Football and the Pandemic
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Slightly off topic. Manchester City which is owned by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family and deputy president of the United Arab Emirate, accused by the U.N of ‘sportswashing’ its deeply tarnished image.
I bring this up as a number of tweets on the party (@OfficialSPGB) Twitter account page, vociferously accused us of wanting to be a small elite……He’s made a Freudian slip, as you can’t get much smaller than the UAE, run by a family dynasty! But the tweeter obviously is not interested, anything to fit his agenda, having a myopic view of the world.Today the news of missing family member.
Princess Latifa: ‘Hostage’ ordeal of Dubai ruler’s daughter revealed https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-56075528Princess Latifa: ‘I’m a hostage’ – Secret videos of missing Dubai royal released to Sky News
Amnesty International have previously been critical of the Manchester City owners’ human rights record
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With Man City top of the Premier League by some distance, their ardent fans probably don’t care that much about a dodgy owner. Love is blind.
rodshaw
Manchester City’s owner Sheikh Mansour, who is a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, who has been accused by Amnesty International of ‘sportswashing’ its Human Rights abuses. Abu Dhabi are to carrying out the sentence that was imposed on a then child, who is now a man, the death penalty. Shouldn’t there be an * when Manchester City win the Premier League?
Now this! Abu Dhabi is nothing more than a family thiefdom"The situation is getting more desperate every day"
Secret messages, sent by Dubai’s Princess Latifa Al Maktoum, reveal details of how she has been held in captivity, after a failed attempt to leave Dubai in 2018#MissingPrincess @BBCPanoramahttps://t.co/58qW4SHDAw pic.twitter.com/ILJseDc1JL
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) February 16, 2021
Princess Latifa: UK under pressure to act over allegations against Dubai’s ruler
For a long time the UK has seemed prepared to play down the disturbing allegations against its close ally, Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/31/football-teams-retain-home-advantage-no-crowd-study
“I was always convinced that me being at the games and supporting the team, at least changed something, sometimes. But what can you do? It is science and the large data set of more than 40,000 games, which were considered for the study, cannot be ignored. Social support does not seem to be a key factor for the home field advantage.”
Under normal circumstances home teams receive fewer disciplinary sanctions and are able to create more offensive actions compared with away teams. But, in line with previous research, the authors found the difference in disciplinary sanctions disappeared – or was even slightly reversed – when the crowd was absent,
“If a team asked me what to do to gain an advantage, I would need to tell them to put as much social pressure on the referee as possible. The problem is that that’s not fair play, so I don’t really want to say that – although I think it’s true and that’s what’s in this study,” said the lead author, Fabian Wunderlich of German Sport University Cologne,
Rather than start a new thread
The Super $ix and the European $uperLeague
The ramifications are big with fan power now being seriously considered by a government.
Echoes of Packers cricket changes?
A similar fuss was made when the Premier League started. And when the European Cup became the Champions League. Cynicism, betrayal of grass roots etc. etc. Admittedly without (as far as I can remember) the government sticking their oar in. And without the prospect of a league where most clubs will never get relegated and will be able to play one another ad infinitum.
Let’s not forget UEFA have their own plans for lining their pockets further by bloating the Champions League. And of course the World Cup keeps getting bigger.
When the hoo-ha dies down fans of these big clubs will still shell out for replica shirts and tickets to watch their much-loved idols, most of whom move on after two or three years anyway. The cynicism on one side is matched by the naivete on the other. But isn’t that a reflection of life in general under capitalism?
Actually I can’t see anything wrong in principle with a league without relegation. That was the situation with rugby in South Wales before it went or was preparing to go professional. The top 16 clubs played against other clubs as well as against each other. There wasn’t really a league table with points. They were just obliged to play each other twice, once at home and once away. All games were friendlies and all that counted was whether a club won or lost that particular game.
It is the league system with points and promotion and relegation that is part of the problem as in the end it’s a question of more money if you get promoted and less if you get relegated. It’s a reflection of competition between businesses in the market place where there are also winners and losers. In fact it is a competition for money between businesses for that’s what football clubs are.
Of course the proposed super league is also about money, a means of stabilising the income stream of the clubs involved by eliminating the risk of it being reduced through being relegated to a less money-making league. But that wasn’t the case with pre-professional rugby in South Wales.
