DDon't look up! As the families of Westeros war, the undead gather beyond the Wall. Viking longboats mass on the horizon, jockeyed by senior monks as the new abbot. As the left fights endlessly over endless doctrinal differences, the right-wing billionaire tech bros fund a parade of quasi-fascist populism.
The problem with existential threats, from the climate crisis to the Conquistadors to Covid, is that they always seem distant, somehow unreal. People are always predicting the end of the world, which easily eliminates doomsayers. Why should anyone ask now when we have had so many warnings of disaster? But one day one of those prophets is going to be right. Nothing is forever.
Football has never been so popular. Including non-league football, attendances in England are at their highest for half a century. The global television audience is vast. It is universal for all consumption. And yet that is its problem; Football is so magnetic that it has attracted the interest of many who see it not as a sport, but as a cultural expression, but as an enterprise from which they can make a profit.
Other sports, while not having the global appeal of football, have been so unshakably popular in the past that they will decline: no one goes to the arena to see a gladiator fight, chariot racing is defunct, cockfighting has had its day, and even cricket – once England's national sport – feels locked in a perpetual battle for survival. , reducing the rash schedule of cash-increasing short-form tournaments to unfathomable irrelevance. Football's structure is different, but as new competitions are discovered and existing ones expanded, its calendar feels packed with content for content's sake.
For 150 years football has proven extraordinarily resilient, but there is an existential threat. Fans and pundits and the media have spent the past week fighting over who “won” the Premier League vs. Manchester City legal battle over Related Party Transactions (APT), taking their pre-allocated positions behind barriers, all while Fuji and Kodak battled it out in a sales war 20 years ago: er, Have you heard of digital?
The game is now in the hands of states, oligarchs and private equity funds, none of whom, it's fair to say, are likely to care much for the long-term good of the game. All of them are rich enough to pursue hugely expensive lawsuits, which paralyze football's executives, as the leaked email apparently indicated. Glass City's general counsel Simon Cliff quoted the club's chairman, Khaldoun al-Mubarak, as threatening “extermination”. [Uefa’s] Rules and system by prosecuting them for the “next 10 years”.
Long-time managers of the game have also struggled to profit from competition and create interrelated incentives that lead to customers – but it's bad. What would be the future of any organization if one member had the power to effectively make decisions that would not have to obey the rules “the tyranny of the majority,” others voted, to use another phrase used by Citi?
The case appears to be established that financial control is necessary to prevent successful clubs from becoming self-sustaining elites, and that loans from shareholders to their clubs must pay interest at market rates. Profitability and sustainability calculations. All of this seems perfectly reasonable – already part of the UEFA Financial Fair Play regulations.
It could be argued that City could have done the sport a favor by closing the loophole that ensured tighter financial controls. However, if that is their intention, they will describe the Premier League's plan to update the regulations accordingly as “an unwise course” that would “lead to further legal action with further legal costs”.
The wider issue now is whether they have isolated a procedural flaw that could undermine the Premier League's 130 allegations against them (which they deny, of course). Those who argue that there should be no restrictions on what clubs can spend are often wrapped up in free market principles. But rich people win, generate more revenue, buy better players, and win more.
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This is why, until 1983, home teams in the English league paid a levy to the away team and why a maximum wage was introduced in 1901. The maximum wage soon proved to be exploitative. Wealthy clubs prevent growth and become monopolies – acceptable to all but the most independent free marketers.
No one seems to be thinking about how the game should be. In an ideal world, how many points would the average Premier League champions get? What is a club? What happens when the investment funds of authoritarian states with command economies begin to engage in a free market?
The problems are complex, global and will require an enormous, perhaps impossible, consultation and collaboration to solve – but even these are unasked questions. Each is driven by his own greed and locked in his own selfishness. And it brings danger. Already at some clubs there is a clear preference for occasional fans who spend more than regular fans.
Competitions are heating up. The Champions League is a step up from the Super League. There is more and more content and less and it means nothing. Financial bullies, celebrated by fans and partisan cheerleaders, seek the right to bully financially. Football is being dragged away from the societies that nurtured it.
What if global hunger is reduced? What if this new audience gravitates towards MMA or sports or something else? If English football leaves its base, it will find that there isn't much left of it, and the self-serving super-rich aren't going to come around to bail out the decades-old institutions they own; The medium to long term is not in their thoughts. What if an infinitely rich owner bankrupted the Premier League?
How will football end? Through the greed and cruel selfishness of those who never cared about that game and the complacency of those who allowed it to happen. Winter may already be here.
