AMAZING PORN CLIPS REVEAL SECRET SHAME OF CUP-WINNERS ARSENAL

I do realise that many of you are bored sh*tless by football, but please bear with me in what follows: as I’ve written many times before, I write about footie these days largely because it is yet another glaring example of how neoliberalism works against the natural human expression of creativity.

It is a terrible sadness to me that the game of Association Football – quite rightly called ‘beautiful’ – has been reduced by the munneeee to one in which most of the excitement has been destroyed by stratagems designed to ensure a result at all costs.

Victory at any price is a core value of neoliberalism, and no single human being has defined that ruthless search to be Number One (at the expense of everyone and everything else) more than the world’s most multinationality psycho, Rupert Murdoch. So we should not be surprised that, over the last thirty years, he has been by far the biggest and most malign influence on the British game.

In yesterday’s “exciting” Cup Final, two coach-constipated sides scored five goals between them. The four scored during normal time all came from set-piece corners and free kicks. The last of these – Arsenal’s equaliser – ricocheted off two heads and a heel before dribbling into the net under the hapless Hull City goalkeeper. The single piece of ingenuity in the entire 120 minutes was Arsenal’s winner, which came in extra time from some creative play and an excellent strike by Aaron Ramsey.

Any one of four South American, two African and seven European mainland sides could’ve ripped both yesterday’s finalists to shreds with ease. People talk about the ‘genius’ of Barcelona’s Messi, but in reality he is simply the best at kidding defenders. He does this by changes of pace, backheels, passes to the byline, and one-twos with colleagues. He is a charming young man of great humility…and an unshakeable belief in elegant simplicity. But then, he’s Argentinian. And like Brazil (where the forthcoming World Cup is to be staged) South America both nurtures and demonstrates that adventure will always win over fear.

The British home-grown game of football has two blindingly obvious problems: there is little or no investment in raw grassroots talent; and proprietors demand instant success from coaches, whose insecurity is reflected in the safety-first nature of their game-plays. As such, it is a microcosmic but nevertheless telling damnation of the insane neoliberal belief in minimal investment alongside immediate ROI. British soccer too has its bankers – imported foreign players or rare local superstars on £3m a month – and its mill owners like Murdoch, Roman Abramovich (Chelsea), Stan Kroenke (Arsenal), The Glasers (MUFC), Shahid Khan (Fulham) and Sheikh Mansour (Manchester City).

In turn, its Swinging Dicks are above the law. The Football Association (FA) will not move against the harassment of referees, the sloping playing field of mega-money – or dependence upon player imports – because it fears what the backlash to such radical (albeit urgently required) actions might be.

But perhaps most significantly, England’s Premier League also works on the exact same basis as globalist mercantilism: massive overdependence on megadebt, paper wealth, and the need for dozens of atypically favourable circumstances to all stay in place….forever. The FA Premiership is, literally, a Northern Rock waiting to happen. For example, a 1.5% rise in US interest rates would collapse the Glasers at Manchester United. An adverse series of prosecutions against Newscorp could result in the Premiership’s business model collapsing overnight. Legal action against Abramovich in Russia would produce the same outcome at Chelsea.

Old moaners like me would, of course, have no case at all were the English Premiership (a) providing the best club sides to compete in Europe and/or (b) bringing forth local talent to help England win the World Cup.

Neither of these are even remotely true.

England last won the World Cup nearly half a century ago. In the six years prior to the establishment of a Murdoch bankrolled Premiership, English teams won the European Cup six years in a row. In the 30 years since then, English teams have triumphed just six times.

Over that same period, clubs from countries where the Murdoch model has no influence at all were four times more likely to win the European Champions’ League than English sides.

Neoliberal models of business, entertainment, media, banking and fiscal budgeting do not produce investment in creativity. On the contrary, they breed fear, safety first, mediocrity…..and ultimately, stagnation. Entrepreneurial capitalism with a socially mutual dimension delivers ingenuity, progress, and intelligent entertainment. It supports the arts, and technological exploration. It assumes that risk and losses will, in the end, produce broader benefits for the human race. It sees far beyond Bourse short-termism, and aims to deliver products and services that inform  way above the lowest common denominator….while entertaining the citizenry with pleasing invention rather than merely victory.

Here endeth the lesson.