Thaksin’s buying a bit a City, Kroenke’s after the Gunners, Carson Yeung hears Birmingham is a lovely place to spend a Saturday, and Roman ‘not a political exile from Russia’ Abramovich has long since sent Ken Bates Packing. But those paragons of fiscal virtue, the British Labour party, have seen fit to stick their beak in. Sports Minister Richard Caborn is to convene talks on foreign ownership in English football.
And he has a point – a lot of foreign money is pouring into the Premiership. Reading owner John Madjeski has predicted (in the Daily Mail no less) that by 2009 all of the premiership will be foreign owned. This raises a salient, pertinent, and obvious question - ‘so what?’. Carston Yeung is to displace porn-mogul and generally unsavoury type David Sullivan at Birmingham, Abramovich, much as he is loathed, at least got rid of Ken Bates at Chelsea. In the same week Caborn called for his talks, three Labour MPs also demanded an investigation into the very English Ken Bates and his activities at Leeds, where he deliberately declared the club bankrupt – in the process relegating them, but allowing Bates to wipe the club’s massive debts.
There is a tendency towards jingoistic sentiment when decrying Foreign Ownership. Arsenal Chairman Peter Hill-Wood banked on this when attacking American billionaire Stan Kroenke, who had just bought a significant stake in the club. Hill-Wood claimed that ‘We do not need his money and we do not need his sort’. Of course since then Arsenal have slipped into mild meltdown and the oh-so-English board’s complete disconnect from reality is becoming ever more apparent. Right now most fans would welcome an American owner of Arsenal – at least it would get rid of the current prats. And anyway what difference does nationality make – ultimately they’re all class enemies’ right? Either bring on Fan ownership of clubs, or adopt the excellent Soviet system. Otherwise quit whingeing when football ends up in the hands of a multinational squadron of robber-barons – this is global capitalism after all.
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2 comments:
Foreigners, eckkhkk. They are plague on our healthy folk, scurvy in our ship of state, pus in veins of masses, not enough baba in ganoush.
That said, they're also going to make the league more competitive (not less), glitzier, and - dare I say - stronger. Mid-table (and invariably midland) clubs are going to nick more points off the top teams this season - Mustafa says so.
The Premier League is already globalised - its players come from far afield, its audience is mostly outside Albion. So why not the owners? English owners are as capable of sucking clubs dry as chaps from the antipodes.
Oh yeah? What chaps might these be. That post was written by a cat not me!
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