by Tony Attwood
In my last piece I noted the Uefa Convention on the Future of European Football and the chaos in football in which lots of separate organisations fight for control, and no one group particularly seems to listen any other group and absolutely no one listens to the fans.
Meanwhile Uefa seems completely incapable of controlling clubs either in terms of financial fair play or (to take a totally different angle) UEFA punishment for Bulgarian racists. And in this situation, for Arsenal and other clubs to start encouraging their fans to buy into unregulated cryptocurrencies really is going far too far, is grossly appalling, and completely unacceptable.
And this lack of serious regulation across borders, with each individual self-interest group maintaining its own right to control itself, means there really is no regulation. Seemingly match-fixing and money laundering are now utterly out of control. Pretending that doesn’t apply in England seems rather pathetic. Indeed we might ask the authorities: given that corruption seems to be everywhere in football, how can you be pure that nothing is wrong in England?
Indeed as Euronews pointed out, regulation is necessary “because sports, and football in particular, are some of the most high-profile areas of the EU internal market, and one in which the absence of any effective regulation permits unlawful activities to flourish.”
When we stop believing we stop spending and then football falls apart
Sports broadcasting, gaming, gambling, and the sale of sports merchandise, clothing and equipment are all now huge economic areas, and all have a desperate need to maintain the notion that nothing is wrong. Thus we have a huge propaganda industry behind football, the prime raison d’être of which is to convince us that sport is fine, sport is not bent, there’s nothing amiss, nothing odd to see, just give us your money. And that “nothing is wrong” industry which focuses on the media, exists because the moment we start to think something might be wrong, that referees might be biased, that administrators might be taking back-handers, that cup draws are fixed, that clubs can manipulate covid regulations to their own ends, or anything else, we stop believing. And when we stop believing we stop spending and football starts to fall apart.
In short, the absolute central core of football now is that everything is fine, no matter how many events happen that suggest this is not the case.
Now I have no idea how much pressure if any the Premier League and others put on the media not to mention certain topics such as Infantino moving to Qatar or the fact that crypto currencies are unregulated and extremely dubious, or that there is something fishy about the way referees are selected in the Premier League. And maybe there is none. Maybe as a unity the media in England just happen to feel that PGMO is not a suitable entity for discussion or examination and that no one in England cares about the head of Fifa’s court cases, or why he has moved away to a country with no extradition treaty.
So the media does not even ask the question about Liverpool’s multiple false positive covid tests – despite the major public interest there should be in such a case. I mean, if they, with the best tests available and all the latest testing equipment, can get five false positives, how many more of us have had to isolate for a week, when in fact we didn’t have covid at all?
76,500 people in the UK are isolating unnecessarily
We have 107,000 daily cases in the UK at the moment according to the Guardian, but if the Liverpool figures are replicated across the country, then 76,500 of these people who don’t have the virus and are isolating unnecessarily. Surely that is worth talking about. But no, it seems not.
And all this is important because football alone accounts for around 3.5% of the GDP of the European Union. That is twice as much as agriculture – and just think how much regulation is put on agriculture!
Plus it is not as if Qatar’s courting of Infantino is the first such incident. For example, Putin in Russia invited the disgraced Sepp Blatter, to the World Cup when held in that country. Blatter has accepted the invitation. Will Russia be insisting the next head of Fifa is a Russian? Will Fifa go with that?
As a not-for-profit organisation registered in Switzerland, Fifa is subject to Swiss income taxes according to the Swiss taxation rules that apply to associations. So Fifa is taxed on its taxable income – that is revenue minus expenditure. And yet somehow it is estimated to pay about 1.5% of its income in tax. How does it do that?
In the bidding process to become a host country for the world cup the bidding country has to give “a comprehensive tax exemption to…. Fifa and further parties involved in the hosting and staging of an event”. That’s how. But why has that little snippet never made the news?
But there is a little footnote I need to add here. Nothing in this or the last article has suggested that football is fixed. Rather that it is financially chaotic, and not administered to the highest standards possible.
To suggest anything is fixed would be to go even further.
Of course you may choose to believe all the various odd things that happen in football, from the child sex abuse cases in England, to the secrecy of PGMO, from the refusal of the media ever to consider there is anything wrong, through to the determination of PGMO to use the same refs over and over again, amounts to nothing.
I just happen to think there are too many dubious things all piling up one on top of another. And I didn’t even mention gaslighting.
Gaslighting: how refereeing in the Premier League is manipulated, and why the media never speak about it.
- 1: Are the referees and the media really out to get Arsenal, or am I just imagining it?
- 2: How discussions about refereeing are deliberately stifled by the media
- 3: Referees: the odd statistics that are simply never revealed or discussed
- 4: How we have been utterly misled about football: part 4
- 5: Hiding the problem of refereeing is destroying the credibility of the Premier League
- 6: Revealed: PL referees are not 98% accurate but actually just 75% accurate
