Index

Soccer Follows Golf

Man City is Just the Beginning

We have two professional golf leagues, the PGA and the LIV. The latter is the rich kids’ playground for the Saudis, while the PGA is for the rest of us. The Saudis have the money to buy the best, and we get to keep the rest.

Now the Soccer (Football for everyone but us Yanks) world is being divided along the same lines. The Premier league is about to split into the regular Premier League and the no-limits petrobucks league, whatever they decide to call it.

Man City’s owners decided they didn’t need to follow the financial rules, and are about to be kicked out of Premier. As more Premier teams are bought by the billionaire crowd, one of two things is going to happen - either the Premier League abandons all pretense of financial fair play, or the rich teams will split off into their own league and the former “Premier” league will be the poor man’s game.

Since the Premier League is (or now, “was”) a very city-based league, I have to wonder how the teams that get kicked out are going to handle the nationalist backlash against their ownership. Manchester is certainly not going to have much of a stake in a team that has no roots remaining in the city other than the name. Getting kicked out of the United Kingdom’s best soccer league is going to hurt.

The UK puts a great deal of pride in their teams, and now some of the teams are being yanked out from under them. The country is suffering a lot of serious problems due to their Tory-driven plutocracy, so the loss of these points of pride could easily be blown out of proportion. I can see a potentially very bad reaction to the takeover of yet another very British institution by the no-limits rich.

In researching this, I looked into the ownership of the Premier league teams, and found out that, at least in the public record, a lot of them are majority owned by American interests. While there have been some spats, particularly over the attempt to form the European Super League, in general I didn’t see a lot of animosity there. The unlimited money strategies of the Saudis seems to have created some issues, though.

There are other accounting scandals in soccer right now, so there will be more of this going on for seemingly quite a while. Apparently the moneyed sorts are being their usual selves with their soccer teams, too.