With Liverpool v Manchester City we are being asked to get excited about a game between clubs owned by a Middle Eastern autocracy and an American multinational sports holding conglomerate; forgive me if I can’t forget that for 90 minutes of football.
Yeah, great footballers, great football, but what does it all mean? Does it not matter at all? Is it a kind of evil? Or somewhere in between?
When we fell in love with football as a sport, it’s worth bearing in mind that we never had to think about such moral dilemmas (if we are over 30), but a spirit of positivity lives on. We like to think positively about football. In fact, it trumps everything.
The love of our teams and of football as an artform is incredibly resilient. That’s what makes it so valuable for the owners. If the current register of owners doesn’t put us off the game, nothing will. So the argument that the nature and location of the club owners just doesn’t matter has a lot of weight. As long as we keep buying tickets, and subscriptions, owners and others will feel justified in their investment.
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So the loud-voiced headline that no-one cares is, to an extent, justified. But I would ask if you dig a little deeper and more thoughtfully, what the effect of such ownership is.
Once upon a time, it was a game between the Moores family’s Littlewoods pools or a long-time shareholder and a board led not by a figure as distant as Sheikh Mansoor, but by Peter Swales, a radio and hi-fi businessman.
In other words unless you felt strongly about 8-track stereos and eight score draws, you just didn’t even think about ownership. Swales did become unpopular, not because of how he invested his sovereign wealth fund but because it was felt he was more interested in preserving his own status. Certainly the moral and financial integrity of the ownership wasn’t a live issue and to the extent that it was, it felt all part of British life.
So fans felt a closeness to both clubs that you cannot feel today. It felt a part of local life to be a fan of either club in a way it just can’t when the owners are in America or UAE. You might argue that doesn’t matter at all but I think that’s wrong. It makes the heart grow cold in a subtle way.
It’s a very modern thing to feel everything from water companies to energy provision feels beyond our control. We’re supposed to have the power of the consumer but that’s a right-wing illusion. So who owns a club is just part of this arms-length culture. When you have invited foreign states an investment opportunity in our power or railway companies despite fascistically claiming to be patriotic, the very infrastructure of the country has been sold off to foreign states and businesses. You might think we might do something other than shrug and grumble.
So we’ve become used to big things being beyond our control and owned by someone who hides behind corporate jargon. Why not a football club? If you can sell off (though not in Scotland) water, the very stuff of life, for a narrow elite of shareholders to drain for profit, selling a club to an oppressive regime or investment portfolio doesn’t seem as outrageous as it once would, when you could never have imagined that the government would be captured by a group of populist ideologies intent on making a narrow elite rich, at the expense of the people and the country, regardless of the damage.
And be in no doubt, the Overton Window has moved and accepting the sale of clubs to oppressive regimes, economically or politically, is all part of the same culture. How could it not be? We opened the sluice gates, enough people greedily swallowed the lies, stood by and we have all drowned; that describes top-flight football.
Now that this new culture has become embedded, aided by the bribes and blindness that financial investments bring with them, it is hard to change it once again. As ever, money has the power and the core of top-flight football, one way or another, makes an elite phenomenally rich, so they are not inclined to change the culture which has so benefited them.
But the seeds of its own destruction are innate. We are good at pretending this isn’t the case, but the fact that Premier League clubs now financially and thus competitively dominate the Europa League and Conference League without much of a mention of the reality of the situation, which is often like a top-flight team playing an FA Cup game against a League Two side, shows just how blinkered we are.
The Champions League is so hardening finances that it can only be won by a small handful of clubs. That boringly predictable situation corrupts and eventually ends interest in football’s elite tournament. Just changing the architecture of the tournament won’t change the financial power dynamics.
Similarly the Premier League winners deny the vast majority of hope, and not even of success, but of ambition. So the seeds of decline are inbuilt into the model. It might not seem like it. Wealth is being used to make us think that the cream rises to the top, so it’s all natural justice.
The changes are relatively slow but there is no doubt that the economic model guarantees that football will eat itself until it is replete and become so predictable that the elite will be fatally corrupted and will need to reorganise itself on a basis that is apparently, but isn’t, more fair and equitable because to be truly more fair and equitable would financially diminish those already with the power, which can’t be tolerated.
Still. What a game. Great play. Everything is fine. The football is superb. Some of football’s great aspects remain and can easily fool us.
You can lie to yourself about the truth for a long time, but not forever. The truth is here and now, if you want to see and understand it.
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