‘It still burns’ – The Maradona match that led to the creation of the Champions

When the Super League was launched in 2021, its chairman, Florentino Perez, also the president of Real Madrid, and the other founders didn’t think to invite Napoli.

Aurelio De Laurentiis, owner of the current Italian champions, claimed he wouldn’t have joined anyway. And in classic opportunistic fashion, he used it to his own political advantage.

At the time, Serie A was in talks with private equity firm CVC about setting up a media company to better sell its TV rights around the world. De Laurentiis opposed this. He thought giving away a percentage of future revenue in return for a much-needed instant cash injection after the financial damage done by the Covid-19 pandemic — “crumbs for the starving” — was a bad idea. “I said they were mad.”

So he played Andrea Agnelli, using the then Juventus and European Club Association (ECA) chairman’s ambition to launch a Super League with Perez to sink the CVC deal.

Signing up to it would have meant accepting what was dubbed an anti-Super League clause, which had been inserted on the grounds that an adjacent competition threatened the value of the rights CVC hoped to enhance. “I used Agnelli,” De Laurentiis claimed, “because if the fund bought into the league, he wouldn’t have been able to join the Super League. That’s why he lined up against them.”

Perez followed suit in Spain but, unlike De Laurentiis, was unable to stop CVC and La Liga coming to a similar agreement. At their expected lunch before Napoli host Real Madrid in the Champions League tonight (Tuesday), one expects the future of football to be a topic of conversation.

While Perez and De Laurentiis disagreed on the Super League, these septuagenarian disruptors share a belief that they could manage European football a whole lot better than UEFA does.

Perez insisted the Super League idea “saves everyone, it saves football” because it triples or quadruples club revenue and re-engages the next generation of fans, who are apparently losing interest. De Laurentiis proposed his own Champions League alternative on the basis that “it’s wrong UEFA makes €800million and we don’t know what they do with it”. He suggested: “Let’s put €10bn on the table and make a European league where the top six teams from the top five leagues and another minor league all play against each other once.”

These half-baked conversations have nudged UEFA into reformatting and expanding the Champions League from next season and it isn’t the first time Napoli and Real Madrid have influenced major change.

This is the fixture that made the Champions League as we know it.

One of Perez’s predecessors, Ramon Mendoza, wasn’t a fan of UEFA either. In the autumn of 1987, he criticised the governing body for the “mad decision” to ban supporters from attending the Bernabeu for Madrid’s first-round match against Napoli in the old straight-knockout…