Big Money meets Big Football meets Big Law

IT was only through football that I came to understand how the money-men destroyed the world. As a Liverpool fan, I didn’t have to wait until the Great Crash of 2008 to become acquainted with the notion that you can be a very rich person without necessarily having any money, as such.

Indeed, a lot of football people were starting to see their clubs being bought by rich people who had no money — I mean, they might have money, up to a point, but in general they preferred to keep it for themselves, rather than lavishing it recklessly on the buying of football clubs.

For that they would employ magical vehicles with names like the “leveraged buy-out”, they might borrow the money to buy the club, and then have the club repay those borrowings from its own earnings which, if it was a Premier League club, would be substantial.

So there we were in about 2005, realising that this was how Big Football was working, and starting to realise that this was how Big Money was working too

— all our lives we thought that if you wanted to buy something that cost, say, €500m, you might have to possess something in the region, of, say, €500m? Ah, what fools we were.

Soon it would be universally known that in fields far beyond football, the rich-guys-with-nomoney were creating this vast illusion of wealth, where none in fact existed. This would not end well.

Now we are seeing a new symbiosis between the worst aspects of Big Money and Big Football, and at Wembley last week, it revealed itself in ways that were not intended.

Manchester City, owned by the limitlessly wealthy potentates of the UAE, destroyed Watford in the FA Cup Final. It confirmed what most of us knew already, that City are much better than almost everyone else, but something about the one-off nature of the Cup Final seemed to crystallise it in a most unlovely way. And as the lack of the competitive element started to make the match meaningless, we realised that this is how the world works — that as everything trickles up to the oligarchs, the essential energies of society will cease to function.

Now we’ve got rich-guyswith-money, indeed the problem with the rich guys who own City is not just that they are considerably richer than the rich guys who own Liverpool or Spurs, they are limitlessly rich as only oil-rich countries can be, they are ludicrously, crushingly rich. And still… still they’re in trouble with UEFA, accused of breaking rules in relation to Financial Fair Play.

Imagine having all that money and still being accused of our old friend, “irregularities”? Imagine that...

Well, in truth, you don’t need much of an imagination to see people of astronomical wealth and power having an unhappy relationship with the rules, but in City’s case, there are accusations of a darker kind, of “sportswashing” — that the club is now effectively a PR operation working on behalf of a regime which abuses human rights without even thinking about it.

Which perhaps places in perspective, the right to watch the FA Cup Final between two teams, both of which have some chance at least of winning.

Yet that used to be an inalienable right, so for it simply to disappear last Saturday at Wembley made us aware that such things can happen even when everyone is watching. And as UEFA try to calculate if they can afford to ban City from the Champions League for a year, and face some gigantic imbroglio with Big Law, they must be relieved that City are somehow not playing in the Champions League Final next Saturday.

Maybe City themselves are not entirely unhappy not to be there, because each new display of their grandeur seems to draw attention only to the destructive nature of their infinite revenues, and the supreme cleverness with which they have deployed them in the game, UEFA investigations notwithstanding — from which we can deduce that football is so important, it actually becomes controversial when one organisation becomes too dominant. In most other areas of life, it is just accepted as a natural force, like the weather.

One is reminded of the fact that football of the American kind is considered so important, it is rigged like some socialist experiment, with the worst NFL teams of the season getting the pick of the young players for next season. Again in every other area of American life, the endless triumph of the already rich is regarded as a holy thing, whereas in sport it is understood that some form of equality needs to be cultivated for the greater good.

So the final in Madrid next Saturday will indeed be a football match of the ancient kind, in which both teams have quite a good chance of winning. Both of them are by any sane standard fantastically rich, but roughly in the same neighbourhood.

And like fantastically rich organisations in any sphere, there is moral turpitude to be found in them — personally I am opposed to Liverpool taking money from the Victor Chandler betting corporation, especially as so many Liverpool fans are Irish, officially ranked among the worst punters in the world.

But I feel this stops short of the UAE doing well out of the war in Yemen — that has no place in our game.

Well actually, it has.

‘The final in Madrid next Saturday will be a football match of the ancient kind...’