THIS isn’t over. The clubs know it. Uefa knows it. Fifa knows it. The Premier League knows it.

But do the fans?

The fan protests outside of Stamford Bridge on Tuesday night against the extremely unpopular European Super League (ESL) went a long way in forcing Chelsea to reverse the decision to join the competition.

In the same way that Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp’s views on it on Monday night and captain Jordan Henderson’s statement alongside the players on Tuesday forced the hand of the owners.

Manchester United captain Harry Maguire and Luke Shaw’s alleged confrontation made owners the Glazers “see the light,” as did future prime minister Marcus Rashford tweeting a picture of a banner inside Old Trafford with the Matt Busby quote: “Football is nothing without fans.”

Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola outrightly speaking against it in the media forced the clubs’ hands.

Arsenal fans are planning a protest tomorrow night, which will also double up as a way to rid the club of its owner Stan Kroenke — United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward has already stepped down given the furious backlash.

Tottenham? Fans were outside the training ground on Sunday night, letting the big-wigs at the top know they would not tolerate being a part of this sham.

Various supporters’ groups of the so-called “Big Six” demanding that their banners be taken down around the grounds made these capitalist pariahs realise that leaving a competition based on merit and wins to play in one where the size of your bank balance and your “history” means that your place among the elite is guaranteed season upon season — even if you don’t have much historical success in any European competition.

So supporters, media and players made the big bad ESL go away.

Only it didn’t. It won’t.

This competition has been on the cards for decades. The original concept of this column was going to be: “Don’t feel sorry for Uefa, it is just upset that the clubs announced its idea first.”

Because Uefa has been tinkering with the format of the European Cup-turned-Champions League for as long as I’ve been alive. It has been ensuring that the bigger clubs have to do less and less work every season to qualify for what was once a cup for league champions.

The rebranding to the Champions League in 1992 meant you no longer had to be the best in your league to get a seat at the table. We are at a point in 2021 where in England, you get to be the fourth best in the country and still qualify automatically for the tournament.

But if you finish first in Scotland or another country where you don’t have the wealth and political power to do what you want, you are forced to qualify to get the luxury of playing in the group stages. What part of that is fair?

And as everyone was up in arms about the proposed format of the ESL, Uefa had no qualms in announcing an extended Champions League. From 32 teams to 36, it will move from a group stage and knockouts to a league and then a knockout stage … so some kind of Super League is what they are bringing in in 2024?

Not just that, here is word for word what Uefa intends to do.

“The final two places will go to the clubs with the highest club coefficient over the last five years that have not qualified for the Champions League group stage but have qualified either for the Champions League qualification phase, the Europa League or the Europa Conference League.” So a team no longer has to actually qualify for the Champions League group stage to be allowed into the Champions League group stage. 

Sound familiar?

That is the entire premise of the ESL.

Uefa’s plan may not be as outrageous as the clubs that formed the ESL but you can see where it got its idea from.

It was upset that the money it was planning on receiving from the reforms would be going to 12 clubs. And then 15. And then 20.

Uefa and the elite clubs around Europe don’t want smaller teams playing with their ball.

You can’t sell TV rights to a competition for billions of pounds if Manchester United, AC Milan and Real Madrid are replaced by West Ham, Atalanta and Real Betis.

Ever since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013, United have struggled to challenge for the Champions League spots let alone the Premier League title.

Same with Arsenal in the last few years of Arsene Wenger’s reign and the years since his departure.

So what better way to ensure those “magical” nights against Juventus, Barcelona, Bayern Munich (had they signed up) happen every year than to rig the qualification process in your favour year in, year out.

But even before these troubling times for these select few clubs, the European giants of football have been trying to rid the sport of the David v Goliath story because they didn’t want David to triumph.

Because when David downs the giant, when Porto and Monaco contest a Champions League final, Uefa sees people switch off and that in turn costs it money.

So Uefa and these clubs conspired to stack the deck in its favour, only for the Change UK of football clubs to run away and form their own secret cabal. And we all know what happened to Change UK.

“Those pesky greedy clubs stole our money,” would have been the words of the greedy men in suits who work for Uefa over the past 72 hours.

And what was brilliant, from my point of view, was the grandstanding of Sky on Sunday night and throughout the 24-hour cycle that was Monday.

Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher calling on fans to write to their MPs to stop this from happening. Where was that solidarity and passion when black players were getting racially abused after every. Single. Game. This Premier League season?

Carragher, to his credit, rightfully called out Sky for the part it played in taking football away from fans when Rupert Murdoch hoovered up the rights to games via Sky in 1992.

“We’re complaining about a breakaway here, let’s not forget that Sky Sports and the Premier League were involved in a breakaway in 1992 and that revolved around the big five then,” he said on Monday night.

“That’s the funny thing now, the Big Six now weren’t that at the time. Everton were involved then and they were pushing for that. I don’t think Man City or Chelsea were involved 25 years ago.

“So, we’re criticising it a lot but we work for a company that was involved in a breakaway, so are we hypocrites, are we wrong?”

Let’s not kid ourselves. Had the ESL become a thing, Sky and BT would have been front and centre when it comes to bidding for games. There is no way these two would have sat back and kept the Champions League, which Sky doesn’t even have at the moment, and let Amazon, Disney and whoever else was rumoured to show the games, get a free run.

The demise, for now, of the ESL is proof that if you play with rich people’s money, if you threaten to take it away from them, they will retreat quicker than Boris Johnson and the Tories when Rashford challenges them over free school meals for kids.