Just two days after being leaked to the press, the European Super League has already imploded. The proposal for a new pan-European football competition involving a small number of ‘super clubs’ was universally unpopular due to its elitist structure of having 12 large clubs as permanent members of the league. Many felt that this undermined the principles of relegation and promotion — the very thing which makes competitive football… competitive.

“This is surely the equivalent of a Super League. Universities can get caught up in a national bribery scandal yet their prestige increases”

Football fans across Britain protested against the announcement, with rival groups of supporters displaying a rare moment of unwavering unity. British national identity kicked in even further when the plans were linked back to the American corporate owners of several football clubs, including Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool. As we know, nothing enrages the British football fan more than American investment bankers interfering in a sport they routinely mispronounce as ‘soccer’. With the recent violent clashes in Northern Ireland and the growing calls for another Scottish independence referendum, we may have found the vital solution to keep the union together —the anger of the wronged British footie fan.

While this particular Super League is dead in the water, for now, we should realise that Super Leagues have already become dominant in other areas of society. While they are not referred to as Super Leagues, groups of elite academic institutions, such as the Ivy League in America and ‘Golden Triangle’ in the UK show distinct parallels in how they function. The ire of football fans across Europe was stoked by the idea that the clubs they loved were colluding with other elite organisations to rig the rules of the game. Does this sound familiar?

The 2019 college admissions scandal in America and the recent Netflix documentary covering the topic, Operation Varsity Blues, shed significant light on the inner workings of this university Super League. While the scandal was initially focused on several celebrities, such as Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who used bribes and fake test scores to secure college admissions for their children, the Netflix documentary rightly places a sense of responsibility on the universities themselves for their involvement. Institutions such as Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, and the University of Southern California were all embroiled in the scandal, with staff at several universities taking bribes to facilitate admissions.

“I’m not necessarily suggesting that the exact model of relegation and promotion should be imported from football to academia, but a regulatory body with real teeth is needed in the world of academia, just as it is in football”

While the story was widely covered in international media and destroyed the careers of several celebrities, the universities themselves emerged without a scratch. In fact, as one interviewer in the Netflix documentary commented, these institutions seem even more desirable now that we have seen the lengths people will go to in order to gain admission. This is surely the equivalent of a Super League. Universities can get caught up in a national bribery scandal yet their prestige increases. While elite universities in the UK have yet to be caught up in a similar corruption scandal, there is a similar sense that the ‘Golden Triangle’ (Oxbridge and London) could weather almost any storm. We don’t need to look far to find that this is, in fact, the case.

While I was attending University College London in 2018, the university hit the national headlines when it was discovered that the campus hosted a secret conference discussing racial eugenics with speakers who have a history of racist remarks. UCL has launched an inquiry to investigate its links with eugenics, as some of the founders of eugenics were based at the university, such as Francis Galton. This type of scandal might have had a serious impact on a small or medium-sized university but has done little to dent the international reputation and expansion of what is now the largest university in the UK (excluding the Open University). This is not to say that universities should all suffer due to negative news coverage or embarrassing histories, but the threat of some kind of relegation or points deduction seems completely absent for universities lucky enough to already be in the big leagues.

But should simply being in the big leagues be enough to ensure your survival there? In English football, clubs such as Wigan Athletic have been penalised by the English Football Association for going into administration, often resulting in the club dropping down a league. Could this happen for universities as well? If there is a corruption scandal or universities are found to be taking bribes, should the university be penalised for that by being removed from the Russell Group? Maybe the whole structure of the Russell Group should change so that universities can drop in and out based on performance. This may sound like taking the logic of competition between universities to its extremes, but at least it would provide a way of holding bigger institutions to account when they cross the line.

I’m not necessarily suggesting that the exact model of relegation and promotion should be imported from football to academia, but a regulatory body with real teeth is needed in the world of academia just as it is in football. Football fans have rebelled against the European Super League and emerged victorious after just two days. The battle against the University Super League may take a little longer.