Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard

Anal warts, finding out your mate’s a Tory cunt, MacOS, Tracey Emin talking about her own work, 24 hour news channels, Winter, James O’Brien and James O’Brien being condescending, any Disney movie since 1997, Bono on politics, listening to Israeli government spokespeople, Russell Brand’s facial hair, Clyde 1 FM, remembering that Richard Keys exists, Jordan Peterson’s voice, the second season of True Detective, just some of the things that are as appealing as the prospect of discussing how amortization works in professional football.

Instead, let’s punch down on some whiners. Specifically, all those weasels moaning about European leagues and UEFA implementing rules to prevent clubs living well beyond their means or cooking the books to outright cheat, and handing out punishments if they do.

Football fandom in 2024 is quite peculiar and doesn’t help the cause of the Profit and Sustainability Rules. For a growing number of sad cunts, and provided you have an Abramovich type backer, the prospect of your club spending loadsamoney and winning transfer windows provides emphatic bragging rights, even one-upmanship with rival fans on social media when your club wins the race to sign a player that football results often cannot. Compare this experience to supporting your team playing actual games. There’s a genuine downside, at times it can be a grind of disappointing performances and results, your side can lose or drop points, sometimes in agonizing ways, or, God forbid, fail to win silverware.

Much as I despise it, the Stockholm Syndrome towards nefarious investment in football has been built on tangible terrain – the commercialization and commodification of following football over the last thirty-five years. Fans have been bombarded with vacuous branding and hyperbole that large sums of money being spent and huge inflation in the game is itself entertainment and good for the sport, “best this, biggest that, most expensive yet”. Football is escapism and because that is monetizable the sport has been subject to increasing forms of speculation.

Now that most top European clubs are suckling on a roulette wheel of sovereign wealth funds, American hedge funds and billionaires, because these ill-gotten gains “helped” their club compete with the game’s crazed inflation in the era of non-regulation, turning around that oil tanker to head for a land of (relative) austerity now seems unpalatable, and boring. It’s the worst of both worlds – rich foreigners owning your club but unable to furnish your club with their funding. Additionally, it makes total sense to be confounded and hostile at this volte-face from those running the game towards financial doping.

High financing in football is also essential to others whose careers rely on the sport’s transfer industry. Just take this January transfer window, the PSR rules have created inertia. That transfer gimp on Sky Sports News wears a forlorn expression akin to a hostage reading out a list of demands when discussing loan deals for obscure Turkish league players. Agents aren’t getting commissions. It’s a real time collapse akin to Stanislav Govorukhin’s expose of the final days of the Soviet Union’s immense dysfunction. Everything is broken. We Can’t Live Like This.

Some will defensively retort that it’s the same shit, just global now instead of local, and those who endorse PSR are covert xenophobes pining for a return of the game’s bygone age. Thirty years ago, there was certainly less scorn for the philanthropy of Jack Walker funding Blackburn Rovers to the title, or, on the destitution end of the spectrum, Peter Risdale recklessly spending money that wasn’t his and ultimately sending Leeds United into a decade plus long tailspin. Occam’s razor applies here – their intentions, as supporters of these clubs, weren’t in question.

PSR is a referendum on the nature of self-interest, and that’s why I believe its measures will gradually succumb to a bureaucratic neutering. Football is tribal, not altruistic. More importantly, Manchester City being owned by Abu Dhabi, and before that Chelsea by Roman Abramovich, has conclusively proven winning the sportswashing lottery is a far better guarantee of success than improving on merit. Even better, the former isn’t as morally dubious or corrosive as benefitting from a housing price bubble or suppressing the wages of nurses and junior doctors, never mind anything genuinely despicable, say Rwandan deportations and scallywags terrorizing mobility scooter users.

A juxtaposition between two clubs who have been charged with PSR breaches – Manchester City and Everton – is why I’m so cynical. Manchester City have yet to be punished despite their charges relating to as late as 2018, having benefitted from endless bankrolling for well over a decade by one of the worst regimes in the world and being able to afford lawyers who can obfuscate effectively. They continue to rack up the trophies while under suspicion and investigation. If they’re able to evade punishment that in itself would expose the PSR laws as a sham, and confirm that money is the rule of law. Anyone confident this won’t be the case?

Everton, having failed to be compliant in consecutive seasons, already have a ten-point deduction and could face another points deduction, which could surely relegate the club into financial destitution. They got themselves into this mess spending on the promise of increased revenue not realised and are now existing on punitive lines of credit from potential buyers. With no punishment for Manchester City (yet), Everton fans feel they’ve been singled out for mis-management, a much lesser crime than City’s (alleged) impropriety.

Fans of Bury, Derby County, Reading, Birmingham City and Portsmouth would surely side with Everton’s gripes about their punishment in this context. But they understand that had these rules been in place sooner what happened to them wouldn’t be happening to Everton now. Just as people only become militantly politicized when they’re made skint through no fault of their own, it’s also a shame that too many football fans won’t become amenable to PSR unless their club becomes a husk.