Banking, Violence And The Inner Life Today

This post comes from a certain unease I feel when I see people complaining about the Glazers and looking wistfully across the city at the spending power available. 

It's just a series of semi-connected thoughts, because I'm not sure where the answers lie. It's more about clarification for my own benefit. 

And it certainly isn't pro-Glazer, it’s more anti-football-owners

1) That if there needs to be a "fit and proper person" test for owning Premier League clubs then the wrong people are probably being attracted.  That this test implies a line drawn somewhere: "while he's undoubtedly morally dubious, by our calculations he's passed the test by half a point. He's a fit and proper person. 

2) Should football be insulated from the moral concerns of the rest of society? So when we look wistfully at clubs where one man owns the club and voraciously spends money making that club successful, one man whose money may well have been gained by illicit means, and a club unconcerned by, not only financial, but any responsibility, are we saying that this is how we would like our club to be run? And these are the sort of people we would like running it? 

3) Is the only moral concern what happens on the pitch? And here I think we can answer. The Glazers are bad regardless of what happens on the pitch. Even in the seasons we've been winning trophies the protests have been ongoing. The Glazer's model for football club ownership is roundly despised. 

Why does this not hold from the other perspective? That the billionaire owners are morally wrong regardless of what happens on the pitch. We should not desire this model of club ownership. 

from Flicker set

From a Comment is Free article by Dave Boyle: 

It's this economic problem that leads to the moral one. The default position of most people in football has been to wonder why there's any fuss; in the traditional worldview, all new money is to the good, regardless of provenance and impact. Who cares where the guy got the money from, as long as he's got it?

And so Manchester City became owned by the deposed Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra; a good guy to play golf with, said the club's then-CEO Garry Cook. As Amnesty International pointed out, he was much less engaging when it came to summary executions of suspected criminals. His funds soon proved inadequate to City's needs, and so they traded up to the ruling family of Abu Dhabi.

In a sense, all that's happened is that a local wealthy class have been inadequate to the sums needed to subsidise a modern football club, and the task has fallen to a global elite who are attracted to the sport's ability to render us blind to the provenance of their wealth.

As Aguero scored his goal, people were talking about the owners having fulfilled a dream, obscuring the grim nightmare of life in Abu Dhabi as an indentured labourer or political prisoner, unable to vote with either their hands or their feet. Drogba's penalty too brought fawning comment about Abramovich finally having achieved his goal, as if failing to win the European Cup were an arduous labour on a par with that endured by the vast majority of Russians, denuded of their country's wealth by the oligarchs in the 1990s.

4) That self-evidently debt affects the club. Why, when documents reveal that debt affects the club, does everyone go, "AHA! We've caught you out now! Look! Debt affects the club!" No shit. 

From The Guardian’s blog, on that document: 

It is worth noting, though, that the Glazers are legally bound to outline to the US Stock Exchange the "doomsday scenario": the direst – and in some cases, almost impossible – factors that might affect United, which when valued at around $2.24bn by Forbes in April confirmed the club as the world's richest for the eighth successive year. In total there at 21 pages that come under the heading of "Risk Factors" and alongside the incendiary paragraph about "indebtedness" another scenario listed that could affect United is titled: "Business interruptions due to natural disasters and other events could adversely affect us and Old Trafford." It goes on to state: "Our operations can be subject to natural disasters and other events beyond our control, such as earthquakes, fires, power failures, telecommunication losses, terrorist attacks and acts of war. Such events, whether natural or manmade, could cause severe destruction or interruption to our operations, and as a result, our business could suffer serious harm. Our first team regularly tours the world for promotional matches, visiting various countries with a history of terrorism and civil unrest, and as a result, we and our players could be potential targets of terrorism when visiting such countries." All the above may happen but the threat of an earthquake, for example, is far more unlikely than that of terrorism – and even how that could terminally affect United is as difficult to see as the further risk described as: "There could be a decline in our popularity or the popularity of football." There is more likelihood of England ending as a sovereign state than football ever falling away – never mind dying – in popularity in this country. 

5) That in hard economic times it's actually quite fitting that we should be burdened with the debt that everyone is burdened with. That, instead of the likes of David Cameron and his devastatingly rich cronies preaching "We're all in this together," we are all, in a sense, with the Glazers, in this together. Man City and Chelsea with their billionaires, they're not in it. 

6) And just as the government attempts to get the burden of debt down, so do the Glazers. And there are different approaches to this. The Tories use the bringing down of the debt to hide their ideological agenda of removing state-funding from society- we can afford to subsidise the banks but not welfare or the NHS. Whereas another approach would be to throw money at the economy in the hope of stimulating it and creating more money with which to bring down debt. And isn't this second approach the Glazers’, indeed the only possible, approach? That we have to keep spending to stay competitive, because being competitive is the only way to keep revenues flowing and keep paying off debt. 

7) Of course the Glazers would, I think we can safely assume, prefer to be as rich as Abramovich. And of course they only want us for our money-making potential, and of course they want to skim money off us. 

8) Any alternative that doesn't involve the uber-rich seems somewhere off the scale of unlikely (which isn't to say we shouldn't strive for it, but something other than replacing one rich twat for another). And it's one of those odd things about supporting a football club. That one supports no matter what. That on one level if you don't like the business of football and the type of people who own clubs and the huge amounts of money about, maybe supporting one of the world's biggest, richest clubs isn't the best idea, but on another level, we're stuck with it... And we're back to the problem of squaring off-field awfulness with on-field beauty...