Jurgen Klopp would have known when he arrived at Elland Road on Monday night what was awaiting him in the pre-match and post-match interviews.
The entire European football landscape had shifted in the 24 hours prior to what had previously been a crucial Premier League game for the dethroned champions Liverpool.
Victory could have taken them into the top four - which a short while ago was one of the most coveted and lucrative prizes in football - and put the pressure on the likes of Chelsea and West Ham United, both of whom are in action later this week, in that Champions League race.
Instead, their 1-1 draw went under the radar somewhat; their failure to return to the top four became mired in an irrelevance it would have been impossible to imagine when the gameweek began with two of their rivals, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur, dropping points as well.
As much as he might want to keep his and his players' focus on matters on the pitch, that can simply not happen when his bosses are at the heart of such seismic changes to the sport.
What did anger Klopp was the reception his players got on the coach journey to Elland Road - fans gathering outside to boo the Liverpool team and direct their frustration at people who had nothing to do with the decision.
T-shirts made up by Leeds director Victor Orta, worn by the Leeds team in their warm-up and left in the Liverpool dressing room, read: "Champions League. Earn it." and "Football is for the fans".
Klopp was also angered by that, and justifiably so - no-one needs to tell Klopp and his players that Champions League football should be earned and that the fans are the lifeblood of football.
Some of Klopp's anger was misdirected, but that most likely comes down to crossed wires over who exactly is being vilified here. The German agrees with the sentiment on the T-shirt, but feels as though Leeds were aiming a dig at him and his players instead of those who actually made the decision. He is desperate to make sure people differentiate between the two.
Gary Neville's criticism of Liverpool as a club was also addressed by Klopp, because Klopp regards a club as being the players and the manager, whereas Neville was referring to those in charge of the club.
The truth is, they are all on the same side in the war which has broken out in football. It is the cowardly custodians - not the clubs themselves or Klopp - who should be criticised for this clandestine, cloak-and-dagger treachery.
Liverpool's owners want the European Super League to happen. Liverpool's fans, Liverpool's manager and Liverpool's players do not.
The owners are mere custodians of the club. Liverpool FC has been around for 128 years, and Fenway Sports Group has been in charge for just over 10 of those - how dare they attempt to uproot the entire history of the club, and of English and European football, after only a decade of involvement?
To paraphrase Bill Shankly, it is the fans, the manager and the players who make up the club, not the owners and particularly not these owners.
Klopp made clear that he was not involved in the decision-making process and does not like the idea of a Super League, and James Milner - a man who arguably has less to lose than others by it going ahead given he has been retired from international football for some time now - joined the resistance.
That was encouraging to hear from two pure footballing men, who said just about all they could given the major role their employers have played in this debacle.
What was most startling was the fact that they only discovered about these plans along with the rest of us on Sunday.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was similarly blindsided when he was asked about the news following Manchester United's match against Burnley on Sunday, while Thomas Tuchel at Chelsea also only found out on Sunday.
Reports have even suggested that Chelsea and Manchester City only found out about the plans last week and were essentially told to either join in or get left behind.
The level of scheming and plotting behind football's back from the self-proclaimed elite is staggeringly scandalous, and to not even inform their own employees proves their contempt for everyone but their own closed group of the mega-rich.
For players not to have been consulted or even warned is bordering on criminal; people who have worked at their trade for their entire lives for the chance to reach a major tournament with their country could now be denied that opportunity due to the greed and selfishness of men who were not even interested in the sport when those players began their journey.
Players who have dreamed of lifting the Premier League, the Champions League, the World Cup or the European Championship may now have to settle for a tinpot trophy with zero history - and the only alternative would be to join a club outside this 'elite', to be paid significantly less and to take part in competitions deemed second string.
The employees of the clubs - from Klopp and Milner to Solskjaer and Tuchel - have been heartlessly thrown under the bus by the owners, along with every other football fan in the country and around Europe.
Neville labelled those owners "spineless" and "faceless", and true to form they have mostly so far allowed their managers and players to bear the brunt of the criticism and face questions to which they simply do not have the answer.
Super League and Real Madrid president Florentino Perez - the arch-villain in this proposed New World Order - was the first to speak out since the announcement of the breakaway competition on Monday night, and his comments were as worrying as they were audacious.
Perez rubbished claims that participating clubs could be banned from UEFA, FIFA and domestic league competition, insisting his was "100% sure" such measures were "impossible". Reports had suggested that Madrid, along with Manchester City and Chelsea, might be banned from the Champions League semi-finals.
