ON MY MIND

I WAS always used to watching football teams in the lower divisions when there was more mud than grass and it only cost a few roubles to get in. I remember one Saturday afternoon at Cardiff City when two guys were seen climbing over the main gate, but the police stepped in quickly and made them stay to see the end of the match.

The later story of football is one of Thatcherist-inspired capitalistic greed, kicked off by the Premier League breaking away to take advantage of lucrative television rights. Then we had the Shameless Six of the doomed European Superleague, a tainted microcosm of the wealth divide in society, followed by the “sportswashing” by countries with poor records of human rights. And it’s all about the “blind eye”.

The phrase “turn the blind eye” might have been erroneously attributed to Nelson when supposedly in a naval encounter he lifted up his telescope to his blind eye, not wishing to see the signal flags. But the practice remains. When Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea everyone knew about oligarchs and their exploitation of the economic system at the break-up of the Soviet Union. And everyone knew about his close relationship to Putin – but they turned a blind eye because the money he brought was too good to be true.

Those Chelsea supporters who chanted “Abramovich” on the terraces when Ukrainian families were being bombed by his government only confirm the moral darkness in football.

But the pernicious “blinding of the eye” continued with Moneychester City and their owners in the UAE – a federation of hereditary monarchies condemned by Amnesty for its blatant disregard for human rights.

Now Tyneside has suffered a similar optical aberration as it welcomes Saudi state ownership, an autocratic regime which is reported to execute dissidents and is fighting a brutal war in Yemen.

Nelson is rumoured to have said: “I have a right to be blind sometimes.” Really?

When the people of a country, a football club or an organisation refuse to call out corruption and moral failure in its leadership, they are complicit.