No. The six Premier League clubs shouldn't pay a penny of this, and Real Madrid asking in the first place shows how backwards the whole situation has gotten.
Twelve clubs announced the European Super League on 18 April 2021. The plan collapsed within 48 hours under a wall of fan and political anger. Nine of the twelve pulled out days later: the six English clubs, plus Atletico Madrid, Milan and Inter. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus kept pushing. Juventus walked in 2023, Barcelona followed last February, and that left Real Madrid standing alone until they announced the project's definitive end on 11 February 2026. They were the last club out of the building, and they turned off the lights themselves.
Now, according to the reporting circulating this week, Madrid believes Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham should cover their share of the setup costs, a figure put at €80m, despite the six having bolted within days of launch. There's no lawsuit yet, no official word from Madrid, no response from any of the six. It's a demand being floated, nothing more for now. The gall of it still deserves an answer.
Madrid's legal theory is the obvious one, and it isn't stupid: everyone signed the same contract, everyone was in it together, and you don't get to dodge the bill just because you panicked faster than the next guy. If the paperwork says the founders are jointly on the hook, that's what the paperwork says. Fine. But a contract claim and a straight face are two different things, and Madrid have run clean out of the second one.
Real Madrid decided these costs were worth running up. The English six read the room in a weekend and scrambled for the exit. Every euro of setup spending after that first catastrophic weekend was spent by the people who refused to quit, and Madrid chose to keep the project breathing for years. Those costs are Madrid's, run up chasing a thing nobody else wanted. You don't get to keep the party going for half a decade and then split the tab with the guests who left before midnight.
Look at what the club has done since. They've brought Bernd Reichart, the man who ran A22 Sports Management and fronted the Super League itself, in-house as head of business operations. They've made peace with UEFA. They killed the breakaway on their own terms, folded its chief executive into their org chart, then went looking for someone else to fund the wreckage.
The Premier League already handled its own. Those six clubs paid a combined £22m in 2021, £3.67m each, for the embarrassment. That was the price of their stupidity, levied by the competition they tried to abandon. They've settled up with the people they actually wronged.
Real Madrid wrote the last chapter of this story themselves. They can pay for the ending.
