TRASHFUTURE - RIP European Super League (2021-2021) feat. Musa Okwonga

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

This week, we're joined by author and podcaster Musa Okwonga (@Okwonga) to discuss the aborted attempt to create a European Super League of football, a deep dive into why football clubs have such abysmal finances, why there are so many Russian gangsters "investing" in the beautiful game, and much more. If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

All right guys, yeah, see the match which one Hello, welcome back to another free episode of TF. It's the free one. Yeah, when did that start? I don't know but you're changing it every time now It was when you made me stop doing the bonus voice on the free apps because I have to pay for that I have to pay for the bonus voice. Yeah, you're the sexy bonus voice subscribe to the intro Yeah, and did you get the irritating free one voice? The free one. Yes, the irritating voice that our listeners, especially probably our new listeners today will like so well They'll love it. They're gonna absolutely love it. Now, you may wonder why we were hearing from

Our actually secret sixth mic on the show Alan Partridge earlier. It's because he mostly does production stuff That's right. Alan Partridge, who's Nate's assistant We have decided a rotty blotty yank to branch out of our Normal comfort area of talking about, you know, financial scams and weird startups and companies and stuff And instead talk about football Which upon my investigation of it turns out to be much of the same Yeah, who could have possibly predicted but in order to help us investigate the history and

Sort of you might say a story a decline fall possible renaissance who can say a football It is uh musa aquanga author and podcaster and co-host of the stadio football podcast musa. How's it going? It's great. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Cheers for the pleasure. Yes Yeah, we're very excited to learn about football something which none of us know anything about My dad tried and failed. Save yourselves now. Save yourselves now That's right So by the end of this so basically right if you want to understand the offside rule All you have to do is listen to the entirety of this podcast about like transfer financing and you'll get it

Yeah, take out your official trasheacher salt and pepper shakers now And array them in the table on the trasheacher bingo card and then we'll begin explaining. That's right um So look, we're going to be talking all about um A little bit about this whole european super league thing, but also we're going to be a we're going to adam kurtis Said a little bit. We're going to be a little bit trashing this story. How do we get to where we are? But first but first there's a startup I've been wanting to talk about

And we've never gotten to talk about it so far because I've never found the right time So i'm insisting that that time is now. Okay. It is the football index Is it an index linked fund but for football? Uh more or less, but um, I would say it's connected. Well, uh Musa, do you what what is it? What is the football index? It's uh, oh my goodness. It's a house of cards pyramid scheme I mean, uh, you know, it's it feels um It's interesting that, you know, bernie bernie madeoff died

Um Around this time in the football index and it friend of the show similar wheelhouse similar wheelhouse. Um Let's you on imaginary valley. Basically Um, how do I explain football index the rest of the economy? I understand a little bit more information here It's basically a virtual stock market where you can buy and sell shares for the benefit of the listener I'm doing big scientist stock market except with real money Because it says based on the performance of um of that player. So you can invest in I don't know robin or whatever

Uh, and then you know depending on how he does who's around these days jimmy griefs I would name one football player um michael seamen You can you can invest in robert levendowski get me 100 teddy sharing him He's not played for one stanley man 100s. Look, I'll the only football players. I know play for buyer. Sorry or play or played for buyer Um, wait white buyer okay, so basically like it's looking at the um I suppose the the fundamental principle is quite simple. So you have an athlete

who Has a particular um, he's a performer particularly high level and he basically I'm gonna buy shares in that person But I know that person's performance because of like fatigue injury is going to tank in the next like six months So basically I'll buy that person's um I'll invest in that player. So like there's shared a share value of 75 But I know that like six months from now the share value is going to drop to like 14 Are you gonna short that player? Potentially there's there's ways of doing that there's like ways of doing that so you can you can short the player you can

So it's that kind of same message. So the basically player is like The player is like anything with a value that can change sharply over time, right? It just happens it just happens to be with the football in it. They're using Footballers, but it could be any anything, right? Now this was the idea you'd trade the value of a player So you'd pick like say a young player who was 19 years old and you'd know that basically Two years from now that player is going to have like explosion in value So you buy that player for 14 two years later the value flies to 120

You sell play at the top of the market. No, they'll get an injury a year from then and they're going to 36 again So you make a value and you pull out the money Now this is all like, you know, nice easy stock market principles But the reason this is such a pyramid scheme What it kind of is anyway because who determines the value of these players like in the stock market? That's the first problem Second thing was 120 arbitrary football units, which we all understand It is exactly right exactly the other thing was so so what happened was a lot of like

Primarily young men sitting at home in isolation got very emotionally invested in this because they're emotionally invested in football Um, but unfortunately being emotionally invested in this is like being emotionally invested in Q and on Right. I'm waiting for the day of Q and it was basically a big pyramid scheme and a lot of people Were taken for a ride because a lot of them might have been pumped into the scheme There's a pyramid scheme the dividends being paid out We're basically just being paid out of not the growing market But it's people just like shoving money in the deposits

And when people came to their dividends at once Or when people came to cash out at once the thing collapses And that what the made-off scheme relied upon was trust right relied on people not all coming for their money at once because you know Evan could trust this guy. He was everyone's mate and the system relies on The sad thing was it exploits the most um

