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"When we are successful and rewarded after working hard, we naturally believe that such success and its reward are the results of our efforts and we overlook everything else".

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"It is not a sport when there is no relationship between effort and success. It is not a sport when success is guaranteed from the start. It is not a sport if it doesn't matter if you lose." With these words, Pep Guardiola quickly predicted the spectacular failure of the project to create a new elite competition for top European football clubs. The main sporting novelty of the European Super League (ESL), and its most controversial feature, was that the league would be closed or semi-closed. In other words, a handful of (rich) clubs wanted to start a new league where they could play against each other every year without having to earn the right to play. Leaving other considerations aside, the main counterargument, unanimously repeated by the football (and political!) establishment, was meritocratic and perfectly reflected in Guardiola's words. This reaction exemplifies with remarkable fidelity the thesis put forward by American philosopher Michael Sandel in his latest book, The Tyranny of Merit. As I commented in a previous post on Esade Do Better, in this book Sandel makes a critical analysis of meritocracy as a hegemonic criterion of fairness in modern capitalist societies, and he considers this hegemony problematic and even perverse. Reviewing some of his theses in the light of the ESL controversy reveals an interesting parallel between football and society when assessing the issues of effort, talent, inequality, and fairness. When we are successful and rewarded after working hard, we naturally believe that such success and its reward are the results of our efforts and we overlook everything else.