The Times' Matt Lawton joined The Football Show to give us the inside scoop of how the Super League house of cards collapsed - and the fury that the 'big six' have left behind.
Lawton - alongside colleague Martyn Ziegler and Ben Ellery - did a tell-all article on exactly what led to the fall of one of the most spectacular missteps in football history.
Super League & the 'tsunami of shit'
The Times quote a comms executive at one of the clubs involved as saying they knew they were in for a 'tsunami of shit', having only been briefed on the subject last Friday afternoon.
"[The comms departments] pressed the red button on that Zoom call and were just like 'oh my god.' These guys are highly paid, experienced comms people. They were thinking: when the bomb goes off, who's fronting this up?
"They were thinking: who is going to take the hits? Who is going to answer the questions? The fact that there was going to be this vacuum, they knew that no-one putting out the fires was a problem.
"There was just this wall of noise on one side, that was getting louder by the hour, and there was nothing on the other. The artillery was just flying in, and they couldn't fight back."
'Legislative bomb'
The political backlash from the Conservative government - credited by Lawton as 'a good PR opportunity' - also had a major deciding factor.
"The sheer speed with which the Prime Minister was engaged, and the tone of what he was saying - when he spoke about 'dropping a legislative bomb' - it was strong stuff.
"We knew they were going to look at law changes, they were going to throw every obstacle in the way if it hadn't collapsed as soon as it had.
"I don't know if they would have done this, but they could have gone this far - because every game has to be sanctioned by the FA [...] they could have literally sent the foreign managers and foreign players from those clubs packing. They could have done that.
"Another move that they could have made, I was told by someone in government circles, they could have made it a 'listed event'. [So] like the World Cup and the Olympics, when you do that only the terrestrial broadcasters can bid for it, so the value of the rights goes way down. JP Morgan would have run for the hills.
"Those kinds of noises were getting through."
Sources on the inside
The breakdown of the exact internal dynamics was enough to give the likes of Uefa and the Premier League a sense that things were unsteady.
"It was at ownership level that these conversations were happening, in most cases. What you had going on was CEOs having conversations with other CEOs at other clubs, at Uefa, saying 'this is a disaster.'
"It was really interesting that the Uefa, FA, Premier League knew on Tuesday morning that they were wobbling. How did they know? They have sources within those six clubs."
Super League recriminations
The question now, after the Super League project has collapsed, is what fallout
"We've done a story tonight that they are looking to change the rules and the laws in this country to make sure that never happens again. That if you're part of the Premier League, you can't get involved with a league that basically destroys the pyramid of European football.
"In that meeting of the 14 excluded clubs on Tuesday, there was a real desire for retribution. I spoke to one of the CEOs and there were calls for the Ed Woodwards, the Daniel Levys to be individually sanctioned for bringing the game into disrepute. Possibly suspended from football.
"They were that angry, they felt that betrayed. But once they crumbled, there's a realisation that Premier League needs to be 20 clubs and they need those six clubs in there.
"They are going to be removed from the sub-committees so they won't have the same power. The days of Chelsea's Bruce Buck driving the £5m golden farewell for Richard Scudamore - he ain't going to be in that role anymore.
"As one comms guy said to me, they are going to be sat on the naughty step for a while."
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