On the phone from Munich, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge is talking about the “football family”. Rummenigge, once a great German footballer, now chairs the new European Club Association, which represents 103 leading European clubs. “The ECA must be in on all decisions in the football family,” says Rummenigge, who is also chairman of Bayern Munich. “There were big irritations in the past. These irritations are happily over.”

It’s true: the European football family now looks pretty harmonious, as families go. Rummenigge and his fellow former legend, Michel Platini, president of Europe’s football association Uefa, want most of the same things. Behind the wild headlines about plans for anti-English witchhunts, quotas for foreign players or bans on debt, we can now see what the future of European football will be.