In a way non-fungible thing of all which is human intimacy and trust, right? It commoditizes trust shared love And yeah, and this whole thing imploded very recently. So that's basically like in a nutshell what the football index is and did Uh, how about qpr and on how do we feel about that? I'm very good. There we go. He's done it. Yeah, that's what I'm here for qpr is related to this in fact specifically So but how it worked was in the mechanically is That what you would do is you'd buy and sell claims on On bets. So what you were actually buying and selling was a um

Was it was in fact a a bet on this player that would be like have a very like have a very long end end date But the dividends were all from other people making other bets. So essentially it was in fact It was a it was a quite literal pyramid scheme. Yes. Yes and What is in because the operator keep the They keep they needed to keep minting a certain amount of new shares every day and sell them for more than they would be quote Unquote worth so they could keep paying all this money out and what's interesting though

Why I bring this up is that the football index? This actual literal pyramid scheme Was the shirt sponsor of both nottingham forest and queens park rangers also. Oh good. Oh, yeah I'm glad that we don't already have everyone sort of primed to gamble on sort of imaginary football futures already with stuff Like fifa ultimate team or whatever You're completely right. Well, that's actually your that here's the kind of segue towards The super league actually which we'll get onto a bit these games are priming people to bet Because every night you're simulating outcomes and you're playing fifa

You know, you're you're simulating outcomes between your favorite teams teams that you'd like to see So already there's a kind of gamification So the frustration towards players on the pitch or athletes grows because when you're playing fifa every night Your players at 99% but the average footballer has like, you know ebb and flow informed They're not machines, but people are conditioned to seeing high performance every night because they're playing with these players We can we count With the wage inflation too You get the thing of like where you're not allowed to get one of these weird injuries that only footballers get like straining your groin

Uh, because like we're paying you however many million quids a year a week a month to do that Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah, deed too far. I don't think many people who support nottingham forest are concerned about the ultra high performance all of the time Wow The football index would like to distance themselves from nottingham forest football club Do you know what's so funny? You know what's so funny about um these podcasts? You always won becoming a podcast Who's the chaotic element because it's always won, right? There's not only one on this one moose, so don't worry about that

There's there's one non chaotic element on this one, and I'm holding it all together so, um, so basically right this is the reason I wanted to bring up the football index right is um, I mean, it's it's interesting enough as our podcast in its own right, but like realistically, right? It is a actual pyramid scheme, uh, that was licensed by the uh, the gam all the gambling authorities that was a shirt sponsor of two championship clubs And so on and so on and I think that just gives us a little bit of an introduction to our main topic which is the european super league

How we got to where we are and how football became essentially like the rest of the economy this kind of casino for billionaires that has, um Incidentally some football being played Um, and I think like just to as a beginning, right? I think one of the things that I was thinking about When we were sort of putting together this sort of notes for this Was that the european super league which we'll talk about sort of what it is

It's all it is the kind of the apotheosis of the neoliberal project in football Because you have to understand that the neoliberal project was never just about Shielding capital's desire to extract wealth from democratic control It was about shielding it from risk altogether democracy was just one of those risks But competition is another one of those risks And what we're going to see is like this desire to shield returns ability to pay back debt get better interest rates and stuff From the very competitiveness That you would think probably defines a sport the the ultimate form of this is just just simulate the matches

You know just purely have have a computer that tells you Bolton one, you know, two nil And just be done with it You know, I love about this what your critique and I love it is um I think of the hunt for red october that movie. What was that like 1990s it came out? I think I think 90 Yeah, there's one but there's one particular line where they took as a monologue or a siliqui about The nature of war is is the ultimate purpose of war is to serve itself And that's the european super league is this it's the ultimate purpose of capital is to serve itself You've given a lot of credit to the hunt for red october there by describing as a siliqui. I think they'll be very flattered

No, I like to mix like this and we go high So I think my shelf was something of a Shakespearean. So uh, uh, so most of let's Let's sort of dig into that. Let's talk about how how is the european super league this apotheosis of capital kind of Shielding itself from risk even of the competition inherent in football Right. So the way that it works is um, I try to break this down for listeners that aren't necessarily football fans. Uh It's a bit like you have religion, right? And so a lot of people Yeah, so churches all over the country and everyone worships um

And everyone puts their money into like the collection plate at the end of the service to like, you know To give money to the local church and all the rest of it, right? What the european super league does is basically equivalent of if overnight If overnight it was decided by the five biggest churches all in the biggest richest city that you are not a proper christian Unless you only gave your money to the five biggest churches Oh, and it turns out you're not you're not a proper christian unless you turn up to that church at least once every five years Even though the waiting list has obscene and so it's basically like everyone woke up overnight and all of a sudden All the local churches which are struggling to get by basically had their budgets absolutely nuked

And all of a sudden these five mega churches basically like everyone's got a private jet waiting on the runway fully fueled That's what the european super league was like in terms of the kind of like it was a heist It was a smash and grab it was a it was a not a daylight rubber. It was a midnight robbery Literally this thing was announced. So just to bring the context back to football. So Football has in in europe alone. I mean football has I think just on a 750 professional clubs, right? 750 professional clubs, which is the center of in many ways center of their communities anywhere from Montpellier to Bratislava like football clubs are the center of communities not just match paying fat not just match match goers those who are going to games, but like

