Apocalypse now: City row shows richest owners could kill football | city ​​of manchester

dDon't look up! As the families of Westeros quarrel, the undead gather beyond the Wall. As the senior monks compete to be the new abbot, Viking longboats gather on the horizon. While the left argues endlessly over infinitesimal doctrinal differences, right-wing tech billionaires finance the march of quasi-fascist populism.

The problem with existential threats, from the climate crisis to conquistadors to Covid, is that they always seem distant, somehow unreal. People are always predicting the end of the world, which makes it easy to dismiss the peddlers of fatalism. When we have received so many warnings about the apocalypse, why should anyone listen to them now? But someday one of those prophets will be right. Nothing is eternal.

Soccer has never been so popular. Crowds in England are at their highest level in half a century and, if you include non-league football, probably ever. The global television audience is enormous. It is an all-consuming universal. And yet, that is precisely their problem; Football is so magnetic that it has attracted the interest of many people who do not see it as a sport or a cultural expression, but as an entity from which they can benefit.

Other sports, while never having the global appeal of football, have been unquestionably popular in the past, only to decline: no one goes to the arena to watch gladiatorial combats anymore, chariot races have disappeared, cockfights have passed to an end, even cricket. – once England's national sport – feels trapped in a perpetual battle for survival, and the onslaught of short, money-raising tournaments reduces the calendar to unfathomable irrelevance. The structure of football is different, but as new competitions are invented and existing ones expanded, its calendar seems increasingly full of content for content's sake.

Football has proven extraordinarily resilient over 150 years, but the existential threat is there. While fans, pundits and the media fought over who “won” the Legal battle between the Premier League and Manchester City on associated party transactions (APTs), taking up their pre-assigned positions behind the barricades, it all sounds a bit like Fuji and Kodak waging a sales war 20 years ago – ahem, have you heard of digital?

The sport is now in the hands of states, oligarchs and private equity funds, none of which, it is fair to say, are likely to care much about the long-term good of the game. They are all rich enough to engage in hugely expensive litigation that could cripple football administrators, a point made explicitly in the email published by The mirror allegedly from City's general counsel, Simon Cliff, who quoted the club's president, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, threatening “the destruction of (UEFA's) rules and organisation” by suing them “for the next 10 years”.

It has long been problematic that those who govern the game also participate in and profit from competitions, creating a nexus of interrelated incentives that has led to cronyism, but this is worse. What future does any organization have if a member has the effective power to decide what You don't have to obey regulations voted for by others, the “tyranny of the majority”, to use another phrase used by City?

What the case appears to have established is that financial regulation is necessary to prevent successful clubs from becoming a self-perpetuating elite, and that shareholders' loans to their clubs must bear interest at interest rates. market so as not to count as a subsidy for the purposes of profitability and sustainability calculations. This all seems entirely reasonable and was already part of UEFA's financial fair play rules.

It could be argued that City have done the game a favor by closing a loophole that ensures tighter financial controls. However, if that were their goal, it seems strange that they would describe the Premier League's plan to update the regulations accordingly as “a reckless course”, which would “likely lead to new legal proceedings with increased legal costs”.

The broader question now is whether they have isolated a procedural flaw that could undermine the Premier League's 130 charges against them (they, of course, deny all of them). There are those, often wrapped in free market dogma, who argue that there should be no restrictions on what clubs can spend. But then the rich win, generate more income, buy the best players and earn even more.

That's why, until 1983, home teams in the English league paid a tax to the visiting team, and that's why a maximum salary was implemented in 1901. The maximum salary soon proved exploitative, but what was important was the logic behind it: there has to be a regulation to prevent the richest clubs from developing what would effectively become monopoly positions, a principle that would be accepted by all but the most libertarian free market advocates.

No one ever seems to consider what the game should look like. In an ideal world, how many points would the average Premier League champions get? What is a club? What will happen when investment funds from authoritarian states with command economies begin to venture into a free market?

The problems are complex, global and would require an enormous, perhaps impossible, amount of consultation and collaboration to solve, but they are questions that are not even asked. Each one is wrapped up in his own interest, driven by his own greed. And that brings danger. Already in some clubs there is a clear preference for occasional fans who spend a lot over regular fans.

The tournaments are inflated. The Champions League is one step away from being a Super League. There is more and more content and less and less means something. Financial bullies, celebrated by partisan bigots and cheerleaders, seek the right to financially bully. Football is being distanced from the communities that fostered it.

What happens if global appetite decreases? What if this new audience moves on to MMA or esports, or something else? If English football has ostracized its base, it may discover that there is not much left, and that the self-absorbed mega-rich are not going to stick around to rescue the institutions they have owned for decades; The medium and long term is not in their thinking. What happens if an infinitely rich owner bankrupts the Premier League?

How could football end? Through the greed and monstrous self-interest of those who never really cared about that game, and the complacency of those who allowed it to happen. Winter may already be here.