One chief executive said: "The trust has gone completely. We will never forget what they tried to do. They are all running around now telling everyone they had nothing to do with it. It's incredible how some of them are behaving."
Monday 26 April 2021 12:03, UK
Executives from the six English breakaway Super League clubs used this weekend's Premier League games as an opportunity to apologise in person to some of their counterparts at the other 14 clubs.
However, the apologies were not well received.
"The trust has gone completely," one chief executive said. "We will never forget what they tried to do. They are all running around now telling everyone they had nothing to do with it.
"It's incredible how some of them are behaving."
Claims that the executives were not to blame and had not known what was going on at their clubs were not accepted and there was astonishment and bemusement that some of the executives were still insisting that the Super League was a good idea which would inevitably come into existence one day.
Manchester City are the only club who have so far had any success in reaching out to the other 14. Nobody thinks they are blameless but there is a general acceptance that they were not one of the driving forces behind the attempted breakaway.
The 14 clubs are continuing to put pressure on the Premier League to punish the six and they are determined that the events of last week are not brushed under the carpet.
Their united position remains that they can no longer work with the executives involved at the six clubs.
JP Morgan, the US investment bank which was backing the Super League, had been working on plans for the breakaway for two years.
It was providing £3.5bn of financing for the Super League. One of the bankers involved in the deal was JP Morgan Europe CEO and Arsenal supporter Viswas Raghavan.
The American bank provided financing for the Glazer family's controversial leveraged buyout of Manchester United in 2005 and was also involved in attempts to set up a European Super League in the early 1990s.
Gary Neville has urged government intervention to prevent the 'Big Six' repeating what he has described as 'the attempted murder of English football' following the failed European Super League breakaway.
Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester City, Tottenham and Arsenal all signed up to join the league before backing out due to the overwhelming weight of opposition to the plans.
But Neville has warned that a similar breakaway attempt is inevitable and only government legislation will be certain of preventing its success.
"The scary thing is that these people are regrouping back at base," Neville warned. "They are not going away.
"There has to be legislation passed through government. The government are the only people who can stop this.
"It's such an interesting system in this country that 20 or 30 years ago we put the power of English football into the hands of the owners of the biggest clubs. That's what we did but we are going to have to take it off them. And the only people who can do that are government and it has to happen now - more than ever.
"This lot need to be stopped. The ultimate long game is to get the owners out of the clubs. There's no doubt about that.
"But in the short-term there has to be some protection put in place to ensure that they can't go and do what they want with football. Because they want to take it away. They want to maximise their revenue at the expense of football fans and fair and equal competition. That is something that can't happen.
"Last week, and it was severe language, l called it an attempted murder of English football.
"And 'sorry' doesn't wash. It has gone past sorry because it is twice that they have done it. If you were sorry the first time with 'Big Picture' you wouldn't have brought this back. Real Madrid's Perez and Laporte at Barcelona, from two of the world biggest clubs, have told us 'we are coming back'. This lot are not going away, but they need to be stopped."
