Of Greed And Hubris

If you want to hear a torrent of well-meaning guff, just tune-in to TalkSport and listen to deluded football fans trumpeting their 'victory' in seeing off the unlovely and hubristic European Super League. Be afraid, be very afraid - well, actually no, the time for being afraid for the soul of this sport passed years ago.

Here are the facts. Football is a game owned, at its top level, by stupendously rich men. They are not in it for the glory of the thing - that may have motivated them at some distant point in the past but they now find themselves with a cash cow that they fear may have been milked to death. Here's the thing: the business model for football is unsustainable unless it is constantly patched together by eye-watering injections of television money. The inconvenient thing about that model is the very jeopardy that makes sport compelling. So what do you do if that jeopardy (let us call it 'relegation' - ah you get the picture) bothers you? Easy, you invent a lucrative competition from which you can never be relegated, no matter how shit you might become. The hubris in this movemnet is in no part better exemplified than in the ESL membership of Tottenham Hotspur - by whose definition precisely is this one of Europe's great clubs?

Badges of shame

So all members of this self-ordained 'Big Six' of English football have now  recanted of their sins and this is a 'victory' for the fans. Watch this space. Football is governed by the atrociously venal FIFA and the not quite so efficiently venal UEFA. The latter will shortly expand their misnamed Champions League (your correspondent was two years old when Spurs were last champions) so that the fat cats (they will be described as 'legacy clubs' or some other such bollocks) are guaranteed a place in the competition, regardless of merit. The gambit of the ESL will thereby have worked. Sure there will be some casualties (some have no real legacy to boast) but the principle will have been established. The biggest clubs will be all set to shower players with endless cash and to bullshit their way out of any moral hazard. And please don't tell me about the health of the American franchise model. I am a great consumer of American sport but can you really tell me what is the point of being, say, a Detroit Lions fan.

And my own sport, rugby union football, cannot rest easy - the franchise model is what the top clubs want. Jeopardy is no part of their agenda.  

Mind you, what do I know? I'm a West Bromwich Albion fan. Why aren't we in the ESL? Immunity from relegation would suit us nicely.