Perez also moved to deny suggestions that players could be banned from taking part in international tournaments - a point Aleksander Ceferin reiterated in his own blockbuster press conference on Monday. This is significant as a major player revolt may be the best and only chance of stopping this elitist movement from actually happening.
The Super League website boasts that the best players will face each other every week, but if the best players do not want to take part - and Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich and others have helped with that by refusing entry - then the Super League loses a lot of its lustre.
Of course, money talks over most things for players as well as others in football, placing an impossible dilemma on their shoulders if these owners succeed in changing the sport the players worked so hard to get in to.
Perez has claimed that PSG were "not invited" and that they "have not even spoken to the German clubs" - claims which seem unlikely given that the best two teams in Europe last season were PSG and Bayern Munich.
Should those clubs, and Borussia Dortmund - one of the other most valuable clubs in the world - stand firm and refuse to join this league then where does that leave this so-called Super League?
The next most valuable clubs in terms of revenue - which is what entry to the Super League seems to be based on - are Zenit St Petersburg, Schalke 04, Everton, Lyon, Napoli, Leicester City and Valencia - all big clubs in their own right, but not quite the vision the Super League creators had.
Schalke (bottom of the Bundesliga with a measly 13 points from 29 games) vs. Valencia (14th in La Liga) does not have the same commercial appeal as PSG vs. Bayern Munich, and nobody wants to be guaranteed that showdown 10 years in a row.
Ajax and Porto boast the historical success needed to compete for a place, but then you open legal proceedings with the Eredivisie and Primeira Liga too.
Worryingly, though, Perez has claimed that the agreement to take part is "binding" and that suggestions that PSG and Bayern not being involved could derail the plans are "bullshit".
The contempt for other clubs continued to pour out throughout the press conference, claiming that "the 15 founding clubs are the ones that matter the most" and that "the attractive thing in football is playing between big clubs, the value for television increases and more income is generated".
No, Florentino, the attractive thing in football is that every team plays 11 vs. 11 and has a fair chance to succeed and a real risk of failing. It is that Leicester City, favourites for relegation, can win the Premier League title against 5,000-1 odds. It is that Wigan Athletic can win the FA Cup.
Brighton & Hove Albion boss Graham Potter perhaps said it best: "Sport is about the consequences of failure and the possibility of success."
Perez even had the temerity to claim that the Super League would "save football" and that it "will become like a pyramid because we big clubs will have more money and we will be able to invest it by buying players".
Read: You lowly peasant small clubs should be happy because us important clubs will have more money to buy your best players, pricing you out of keeping fan favourites and those who might give you a better chance of reaching our level.
The arrogance and entitlement which oozes from every pore of his comments perfectly encapsulates the appalling attitude of the concept he helped to shape.
Yet, in the same press conference he admitted that Barcelona are in a dire financial state. Madrid themselves, in addition to Manchester United, Juventus, Inter Milan and AC Milan also face monumental debts.
In Italy, Atalanta BC has been run immeasurably better as a business than the Milan clubs, and has achieved more success than them on the pitch too, over the last five or six years. Where is their reward for years of exemplary work on and off the pitch?
That could be the most worrying thing about the proposal - it is being done out of desperation and necessity for the rich to stay rich: "If the big clubs lose their money as is happening, the whole football system crashes as with the Champions League."
It is not to save football, it is to save themselves, and for men as successful as those involved in these plans, there will always be a huge level of self-preservation above all else. It is a kill-or-be-killed scenario for them, and these owners will refuse to be killed.
There is even a degree of understanding on that point - these are businessmen who, in their eyes, have been offered a choice between everlasting riches or the chance of going under. I defy any businessman or woman not to choose the former in that scenario.
The crucial point which they are either ignoring or are ignorant to is that football is not their business to sell; as the Leeds shirts alluded to, it belongs to the fans, and that is the power struggle which is at the heart of this battle.
As if they were not proposing enough fundamental changes to a sport billions of people adore the way it is, they have even suggested changing the length of games.
"If young people say football matches are too long, maybe it's because that match isn't too interesting or maybe we have to shorten the length of matches," Perez told reporters.
The outpouring of anger and resistance to this plot to take over the footballing world has been encouraging and inspirational.
The fear is that the masses have awoken to this threat too late and that fans, players, managers and everyone may still be powerless to prevent these 12 avaricious owners from destroying the game as we know it. body check tags ::