The amount of industries that football touches, you know, the fishing industry obviously is a huge, you know The fishing industry has been destroyed Or decimated or destroyed by by brexit, right? It's we're only seeing the impacts Incrementally, but the already we're seeing huge impacts, right? Um The fishing industry obviously as as as brutal as those losses have been Compared to football. It's it's much more self-contained, right? That the amount of lives and industries collateral industries and damage that the implosion of football would cost to a lot of these countries economies would be huge

because it's not just football it's Um secondary industries is finance. It's also like you can just talk about intangibly the mental health of communities that were held together by football being a place of coming together Now just football is fun to watch Yes, and now the way what the european super league tried to try to impress the blokes riley Out there trotting out going like eye for one I love I love watching a game of the old footed ball the old pig skin I love it. We'll get to that later. So what the what the european super league did?

It saw how popular so it based the 12 richest clubs in the world Well 12 of the richest clubs in the world saw how popular football was and thought How can we basically grab as much of the pie as possible? So what they did was they quietly agreed between them the 12 or 12 richest clubs in the world They they basically said we have so much social media presence So many fans so much loyalty They were basically going to form a league all by ourselves So we're going to cut out all the other kind of smaller clubs and we're just going to play each other because we're pretty much box office

We are basically going to make the marvel cinematic universe of Football nobody wants to see the minor superheroes all they want to see is basically Thor They want to see iron man. They want to see they don't want to see anyone else and they basically did that they're basically like We're only going to play with each other. We're going to take all the tv revenue Because we're basically everyone's it's basically a narcissistic project everyone's obsessed watching these 12 biggest clubs We're going to take those 12 clubs and we're going to broadcast in china Where there's going to be huge revenues in india in all these new economies for football relative new economies

And screw the rest of the world And that that was the plan basically and it was going to be a closed shop, right? Like yes, these clubs are only going to play each other Yes with room for five. There were 12 12 founding clubs They were going to get three more in the door and then they were going to have a rolling Just to kind of spice things up and have a bit of garnish have five clubs come in every so often Um rolling This yeah, exactly like so basically like a kind of like a netflix series

Basically like a netflix series of like community or whatever Or curb your enthusiasm. We have a guest star. Yeah every like couple of couple of episodes. Yeah So is this actually the one thing that I didn't fully clock with this? When couldn't get to the bottom of was whether this league was going to be in addition to playing in the premier league or the league Or whatever whether they were only going to play each other in this league I think that was going to be one of the controversies, right? Because they were like, oh, we're still going to play these other leagues That's going to be fine. And then the leagues that they were leaving said wait, no No, no, no, we can ban you from doing that, right?

Well, because they were trying to leech what they're trying to do is a classic thing of like Like if anyone anyone missing needs to go to like so spoken word nights when promoters would turn up to a spoken word night and fly the entire event And the idea was that gradually start stealing your fan bases away, right? That was the plan That's how it worked the promoting scene whatever and the same thing with football will set up a parallel competition at overtime Drag all the eyeballs across through our league And when we've got sufficient eyeballs, we'll just cut everyone loose And I'll only be us. Yeah. So what what some of the owners have said about this, right?

This is uh, furantino Perez says it's pure statistics Teenagers are more interested in playing video games than football these days and we have to do something to bring Because it's not on terrestrial tv anymore Yeah It's uh, they're not interested. I wonder why he's not spending 90 quid a month on sky sports They should just learn to code teenagers. Absolutely. We'll we'll play a lot of fifa for instance because that's more affordable than uh, then buying fucking sky sports or whatever else to to get matches But also they are watching they're probably just streaming it because they can't afford it. They're watching it

Yeah, you wouldn't download a football game Come on. That's illegal So uh, Perez went on to say the super league is not for the rich, but it's to save football And if this continues football will disappear and by 2024 we would already be dead This is the only way to save everyone. What the fuck are they talking about? Here's the thing we're going to get into the because the thing is this makes sense Within the logic of how the big clubs operate and we're going to get into kind of how we got there and what that logic is Yeah, and what I find so fascinating about this is that the logic of how the big clubs operate

It's basically the same as any crazy soft bank funded startup where they need to compete in these like at these compete economically at these sort of stratospheric levels But because they're they're all bidding one another up in cost They're all their profit margins stay razor thin And so the only thing they can do is try to eliminate the risk of possibly being relegated because they need to make Sure that the you know, weird factoring loan that they're getting from like it's worse than that It's worse than that. They're in horrifying levels of debt. Oh, yeah, Barcelona

Atletico Madrid close to a billion in debt Barcelona about a billion in debt Ramaldred hundreds of millions in debt so basically The the european super league is the moonshot to pay off Those debts and the way they were going to do it was basically like taking a loan from jp. Morgan secured over 23 years Repayable 23 years so basically to take out loan it was based. This is the thing is the kind of economics That they're that business supposed business geniuses As scoff at you like if you went and asked for a loan like that as a regular member of the public from a bank They'd laugh at you and be like you're not savvy with your money

Yeah, well because they know they can secure the debt against they can securitize the debt against um The future earnings the income the revenues the gate revenues in these clubs. They gave the loan That's how all big businesses work now is the thing. Yeah, it's like they work like hedge funds Yeah, well, it's that what you do is you have a loan right with a lot of debt You have a lot of debt what you to pay back those loves debts You need to get other investors or take out other loans to pay back that and then you just take out more loans To pay back that second loan and you just keep doing that. I assume forever

