Boehly knows he can’t stage a coup

Todd Boehly will be the most intriguing American owner in english football for one simple reason: he knows the Super league is dead. All of the others — the Glazers, the Kroenkes, the Fenway Sports Group — we now doubt their motives. Was this the game-plan all along? Get inside the english game and steal it, moulding it to their enormous advantage and profit. Boehly is buying in at a time when that coup can no longer happen. Not like before, anyway. The elite clubs will always bully and threaten UeFA into skewing the competition towards them. We can see that with the pressure put on for those contemptible historic places. yet that is a safety net not a guaranteed revenue stream. A relatively successful club should never need it anyway. The big win, the promised breakaway, is dead. The clubs know they would lose their fanbase overnight if it happened, and new regulations may make it a legal impossibility without withdrawing from domestic competition. So Boehly is buying in on what he sees now. Four competitions — three domestic, one european — plus maybe the promise of an enhanced Club World Cup. Chelsea have a good revenue stream through their successful academy and a redeveloped Stamford Bridge has huge potential, but will be costly. Boehly, however, sees profit in Chelsea as is. It doesn’t make him better than the other American investors, but perhaps braver.

Matt Le tissier was given a significant platform at the weekend to advance more conspiracy theories about Covid victims being actors and the war in Ukraine being Western propaganda. the strange thing is, these extreme, often irrational, arguments become bound up in debates about plurality. Don’t we need to hear more independent voices, questioning the accepted logic, it is asked. Well, no actually, we don’t. We need a range of views and ideas, but only if they’re rational. every time someone from Nasa speaks, it doesn’t require counter-balancing with tony, from Luton, who thinks the earth is flat and we’re going to sail off the end of it. Le tissier’s 100 best goals remain a wonderful watch but, for now, let’s leave it there.