Even so, independent observers at first figured that the “dirty dozen” of rich clubs that announced the Super League this past Sunday would get their way. Wealthy clubs had been threatening such a breakaway for years, using those threats to gain ever more concessions from their sport’s governing bodies. Now the rich clubs were making good on that threat, and their eventual triumph, the Guardian’s Jonathan Liew lamented soon after the Super League unveiling, felt  “inevitable, even irresistible.” The “dirty dozen” had “invested far too much capital,” other analysts pronounced, “to turn back.”

But the 12 would-be founders of the Super League did turn back, in less than 48 hours. Neither the “dirty dozen” nor independent analysts foresaw the enormous pushback the Super League notion would engender. Global football fans had been stewing for years as billionaires became ever more dominant in their beloved sport. These fans saw the Super League as simply a step too far, a move “driven exclusively,” the group Football Supporters Europe charged, “by greed.”

Football aficionados across the world, roared the Chelsea Supporters’ Trust, “have experienced the ultimate betrayal.” The Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust called the Super League a “concept driven by avarice and self-interest at the expense of the intrinsic values of the game we hold so dear.” The Super League, added Arsenal fan Daron Doolan, is “going to ruin all the money passed on to grassroots football.”

“JP Morgan will regret setting up a #SuperLeague with my entire life savings,” another British fan tweeted.  “Account is now closed and this £32.25 is going elsewhere!”

Players, current and former, would be just as outraged. Retired Liverpool star Mark Lawrenson lashed out against “these unbelievably fabulously wealthy guys” who think they “own” the game.

The Super League scheme, in the face of all this anger, totally crumbled. Manchester City bolted the scheme publicly first, after Atlético Madrid and Chelsea had expressed cold feet privately. In quick order, the rest of the would-be Super League founders either explicitly withdrew from the plot or acknowledged the end of it.

What happens now? The global football status quo continues, warts and all. The billionaires aren’t going anyplace. They still “dominate their domestic leagues,” notes global football historian David Goldblatt, and still feel “that only an elite European league will suit them.”

“Like many of the world’s ultra-rich,” adds Goldblatt, “they cannot accept that the way to solve the problems created by extreme inequality is simply to reduce inequality, rather than seal yourself in a protected bubble with your plutocratic peers.”

So the future of global football’s ecosystem remains perilous. In a world where wealth keeps concentrating at ferocious rates, the sport’s more egalitarian traditions will always be at risk. We can’t expect free and fair sports, in other words, as long as billionaires in search of playthings and profits still walk the Earth.

And that brings us back to the wealth tax in Argentina that Diego Maradona supported so nobly shortly before his death. Lawmakers in Argentina didadopt that tax, a modest one-time 2% levy on wealth over 200 million pesos, about $2.4 million in U.S. dollars. Now the heirs to the money Maradona made playing the game he loved have gone to court to get that new wealth tax killed.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.