Yeah, well, then you get a russian criminal. That's also the bottom It's generally this is like guys who tell themselves that they're running tech companies Rather than guys who tell themselves that they're running football teams Yes, and and guys that tell themselves they're running tech companies. They're actually just running revolving credit facilities. Yeah, yeah Precisely, it's what it is thousand percent. They're running their security. It's basically securitization. I used to work in financial markets years ago I was a lawyer in a previous life. I trained as a corporate lawyer And it was funny because I used to work in capital markets and I remember like looking all the numbers and going

But hang on a minute. Like this company Exciting like crime sensors Yeah, so this no, this is so I remember like was it Warren Buffett said in early 2000s that um These instruments of weapons of financial mass destruction, right? as I was looking at that I was working for this um, uh law firm in london, um, and I was training there. I remember thinking wait a minute This company is 700 million in debt But it's only securing that debt with a loan. It's wrapping the loan in what it has to notice

What is it called? They wrap a bond for two million I said, but that can't cover You can't cover that you can't ensure 700 million with like a two million doesn't work like that's like that's like running on flimsy ankles Right, you're gonna like the ankles will break at some point The owner knows you wrap it repackage it put it here And I remember just thinking but all that bad debt is going to be packaged in the same place And I remember like I drew all the diagrams and I was like this doesn't work and I was drawing these diagrams going

This is absolutely this doesn't work. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I need you to stop drawing those diagrams Yeah, please These pyramids everywhere I'm sorry. Yeah, but I remember looking at this and I'm thinking and this is exactly what modern football's run on It's basically the same thing. It's it's um, it's uh, what's the word musical chairs? In the hope that no one actually stops the music if effectively at the highest level The real game of football is this shell game And there is just incidentally a football being kicked around that a lot of people are looking at

But the real game is being played in the boardroom with the with the balance sheet And we're gonna talk about some of the crazy like loans and transfer deals as well as we get into the latter half of the episode But right, so let's also say this upfront, right? This is a political problem and it's born of Not it is born It is a problem sort of it mirrors the sort of um, you might say journey of sort of the British and European economies over the 20th century It also is really good Being great and having wonderful foundations

Yeah, um, it also is a political problem of massive inequality between football clubs And it's a problem of you know, I think like we talk about on on almost every episode of this podcast The crazy shit happens because yield is hard to come by doing normal stuff Yeah, because the tendency of the race of profit to something something Yeah, yeah, and you know, I mean the and the and the thing is right politically the super league has been very unpopular But if you look back uh to 2019 It was Corbin who said that in football the professional game has become divided between the extremes of the very rich and very poor With clubs and burying Bolton facing collapse

And he said that you know labor at the time would review the sort of fit and proper person test for club owners It's basically make sure that like someone coming in and running the club isn't going to like, you know Have it like an actual pyramid scheme as opposed to a hedge fund guy mark crimes is not going to be allowed to do Didn't make all their money from guys who uh killed themselves by padlocking themselves in a suitcase and shooting themselves four times in the back of the head in Fucking sort of go to in the 90s. And so I'll look at the reference now. Yeah But also um

Supporters trust he went on to say would have a proper role to basically ensure that the professional game is properly run for its fans and clubs And that like we need like forters football supporters trust of 50 plus 50 plus one percent fan ownership And so on and so on and like this was a radical position at the time It was decried as like football communism and all all of this But they love sticking communism on the end of the policy talk about that But then right like it's a broadband communism or sort of nhs discussions It turned out to be rather prescient and now it seems like Even like like starmers not a million miles behind this because starmer also partly is a huge football fan of one of the clubs

Under question arsenal. Um and even boris johnson. Boris johnson not himself Do you think is there a football club? You like my I've just been this is what's really annoying because I don't I don't follow football But my dad was so into football and was such a big tottenham fan that I'm just programmed not to like people who support arsenal I don't actually care yet. You just like it's like a pavlovian response That's right. You know, do you know my football? Do you know what I think it's funny you should mention this, um The reason why we're trying to like me and my you know, ryan who I co-host idea with and so many of us are trying to really Hammer this european super league point across is because it's it's so rarely to get a ready metaphor

for corporate excess for greed um For basically football being transformed to attack savin overnight It's so rarely you have a ready metaphor people you can go. That's it. Um, I think you know, actually, um, I have to say like The greater suspect to um mark fisher mark fisher would talk about class consciousness being fleeting And this is a moment like it's so different difficult to get people to actually be like Unified in their rage at particular things. It's almost like this is um a lighting rod and you know, what corbin said I want to come back to the early 2000s where he made that was it early thousand made that comment like

This you know, there's many if you ask how we got here The european super league is a bit like trump People are like looking around non-plus. Oh, how has this happened and disavowing? All knowledge of like what led to it, but but you don't get to trump without george w bush, right? You don't get to george w bush. You don't get there without the kind of samuel alito torture memo There are so many incremental steps that led to trump so many Um weakening of checks and balances and the rule of law in relation to football We got the european super league because in 2004 among many steps on the way

