20-04-2021, 02:51
If there's one thing I'm glad of, it's that this travesty has provoked so much nationwide and worldwide anger in the last twenty-four hours. For a long time now, I've despaired of football's future. In the space of thirty years, the whole sport managed to go from nearly dying on its arse due to violence, poverty and neglect, to the opposite extreme of choking on its own wealth. The free market brought money to fix dilapidated old stadiums - even to build some shiny new ones - and to invest in facilities, young talent and countless other good things. But without adequate regulation and oversight by people with actual principles, it also brought a class system with it: it divided football into haves and have-nots more starkly than it had ever been before. And too many people nodded those changes through with a shrug of the shoulders, often getting fat off the proceeds themselves. When Graham Potter was interviewed on the radio last month, and said that Premier League finishing positions were 95% down to finances, and his job was to work within the 5% window of actal merit, no one argued with him or tried to deny the truth of his words, because even the staunchest advocates of modern football had given up pretending that it's remotely fair.
But it's increasingly looking like this stunt from the ESL12 is the straw that's going to break the camel's back. They've chosen to try and push their monopoly over the game from 95% to 100% on the back of the pandemic year, with thousands of clubs teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. If football fans are a kid who's spent weeks hoping that his missing pet is still alive somewhere, these clubs are the guy who shows up at the kid's birthday party with some mangled dog remains in a box, a card with a tyre mark on the front and a message on the inside saying "for squashing Fido I'm truly sorry, but at least it wasn't a f**king great lorry." Even if they back down in the face of the threats from UEFA, the FA and the government, it's not going to be forgotten that they conspired to do this. A backlash is coming, and even if the authorities bottle the punishment, from the fans and other powerful voices in the game it's going to be big.
But it's increasingly looking like this stunt from the ESL12 is the straw that's going to break the camel's back. They've chosen to try and push their monopoly over the game from 95% to 100% on the back of the pandemic year, with thousands of clubs teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. If football fans are a kid who's spent weeks hoping that his missing pet is still alive somewhere, these clubs are the guy who shows up at the kid's birthday party with some mangled dog remains in a box, a card with a tyre mark on the front and a message on the inside saying "for squashing Fido I'm truly sorry, but at least it wasn't a f**king great lorry." Even if they back down in the face of the threats from UEFA, the FA and the government, it's not going to be forgotten that they conspired to do this. A backlash is coming, and even if the authorities bottle the punishment, from the fans and other powerful voices in the game it's going to be big.