Since then rugby has, sadly but I suppose inevitably given capitalism, gone the way of soccer
That fans don’t count for much and can be dispensed with was demonstrated by matches continuing during the pandemic without the crowd. The businesses that are football clubs continued playing for the income they got from television and advertising.
Professional sport is completely corrupted by money but what do you expect under capitalism?
“That fans don’t count for much”
They still bring in revenue with all the franchises operated and also sponsorship is reliant on the allegiance of the fan base.
But saying that, living in a country where the Super League members have huge numbers of fans and will be a receptive television audience and are already a lucrative source of income for all the usual paraphernalia, what the average domestic supporter thinks is little influence on this huge global market.
But for a Scot, this is well out of our league and Rangers and Celtic might as well join the English divisions to make up the numbers if the top teams leave it…they just might have a chance of qualifying for Europe, something competing with the super six they had little opportunity of achieving and the only reason they stay in the moribund Scottish league as top dogs.
As an aside. Rangers being demoted to the bottom league and having to crawl their way back up to the premier is a sign that when push comes to shove – it is the fans that still make a club not TV money and the sponsors remained just as loyal because of that.
Sport will always adapt – Indian cricket league being another example of chasing the cash and the star players which has been an aspect ignored by the football authorities…any successful team in one season will find its best players stolen before the following season and so become a one-season wonder to lapse back to mediocrity once again…and have to build up yet again. I once read that not a Scottish club lost money because of this trade in player transfers. Football is a poverty-porn market, trading in people’s flesh, when we come down to the very basics.
That will be an effect if the Super League is a success…the best players will also go where the money is.
From the BBC website:
Leeds boss Marcelo Bielsa was also critical of the Super League proposal.
“It shouldn’t surprise us,” he told the BBC. “In all walks of life the powerful look after their own and don’t worry about the rest of us.
“The big teams are also created due to the opposition of the other teams. In the search for higher economic earnings they forget about the rest. The powerful are more rich and the weak are poorer. It doesn’t do good to football in general.”
Among other groups, the players of these clubs have been completely bypassed. Ok, some if not all of them are pretty rich in their own right but they have no option really but to follow the clubs if they want to stay in the big time.
But can someone tell me why the government has jumped right in and is showing so much interest? Is it just to gain a bit of popularity?
Maybe because they calculate that this is a way of retaining the votes they got in the red wall constituencies as they think everybody Oop North is a football fan.
Or maybe it’s because the super league reflects monopoly capitalism while the other clubs reflect competitive capitalism.
“But can someone tell me why the government has jumped right in and is showing so much interest? Is it just to gain a bit of popularity?”
I think that some of the response by Boris is partly a way of him trying to show he is responsive to the the voters, but the possible revenue loss to the treasury might also be a factor.
The amount of money coming into the treasury through the Premier League and through the rest of football is phenomenal. For instance, The transfer of footballers is subject to VAT However, transfers between football clubs in the EU were relieved of VAT, however I assume this will have changed with Brexit. £1.93 billion was spent on transfers last year. The current wage bill for the Premiership is at £2.8 billion, with income tax being charged at most of it at 45%, that’s a new fitted out aircraft carrier every couple of years.
If the “super” League clubs are expelled from UEFA, FIFA, etc. then in future they would not be have to pay smaller clubs for transfer fees, in the same way that Rugby League teams used to poach Rugby Union players, and now Rugby Union Teams now Rugby League players.
With the six clubs playing half of their games outside of the UK how long will the clubs work out that it’s better to put their training grounds in Dubai, Monaco or Gib and fly the players in, then the players can go non dom and save the tax (or more likely reduce the wage bill).
A large portion of football revenue is paid from outside of the UK and the revenue that comes back (TV money, sponsership, etc.) is paid in the UK. The revenue is on a nice little earner for UK Ltd and I’m pretty sure Boris and his gang won’t be keen on anything that screws up that cash flow.
From the latest news it looks like it’s all got Pete Tong anyway, Chelski and Man Citeh have withdrawn from super league, looks like there’s several multi millionaires with egg on their collective faces.
Looks like Athletico Madrid are pulling out as well, looks like it will be Juve v West Auckland Town all over (Lipton Trophy), bet West Auckland Town beat them again.
Looks like the wise man has been heard for once
“What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.”
Bobby Robson, Newcastle -
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