They had a test called the fit-and-popper persons test which is basically like When you'd assess which owners could own a football club in in the uk and the premier league in the top division And they allowed among other people facts in shinowatra To own a football club even though he was under investigation for the extraditional execution Of people that were dealing drugs Like he was under Investigation for extraditional execution Um because we are anti drugs in the premier league and we do want people to know that so oh my goodness

And I said obviously I had a legal training even even then the legal the legal framework for allowing this person over club was wild Roman Abramovich was under investigation for all kinds of things as allowed to own a club And like you know, this was someone that wasn't necessarily vetted to the level that you'd vet other people in different fields and many of these witnesses are no longer alive so Conducting a series of interviews with people floating face down in the yena say I will say this there are a lot of conversations about how wealth was acquired so quickly in the late 90s that we all know about Um, yeah, oh, yeah, probably wouldn't worry about it Actually biff biff cross podcast content content here. I was in moscow in 96

Oh, wow The energy was time to be there. The energy was wild The energy was wild It was they don't pick up the mcdonalds and go to mcdonalds back there and was like a kind ever was smoking like chimneys because maudra were like Let's pile into russia and basically like cap a capitalizes marker. So cigarettes were super cheap and ever was chain smoking Uh mcdonalds was like a luxury. It was like a sort of You know going there was like a status thing just being around there and hanging out But one thing you did notice was

there were a lot of like a lot of dudes with like, you know dark glasses and penthouses on the top floor of hotels and like there was a killing across the road from the hotel In st. Petersburg where we went like it was there was like a there was like a mod killing like Two weeks before we got there. So there was a lot of stuff going on. It was this was a murky time and a lot of the money coming into football was not vetted From from lots of from several parts of the world and that is where a big path became and

Football became to some extent. It would always been like used as a kind of financial vehicle But the explosion of money that was unregulated moving through football You know Corbyn was on it like late 90s early 2000s. It really just started to flow in But then they actually they resolved the problem of organized crime in russia by making them the government That's right, which is a very clever way of doing it. This is one of my problems with Corbyn, right? Is that like he's he's right so often But the the upshot of it is so what because he has this peculiar gift for saying the right thing at the wrong time And it just it's always the wrong time. It's always the wrong time if you're left-wing

It's always the wrong time Ed Miliband talked about predators and producers Predatory capitalism he said it and they were like and then the financial times said in 2015 the opinion piece and they said Oh, he's he's too preoccupied with inequality And I was like what we're endorsing uh Cameron and I remember tweeting this I tweeted this a few months ago And I said I remember when the financial time said that Ed Miliband was preoccupied with inequality And everyone says Corbyn was too red. Well, you had Ed Miliband right there Okay, if you really were that offended by Corbyn, you could have Ed Miliband

But you laughed him and called him red Ed and you called his dad a red or whatever The red scare and you have that anti-semitic all those anti-semitic tropes and here we are and financial times journalists were like What and I was like one of the bond journalists read it. It was like, oh my god Like he couldn't believe his own paper had done that's like, yeah You basically made up anybody who was even vaguely Left of center Like seemed like they were just trying to like bring the world down and here we are In the British press

Is that um as a result of all of that right as a result of basically this problem not just going ignored for decades But like any sort of any attempt to take a look at it being like sort of Actively suppressed. Yeah actively suppressed means that now there's kind of There are you can see like there's this um We're at the risk of developing what you know good billionaire syndrome where these you know Coterie of like heirs midwestern Lutheran sociopaths or petrodollar royalty can position themselves as men of the people and say Oh, sorry. We it's our mistake. We listen to you. We're we're we're a good billionaire owners and so on and so on We won't do the super league. Let's just go back to how things were which we all like

Even even the other clubs like the clubs that did not sign on to this Getting the thing of having like saved football bayon and bvb have saved football And it's like well, no, it's just this is this is a fight between two different kinds of corruption the kind of corruption where you like have people floating face down the river in Siberia and Fucking luigi de paola and the ua for officers Well, the reason also that the key thing to understand in Germany, which is why bayon and Dortmund Would have found it much harder to join the unit they'd wanted to an ownership Exactly fan ownership. And this is the kind of these the key techs and balances and in Germany. There's a rule where

51% of the club is owned by fans And also like those fans it's funny actually the bayon ultra's bayon is like this in the elite germans german aristocrats football club, but the bayon munich ultra is the kind of The fans who do the activism have done some really amazing progressive work in anti-racism and also critiquing bayon's involvement in catar, which obviously is responsible for so many human rights abuses and the lead up to next It's his world cup So shout out to bayon ultra's and dorbin ultra's who really mobilized them alike They didn't want any part of this

I was hoping you were going to mention kata too because we were going to bring it up at some point Actually, the katario family are super fans of a lot of clubs, which is why they're allowed to own them. Yeah, that's right Yeah A few one percent is owned by the katario family who are massive fans They're actually have the class b fandom and that allows them to actually have voting, right? I am wow. Wow. Yes. Yes. Basically, right I think we can talk a little bit about history right because british football clubs have been around since the victorian times And I think that situation is nicely summarized in a report written for commonwealth on democratizing football by friends of the show

jaunty lebowitz and joe bill's breath uh Their report says the broader contours of british political economy over the last hundred years are clearly reflected in the contestation Over who owns and benefits from football? And just as the neoliberal era has seen britain's social contract disintegrate in the face of vast new inequalities So too has football's easy alliance shattered and that that that uneasy alliance as it sort of talked about in the report um And also musa and some of the articles you sent me

