secret, were primarily focused on exploring options if UEFA would not produce "reforms" for the Champions League that would be considered as acceptable for them. The idea of a new competition again surfaced in 2020, as big-name football clubs suffered financially from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, especially with ongoing debts. Real Madrid was amongst those hardest hit financially by the pandemic in Spain, which led to Pérez advancing the concept once again. The announcement of a new competition eventually drew interest from American investment firm JPMorgan Chase, which pledged US$5billion towards its formation.
On 18 April 2021, the eve of a UEFA Executive Committee meeting whose objective was to revamp and expand the UEFA Champions League by the 2024–25 season in order to increase the number of matches and revenues. Pérez announced the "formation of the Super League," also referred to as the "European Super League" or ESL, via a press release by the twelve clubs that had signed up to be involved. These included English clubs (Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United, and Tottenham Hotspur), Italian clubs (Inter Milan, Juventus, and Milan), and Spanish clubs (Atlético Madrid, Barcelona, and Real Madrid).
Pérez expressed the "hope" that the new competition would "provide higher-quality matches and additional financial resources for the overall football pyramid", provide "significantly greater economic growth and support for European football via a long-term commitment to uncapped solidarity payments, which will grow in line with league revenues", would appeal to a new younger generation of football fans, and also would improve VAR and refereeing. At the time of the announcement, ten of the founding clubs were in the top 14 of the UEFA club coefficient rankings, with only Inter (26th) and Milan (53rd) falling outside. All twelve clubs were in the top 16 on the 2021 Forbes list of the most valuable football clubs; their combined value was US$billion.
Leadership The launch of the ESL included the announcement of the organisation's executive leadership. The table below shows each football executive who became involved in the competition's operations, and the role they'd held within the sport:
PositionNameNationalityOther positionsChairmanFlorentino PérezPresident of Real MadridVice-chairmanAndrea AgnelliChairman of JuventusVice-chairmanJoel GlazerCo-chairman of Manchester UnitedVice-chairmanJohn W. HenryOwner of LiverpoolVice-chairmanStan KroenkeOwner of Arsenal According to reports, Gavin Patterson, former BT Sport boss, was approached to take up the role of chief executive officer.
Format Following the format for the initial stages of the European basketball's EuroLeague, the proposed competition would feature 20 clubs that would take part in matches against each other. 15 of these clubs would be "permanent members", and were dubbed "founding clubs". The founding clubs would govern the competition's operation, while five places would be given to clubs through a qualifying mechanism focused on the teams who performed best in their country's most recent domestic-league season.
Each year, the competition would see the teams split into two groups of ten clubs, playing home-and-away games in a double round-robin format for 18 group games per team, with fixtures set to take place midweek to avoid disrupting the clubs' involvement in their domestic leagues. At the end of these group matches, the top three of each group would qualify for the quarter-finals, while the teams finishing fourth and fifth from each group would compete in two-legged play-offs to decide the last two quarter-finalists. The remainder of the competition would take place in a four-week span at the end of the season, with the quarter-finals and semi-finals featuring two-legged ties, while the final would be contested as a single fixture at a neutral venue. Each season of the competition would feature 197 games: 180 in the group stage and 17 in the knockout stage.
On 15 October 2021, it was announced that the European Super League Company, led by Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, was planning an open league with two divisions of 20 clubs each, intended to compete with the Champions League and Europa League.
Contracts The proposed European Super League (ESL) intended to offer participating clubs uncapped 'solidarity payments', which would increase alongside the league's revenues and surpass the payouts of existing European competitions. According to the league's press release, these payments would amount to "in excess of €10 billion during the course of the initial commitment period of the clubs". Additionally, the founding clubs would collectively receive €3.5 billion to support infrastructure investments and offset the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The proposed payment structure for the ESL included sharing 32.5 percent of commercial revenues among the founding clubs and all 20 ESL teams (including five invited teams), with an additional 20 percent distributed based on club performance. The remaining 15 percent would be allocated according to each club's broadcast audience size. In addition, clubs would be permitted to retain gate receipts and club sponsorship revenue.
The ESL claimed that the league would generate income across football and increase revenues, enabling larger clubs to invest more in smaller clubs through transfer fees. The ESL also offered an annual solidarity payment of €400 million to incentivize participation. The proposal also included a purported solution to the financial control issues raised by UEFA's Financial Fair Play Regulations, although critics disputed the effectiveness of this proposal.