Soccer scoreboards breaking news! The Manchester City franchise has been bought by trillionaries from who intend to move the club to Dubai where there is a bigger support base and fans are prepared to pay $15 for a hot dog. They will buy the best 300 players in the world and will pay them an oil field a week and as well as a signing on fee of a planet shaped like a palm-tree. Fans will be happy to re-mortgage their apartment on the 180th floor to buy a season ticket and will enjoy the McGoogle demonstration penalty shoot off at half time as well as the BurgerSoft dive of the day competition.
Is this really happening or did I dream it all? Is the English game really become a toy shop for foreign owners who want to use it to make themselves famous and to get rid of some of that annoying money that is clogging their bank account?
Chelsea were the first team to be bought by a billionaire, and to buy big and buy hard, completely distort the market, and achieve success purely by throwing money at it. Manchester City are the latest one, and the most ridiculous of all. The sums the club are paying for very average players are phenomenal. The wages are even more ridiculous. Last week, I heard, and I really hope that its not true, that Yaya Toure is getting $200,000 a week!! A WEEK!! Considering that he fairly regularly earned a staring place in the Barcelona team, he certainly must be a very good player, but the sum of money that we are talking about is so outrageous that for me in many ways it signifies the death of the English game. His name was on the soccer scoreboards last week for the first time in Manchester, and he had an average game.
The Premier league has followed the capitalism on drugs model of American team sports, and in doing so it is ruining the game as a whole. In America it is ALL about the money. The language of sport is very different in the US. The talk id of franchises not clubs, and fans and pundits admit openly that moving a club is a good thing if it brings more revenues. Fans talk about how players are making a good move if this move means they are getting more money, no matter what the consequences.
Whilst the English soccer league is not American sports yet, it is getting that way. The biggest difference in my mind, is that even though the game has got very American in many ways, a lot of English fans do not accept it. We know that players abandon clubs that nurtured them for clubs owned by sheiks who offer them an oil field and a planet shaped like a palm tree, but at least we don’t openly talk about like its normal and acceptable. Also we have yet to reach the wide heights of commercialism that American sports are associated with. Go to an American football game, and the football scoreboards will show more than 100 adverts in one game. The overriding feeling is that the game is a sideshow for all the commercialism around it. Hence the 4 quarters, and all the time outs – plenty of opportunities to advertise and sell $15 hotdogs.
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