Is basically one where as british football clubs started having owners, you know around or just over a century ago They went from the community organizations to companies to this that and the other Is essentially they would be owned by a sort of local industrial capitalist or whatever Like the guy who owns the mill might also own the football team or what have you to works team? Yeah and um And those and the ability of the owner to influence what was happening with football Was sort of addressable with the democratic tools that people had available at the time They were able to say stuff like well

This very popular team there's something called rule 34 This very popular team. No, that's that's not that's not this thing Or it's it's uh, it were a very popular team is making a lot of money has to like share out a lot of its income The idea being you wouldn't get into a situation where there are a big six of football clubs who could like are untouchable by like, I don't know Brighton and ho valby it And so and that's the pro brighton ho valby and that's right. We want brighton and ho valby in in the premiership Actually, no, I hate brighton. Fuck brighton No, no, I don't hate the football team. I hate the town. Why are you specifically hate the town?

Why are you recording? A secret bunker under Siberia. No, put up in an art mark. Yeah, put up an art vehicle That's right So that that was kind of the situation where the amount that the owner was able to extract from the team was uh, limited by sort of law and The and and the control the owner had was counterbalanced by basically the capacity of Fans to act together of the of laws to be passed and so on. It was basically a fortest model of football clubs, right and

And um, what happened and so uh, jaunty and joe go on they say the privatization and deregulation of elite football in the early 90s Which we will talk about in detail as well as the rapacious globalization of the game is tipped the scales decisively away from ordinary fans and towards the interest of cruel club owners petrodollar billionaires and their friends in the media and politics right, so What we get right is Much like in the broader british economy We have these things that exist in british towns that are

That where we there is a competition between like labor and capital in them, right? And it's not that capitalists were better back then. It's just that they weren't as strong They didn't have the ability to move around like for example if you own a factory You can't just like move you can't move your factory very easily until that's financialized and You don't really own the factory you own some pieces of paper that say you own the factory and you can trade those very easily Right, it's the same thing with with with the football clubs You don't really have to be from in fact you don't have to be from liverpool at all to own the liverpool club You can just be someone who's like i invest in sports teams

Here's the sports team that i've bought or to support liverpool I found it's something i've found increasingly weird I remember this was saying my dad used to remark on a lot as someone who was born in 1943 In totlum and supported totlum and used to go to totlum as a kid for like, I don't know like 10p or whatever the fucking cost um How much it like football Even within britain became like so decentralized and like people like there was very little connection between like local people and a football club Anymore especially and then recently for a work thing

I had to go to a liverpool game Which I was not remotely interested at all and I was struck by the fact that oh interesting another football team You don't like No, it's even I just like the football team. How long how long did it take to get how long did it take to get the liverpool? um about Three and a half hours in the car um Great, so you're within three not get some work. Okay, great. You're drawing circles on it. You're doing your diagrams again

Turn your location on um because moosey just wants to talk to you Yeah, Roman Abramovich is paying you And I was shocked by the fact that no one I was there working for some ukrainian guys Which I know which people know me sounds very unlikely. Um, and literally no one in the I don't know like 20 or 30 people immediately around us was like I don't even think like living in britain. It was all like people who'd like flown in for the game um Which was like mad to me

If you want a case of people having genuine local loyalty to their football club Uh and has not quite been corporatized. I invite all of you to come to glasgo Are you in glasgo? Oh wow wonderful. Yeah. Yeah, so now you know where my is it which is glasgo. Yeah, that's right How far away am I moosey? How far? There is an alternative to corporatization and that is less corporatization and sectarianism Yeah, that's right. If you yeah, so god, that's another story But I rude interrupt. So I interrupted I interrupted your story about friend living. Oh, so my point was simply that I was really struck by like how few scousers there were at this Liverpool game

Um, just like everyone around like I was chatting to some people next to me You'd flown in from Malaysia to go to a Liverpool game and I was just like, why? Like what is wrong with you? Well because because it's uh, well because a lot of the I had a season ticket because of they lived in Malaysia because of what happened in 1992 No, he never sees a ticket to a good american football team So but but uh all in all right before in 1992, right this tension between uh, between in the football club between A voluntary association where the game of football is played competitively because people enjoy to play and watch football And a company that has to thank you for the description of football robot Riley, right?

But the company that exists Almost despite those things right that tension was upset in 1992 And so I want to turn back to our guest musa. What happened in 1992 that upset that balance and laid this laid the groundwork for where we are now So, okay, so um and actually just to say about about the kind of the composition of fans at Liverpool I mean I'm a bit of a romantic. I quite like the idea that you've got fans that come from all over the world to support because it's a bit like For a lot of them, it's like pilgrimage Like it's like going to Mecca for some of these people like being in the stadium just for once

About the same amount of oil money involved Oh gosh, well actually you're gonna get me in trouble. But um, what I will say is um in what happened in 1992 so the football there are four Divisions of professional football where you can get paid for it's a basic professional football is like defined I suppose as Any football club where you can earn a full-time wage playing for the club, right? So there are four divisions um in england composed of 92 clubs in total

