FOR me, one of the most genuinely spine-tingling moments of over 30 years of watching football was that when Leicester City, having just been crowned champions of England, when they had been tipped to be relegation fodder, celebrated their improbable Premier League title win.
Their King Power stadium home was a montage of blue flags, fox symbols to depict the club image and triumphant fans were enthralled as operatic legend Andrea Bocelli delivered a spine-tingling rendition of Nessum Dorma.
For football fans, remember it. Remember too when Nottingham Forest went from promotion to the top flight to European champions in a heart-beat, when Aberdeen were the best of the best in the European Cup Winners Cup.
Remember it, and all the other myriad stories of the underdog's triumph well. If the plans for a European Super League do come into existence, those fairytale champion stories will not become just unlikely; they will be, literally, impossible.
Impossible because the Have's of the European football landscape have gobbled up even more from the 'Have Nots'. In the pursuit of their ill-conceived European Super League, they have thought about the lining of their own already bulging pockets.
Football's ugliest example of pull the ladder up Jack. It's hard to remember a plan for the game's future so universally castigated as this one. Not only is the plan to make it a closed shop, but it'll put the security gates around it too to keep others out.
What is sport if it is not the challenge to triumph or even survive? For those who in any Super League structure under current plans, struggling in the lower reaches, there will not necessarily be any great worry. If the powers that be were to get their way, the position of that struggling club on the gravy train would still seem to be perfectly secure.
There is zero merit in that from a sporting perspective. Not only that, but for clubs outside the gilded company, clubs steeped in their own tradition, would in essence be demoted to the ranks of the also-rans, only able to look through the window of the castle at the banquet of those at the top table.
What would the figures associated with some of these Super League-advocating clubs make of it? Indeed would Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly or any of the rest even recognise 'their' club now?
One way or another, the fear which I expressed in a radio interview on the subject this morning is that - whether or not this plan goes ahead or not - the genie has escaped from the bottle.
For these clubs involved in this plan from across Europe, there can't really in all truth be any going back.
We know what they are committed to and it is not their tradition, their homes, their domestic heritage. The beautiful game, for many has now already come what may from this affair, lost much of its allure.
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