The Premier League circus kicks off again on Friday. Actually it’s never stopped. The football might take a break but the business never does. So maybe it’s premature exhaustion with relentless transfer stories but rather than Arsenal and Leicester all I can think of is Ned Beatty.
You mightn’t know the name but you know the face. He’s the actor famous for that “squeal like a pig “ scene in Deliverance.
However it’s his bravura delivery of blunt corporate cynicism to Peter Finch’s character in the Oscar-winning Network a few years later which helps put the lie to naive ideas of Premier League football actually being about football.
Finch’s newscaster is famous for being ‘Mad As Hell’ and not taking it anymore. But it is Beatty’s network boss who wins.
“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems – one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars,” he proclaims.
"There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. These are the nations of the world today."
The specific corporate references sound dated but fill in modern equivalents and the point’s the same. In elite football the international system of currency really does determine the totality of life. It is a world where the world really is a business.
It's why Arsenal's majority shareholders are an American and a Russian-Uzbek. It's why Leicester City is the property of a Thai family with a near unpronounceable name. Why Manchester City is divvied up between Qatari and Chinese interests and Chelsea belongs to a Russian oligarch.
It’s why they have been hard-selling their ‘brands’ around the globe this summer, exploiting every commercial angle to audiences that might be hard pressed to pinpoint Manchester to the nearest thousand miles but can pony up for pictures and a shirt.
It's why the Premier League is a spectacular success, a vast multinational dominion of dollars so plentiful it makes Kyle Walker the world's most expensive defender even if, as pointed out by that arch-controversialist, Gary Lineker, he finds it challenging to reliably cross a ball.
Ordinary players
But transfer activity is much more than just football. There’s a self-fulfilling momentum to this inflationary shuffling of players. There are budgets to be spent and a lot of people with a lot invested in preventing questions being asked as to why they’re not.
It means a lot of ordinary players are being paid extraordinary money and that’s fair enough. If there’s a pot to disperse then who are more entitled than players to get their hands on it; no one buys a subscription to watch a suit.
It’s the suits though who’ve turned players into spreadsheet commodities, traded to and fro like high-end horseflesh. Since that’s the market reality it’s little wonder then that players and their representatives play the market and exploit their worth for all it’s worth.
Which is the context in which fans complain about there being no loyalty anymore. And no integrity. Players up traps from ‘us’ and transfer to ‘them,’ ritually kissing the other shirt in a gesture that has become a symbol of all that’s wrong with football.
It gets people mad as hell and it’s something I’m not going to take anymore. If I’ve one wish for this season it is that this fatuousness stops getting picked on so much. It’s as honest a gesture as the Premier League allows.
Because there is no ‘them’ and there is no ‘us’. There is no loyalty, and there is no integrity, or anything so old-fashioned as sportsmanship. Instead there is a vast, interwoven, interacting multinational dominion of dollars which determines the totality of Premier League life.
There is only the business of Manchester United and Manchester City and Liverpool and Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs and Everton, the Premier League nations of the world, global brands taking the boredom-busting business of televised sport to ever more lucrative and pervasive levels.
You can be a 'red' whether you're in Burnage, Ballina, Boston or Brisbane.
It makes talk of loyalty seem quaint, a sentimental hark back to when clubs drew their support locally, and even their players, generating senses of place and identity unique to them.
Such legacies have now become little more than another profitable nostalgic image rights asset.
Wishful thinking
It works too. Man Utd’s fan base is worldwide. You can be a ‘red’ whether you’re in Burnage, Ballina, Boston or Brisbane. Club loyalty can be commercially exploited with just a click wherever you are.
And it's interesting to speculate on what most fans are actually loyal to if the 'us' is rooted in little more than some hard-sell idea wrapped in a red Adidas shirt retailing at €69 a pop.
The Premier League sells this idea with unprecedented sophistication. It assembles some of the finest playing talent on the plant and propagates an image of excellence. It’s so successful it holds a sizable proportion of the world’s population in thrall. It’s a circus alright but what counts is the bread.
So expecting old-fashioned loyalty from players is wishful thinking in a business where even the most fervent couch-bound fan’s devotion can ultimately get boiled down to variations on their heroes’ shirt-kissing. They just don’t change as often.
The world is a college of corporations,” Beatty proclaimed over 40 years ago. “Inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.”
Every time a Premier League player kisses the shirt is proof of how big and successful a business the Premier League is. And the reason they do it – because they’re on television, dummy!