Which basically can pay can afford to pay their players full-time. So that's it in 1992 those TV revenues TV revenues are basically like whenever football was on tv The revenues were divided between those four leagues like equally And the top clubs were basically what they the top clubs in the top division They were like sort of 20 clubs that was in the top division of 20 clubs And they basically were like hang on a minute. We basically get the majority of the viewing figures

People aren't tuning in to watch That club in the north of you know, that club down in the southeast. They're what they're coming to watch us We are the biggest 20 clubs. We should get the lion's share of the money. So they formed the Premier League They basically partnered with sky and sky basically sold subscriptions satellite tv subscriptions To watch those top 20 clubs the amount of money that poured into the game of that result was huge because the sky was smart They made a bet they were like There's a lot of viewers out there. There are millions of viewers out in the world who will pay

to watch Us and us alone Well, these top 20 clubs alone and they'll pay like a monthly subscription for it was revolutionary The amount of money that poured into football after that was just huge like the wages that people could afford The clubs could afford was huge. They could afford to have globalized the talent They could afford to bring players from all over the world And as they brought players from all over the world, they attracted fans from all over the world And so you saw this kind of supercharged

Globalization of the game and the globalization of fandom to a scale you hadn't seen before where people are flying in Because they feel like they've got like a they're stakeholders now, right? You've got a subscription in malaysia to watch this club You get a kinship and all of a sudden you've got a season ticket You know if you're from that economic bracket, which is obviously like the point one percent and So almost football went overnight In a sense of being community owned

The local community had to be global community owned, right? And now of course the european super league is kind of cutting up the community and it's been globally owned And that's the apotheosis of capitalism first time ever in 1992 people in malaysia started saying have you heard of this? Teddy sharing him guy That's right as as lennon wrote the european super league is the highest stage of capitalism So, uh Just after 92 in 94 and this is from an article from david con Um, that's when you see the signings of foreign superstars

So, uh, this was german world cup winning striker urgen clinsman by the spurs Uh arsenal bought denis bergkamp and middlesbrough recruited a brazilian juni new And the idea was right that football and football at this point con goes on No one was saying it sold its soul If anything it had been revitalized from the sort of a bit of damp and decay that had been plaguing the game Sort of a poor reputation somewhat it had become almost gentrified and everyone thought this was great Uh ticket prices went up just a little bit

Wages were like we were raising an eyebrow, but it was you know, nothing like, you know, neymar or whatever today But there was little and then clubs weren't really in much debt however Uh looking back on this sort of con put this uh to uh, graham kelly the football association chief executive Who backed the breakaway? He told me forlornly quote. We were guilty of a tremendous collective lack of vision And it is in this period that football makes that transformation where it becomes not just a business, but it becomes Just like every other business which is to enrich, you know absentee owners, uh who see it as a box to generate returns

It's just a black box. It could be a football team. It could be a chip manufacturer It could be a farm It doesn't matter just so long as it produces the yield what I do find interesting though about it is that Football it embodies all of those like ills of capitalism But it doesn't embody a lot of the profits because these clubs they they they have huge turnovers But they don't really actually make much money like most of these billionaires who buy clubs They don't really make money out of it. They kind of do it as like a vanity out of that I don't know what capitalism is

Is about power and control and the desire to dominate and Ultimately, if they bought any other business they would expect to make money out of it But in football, they're just kind of like we're gonna lose money, but it'll be cool Well, well look at Bramovich for example as an interesting example because he actually didn't Give Chelsea that money. It was a low. It's alone. Right. Okay. He loaned Chelsea hundreds of millions So that's that's actually like and you know, it's a place if you want to keep your money safe And if you want to conduct a sport washing project if you want to build the profile of a nation

so look at the the purchase of Paris Agenda by By cat are in that context trying to build a global project like project cat are like cat are Went to that phase of like intervening in the conflict in Syria, right? And it was trying to sort of project soft power You know cat are really like as part this kind of expansionist Soft power policy was let's buy a football club. It doesn't really matter what the returns are same for Abu Dhabi as well like

project Abu Dhabi like This was the same kind of time people started calling football clubs projects projects was basically like a euphemism for Profits not a priority. Other things are prestigious And many people because it's a marketing department or a PR department doesn't make you money But it's an important balance sheet line item that you have to have. Yeah. Yeah And it's in this case It's quite similar and what I and what I find interesting about this is

The way in which football clubs become kind of like everything else They become kind of not dissimilar from any other business Maybe that's supposed to be a loss leader or they're supposed to perform some other function But that is very disconnected from the playing of a game of football that people enjoy And this is actually where I capitalism. This is only finance capitalism reduces football to a soup like homogenous And under 30 seconds So this is where I brought in my will it blend my my mark fisher quote, which is simply the phrase that are used in an essay Referring to the impasses of the flat lands of capital endless repetitions

Because this is essentially what is happening It is just entering into a domain and repeating itself over and over and over again I hate entering into a domain. So I will never enter a domain. Let's meet a football club That's identical with a with some holding companies, right? We know romano-bronvich owns chelsea We know chic months or owns man city, but who are some of the others? So let's meet some of these these colorful characters. I'm particularly interested in the americans. Let's meet dave crimes Well, um arsenals, uh stan cranky. Is that how you pronounce it musa? Cronk, uh, Cronky. Yeah. Oh, that would have been better if it was stan cranky. Stan cranky the baseball crank

