Unusual storylines are growing ever rarer due to the influence of the super-rich and nation states in our national game
dmit it, when Erik ten Hag walked out holding a microphone after Manchester United’s final home game on Wednesday night you also thought he was going to start saying things like “Your job now is to support the new manager”, before marching off to write books containing anecdotes about Richard Branson.
Here’s the thing. The final table is going to be almost exactly the same as it was last season. No one seems bothered by this. But basically nothing has changed. And it feels significant. Let me break it down. With one weekend to go it’s clear the top two will be the same as last year, most likely, for all the talk of sizzling last-day drama, in the same order. The three teams being relegated are also the three teams that came up, so total stasis there. Seven of the top eight are the same.
Perhaps the degree of unease at some Spurs fans taking the view they hate their nearest rivals more than they love beating Manchester City has its roots in this strange sense of stasis.Is the mixed reaction of Spurs fans to their defeat by Manchester City a reflection of the Premier League’s sense of stasis?Is this what it’s going to be now? Sub-drama. Banter wars.
But it is also part of the complete billionaire-ification of sport, a trend that threatens to change fundamentally what it is. Sport has always been dominated by the richest and shoved around by despots. This has now reached a state of critical mass. Things seem to be happening all over the board., so you can basically stay in charge for as long as you want. Saudi Arabia will, we already know, be awarded the 2034 World Cup. We’re getting seeded draws in the Champions League.
There is an argument that the best way to create greater sporting social mobility is to junk all the financial rules, to let the billionaires run free and wild, to embrace “the free market”. But this only makes sense if you don’t know what a free market is, or what the people interested in sport actually want. Nation states overspending on a PR project is not “the free market”. This is the opposite of that. It’s a command economy. It’s market distortion for political ends.
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