“This is football now,” he says, and not even the shitshow of this initial rollout will change that. The players’ welfare does not come into it. He reminds me of how Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp’s complaints about the relentlessness of the compressed calendar in the 2020-2021 season have consistently fallen upon deaf ears. Ferguson, he tells me, would regularly fight with management about the endless commercial engagements each player would be forced to partake in and the impact it would have on their resting time, to no avail. They just know about numbers.” During his time at United he had watched in real time as the money men’s grip on the game grew ever tighter, as the Abu Dhabi-backed Manchester City muscled Sir Alex Ferguson’s five-time champions – they themselves bought by American billionaires the Glazers in 2005 – off the top perch in English football. “I was like, ‘Wow, they've actually got the balls to put it out there.’” He is cognizant of the great divide between money and passion in football and in what direction that balance tips. Speaking over Zoom from his new home in Copenhagen (a temporary arrangement as he and his Danish fiancée, Margaux Alexandra, await the arrival of their first child), Evra tells me that he kept quiet – at least at first – because he hadn’t been as taken aback by the news as everyone else: rumours of a Super League have been swirling for decades and a club president – he won’t say which one – had told him about the plans eight years ago. Then he watched it all come crumbling down under the weight of enormous pressure from outraged fans. He watched as Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin dubbed two of his former bosses – United’s Ed Woodward and Juventus’ Andrea Agnelli – “snakes” and as Fifa scrambled to create new rules that would prevent players, who had no say in the matter either way, from playing in the World Cup if they were to participate in the new competition. He watched as his former Manchester United teammate Gary Neville took to his soapbox on Sky Sports (the ex-United WhatsApp group was going off too) and delivered a furious rant damning the leaders of United, Chelsea and the four other partaking English teams as greedy “bottle merchants”.
When the footballing world imploded two weeks ago, after the top clubs in Europe announced they would break away into a “ Super League” that would sap the competition out of the domestic leagues and make the elite teams unassailably rich, Patrice Evra, known throughout his trophy-laden career for his ferocity and honesty, stayed silent.
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