Football is Fucked: The End of Competition
Welcome to The World Saudi Super League
This is a free article introduction about a series of in-depth articles for subscribers.
Football is dead.
Football is ruined.
Football is corrupt.
Football is broken.
First of all the sport of football continues to be - by some distance - the most popular sport in the world.
It is the most popular sport for men and women, old and young - in schools across the world its played as the primary focus and there’s continued increased participation at grass roots level across the globe. Not only that, but guess which country loves it more than any other…
Who knew? Not me.
What I’m talking about though - crucially - is elite level football, the best of the best. And while the problem has been creeping up on this level of the sport for decades, it could be about to enter a warp speed tunnel of destruction.
But let’s start with a few statements for clarification:
Saudi Arabian investment should be allowed in football.
Qatari investment should be allowed in football.
UAE investment should be allowed in football.
The argument that money is dirty when it comes from any of these countries is wrong in the context of football. That ship sailed a long time ago. Dirty money has been awash in the elite levels of the sport for more than two decades, at least. Rupert Murdoch: a man whose companies have been accused repeatedly of interfering with democracy; hacking a dead girl’s phone; paying out over a billion pounds in hush money and fines; the list could go on. Well, his dirty money turned the Premier League into a world-beating behemoth of popularity able to generate huge chunks of cash in media rights. Then, of course we shouldn’t forget when Roman invaded Chelsea…
The most important part about nations states, sovereign wealth funds, or just individual corrupt oligarchs isn’t so much the source of the wealth - that’s not football’s problem to solve - it’s the use of it. Of course the sport at the highest level could clamp down, maybe bring in a ‘fit-and-proper-person test’? Well that went well didn’t it! In fact, let’s look at those who actually failed:
The test, introduced in 2004, is mandated by the Premier League, the Football League, the National League and the Scottish Premier League. Anybody who takes over a club, runs one, or owns over 30% of its shares must be assessed. The first director known to have failed the test was Dennis Coleman, director of Rotherham United when they went into administration in 2006 and 2008. He claimed:
"I came in and in effect saved the club. It is totally unfair for me to be disqualified.”
In November 2009, Stephen Vaughan, then owner of Chester City, became the first owner to fail the test, after he was legally disqualified from being a director of any company. This was a result of VAT fraud as owner of Widnes Vikings rugby club. He transferred control of Chester to his son, Stephen Vaughan, Jr.[4]
In March 2012, Rangers owner Craig Whyte was found not to be a fit and proper person as the result of an independent enquiry.[5]
In June 2014, Louis Tomlinson, former footballer and member of the boy band One Direction, and John Ryan, businessman and previous Chairman of Doncaster Rovers, launched a bid to buy the club but one month later Ryan was found not to be a fit and proper person due to a lack of funding.
You couldn’t make it up. VAT fraud, not enough cash, tax issues but chopping the heads off journalists, vast levels of corrupt practices or even executing over 80 of your own citizens at once is absolutely actively encouraged. For more context and information, there will be a load of links from Amnesty International for reference at the bottom*. But, I hear you cry, if you don’t care about the source of the funding, why focus on the proper persons test? Well, it does appear as though the Premier League is trying to improve the test.
Individuals found to have committed human rights abuses will be unable to be an owner or director of a Premier League club under new rules.
Human rights abuses, based on the Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations 2020, will now be one of a number of additional "disqualifying events" under a beefed-up owners' and directors' test (OADT).
Anyway, if you want to read more detail on this, here’s an excellent Sky Sports article to digest the finer points.
No, the crux of my issue is THAT FUCKING SHIP SAILED A LONG TIME AGO! We’ve had FFP, we’ve had botched investigations and overturned charges, Super League suggestions, government White Papers, a waggle-of-the-bat-to-the-crowd century of financial irregularities; football has been trying to solve the potential problems to no avail. Frankly, we are now at the point where the elite ship has sailed and fallen off a flat earth into the abyss of eternal death.
Unless we ban transfer fees and bring in a wage cap the only way from here will be a Saudi Super League where all the best players play. It’s happening…
Crucially though can sportswashing work in reverse? Because the sport is so popular in the UAE, Saudi and Qatar could it drive important reforms in those countries? And why shouldn’t they have successful domestic leagues for fans in those nations, with players who have done enough in the Champions League or individual European leagues and want one final pay day? In fact, it should be encouraged! I’d certainly rather that than buying up English clubs and ruining the competitions through financial doping.
What this series of articles is going to do - and this project has taken over a month to research now with over 100 references, including two academic papers - is to look at either the impending doom of the sport with increasing amounts of fans thinking…
Finally, here’s another article on This Red Planet which discusses some similar issues in reference to the World Cup, Qatar and, of course, Welsh Nationalism.
The final word comes from one of the best football journalists in the business, Jonathan Wilson, in the most recent edition of The Blizzard.
Hopefully he’s wrong, and this set of articles is an aim to look for another way. And no, not a Third Way… the only way.
*
“Saudi Arabia: Quash 34-year prison sentence for student Salma al-Shehab”, 18 August
“Saudi Arabia: Mass execution of 81 men shows urgent need to abolish the death penalty”, 15 March
“Saudi Arabia: Halt imminent execution of Bahraini men sentenced after flawed trial”, 24 May
“Saudi Arabia: Arrested at 14, tortured, now faces execution: Abdullah al-Huwaiti”, 20 June
“Saudi Arabia codifies male guardianship and gender discrimination”, 9 December