Yeah, we're gonna call him uh stan cranky who was an american commercial landlord who married a walmart eris He met on a skiing holiday and then um started up a company called thf realty thf standing for to have fun That sounds absolutely cursed What he does is it basically it just develops what are now dead malls So he's a dead mall billionaire Oh, what does he put in the malls? Well, nothing anymore. Does he use to have fun? He uses fun hunt game of some kind A dangerous game, perhaps. Yeah

um, so stan is also referred to as silent stan because He uh, doesn't say much and he doesn't care about football at all because he never speaks Yeah, um, he's like viny jones's character and gone in 60 seconds So, uh, but essentially this is yeah, he's a landlord who does like yeah malls and come and like out of town office buildings Most of which are connected with walmarts. He might be american, but that's very british So I kind of think he should own a british football club Uh, liverpool's john henry was a commodity trader who got rich on soybeans and then just Plus he raced that steam train one time. Yeah, I don't like it when people have two first names. Yeah

I'm taking a stance on that. No, but he used but I think it's also funny He's just a guy who knows really he's so good at trading soybean futures that he's now a billionaire I think this is that's literally how he got rich. Yeah the soy guy. Yeah Yeah, so that's the problem. I think the problem the problem with a lot of this stuff is it's just And that sounds terrible, but like I remember looking at the corporate world and going How do you people do this at 50 now as a day? Like it's this seems really really boring. I'd have friends that work in finance We go for like, you know, you go for dinner like, you know at the steakhouse or whatever like when I could actually afford such things

Uh, no I'm being ridiculous and um You'd be like they they start and they would always talk about finance and you're like and they could just they just They'd be like five bus the table and three of them will start on my finance They'd be really into and it'd be like Have you just created a derivative our conversation? You've kind of just That's right. They're like moosa. How many beans have you bought today? Or potential future beans or how many beans will you buy in a month?

And what's the spot price of this steak on this menu? No, so he's just a beans guy How many what options on what beans have you but he just used much like stan John henry just used the money to start buying sports teams because he was like, well, I'm super rich right now What's really expensive? I guess I'll just buy a bunch of sports teams and then like they're mine And who cares that like st. Louis doesn't get a football team anymore st. Louis in america It doesn't get a football. I have an american football team anymore I like them and I'd like them to go over to los angeles What's wild about american sport is that people just buy teams and then just move them

Yeah, that's why the la lakers are lakers. There aren't a lot of lakes in l. A No famously apart from silver lake and that's not a miniapolis right when they're minneapolis Utah jazz jet Utah like salt uh salt lake city not a good jazz city. No A great name for a band actually Utah jazz if there was a band called Utah jazz that basically made like Shoegaze What I think is the most interesting one though is uh, malcolm glazer and again if you want to talk about billionaire owners not actually using their billions on the team just using their access to capital and like like the resources of financialization to just

Take something without putting anything into it. Glazer is a perfect example So he's an american billionaire who bought manu and also by the way really interesting also bought zepata petroleum An unprofitable fake cia cut out that was sitting at the crux of the harrowman bush delis walker like Friend group that was the origins of the cia zepata petroleum very american natset connected Gentlemen, we are sitting in the center the direct center of the football industry They will have you believe that a magic football the u.s. Government contains The this man tether sharing ham was able with a magic foot the one guy, you know rebound football I just think he's the funniest footballer. I can name so basically right darin ben

So and rickets. That's a good one. So basically right like zp. Let's just say with zepata petroleum It deserves like a lot more of an investigation But zepata petroleum Let's just say if you could identify a payment from zepata petroleum to perm index the jfk assassination is solved Um, so but I don't know what he was doing owning it. Uh, so anyway, the glazer takeover of manu stuff Was interesting, right? He took out basically an enormous amount of debt And bought a lot of I bought just bought tons and tons of shares in manu and then just said, okay Well, manu manchester united i've taken out all this debt, but i'm your owner

Your debt now and then he created two classes of shares Uh, a class a share that the um That the rube is allowed to own that has all the debt against it and then the class shares, uh, which only the glazers now as kids is Is um, uh idiot children are allowed to own which has all voting rights and no in a senior to the debt no debt attached to it so basically manchester united as a result of like In exchange for this guy getting to this one american guy getting to own and control everything that it does at the expense of Of ever all the fans getting to jack up the prices to pay like 62 million pounds a year in pure interest alone on this debt

But manchester united gets nothing it basically is now just a machine to pay interest and let the glazer the glazer Children the glazer fail sons be like we own a football team and that's all made it into a savings account That's more or less right. He's made it into a kids first savings account But that's how elites like football clubs charge huge sums of money for everything And that's why they're also in such a precarious financial position because they need to That's why they need to like make sure they never get relegated because they have these enormous interest payments to make every year Because some guy will just come in and be like you're a billion pounds in debt now, but in exchange I own you Is that about a fair summation?

Where the grim the grim thing I think about um, I mean the the most grim thing about the glazer family is they basically I think ed glazer the brother of joel son of a malcom organized the fundraise of the reelection of donald trump And i've never been able to see past that to be honest among other things. Um I just feel like It's really sad because you know, I support manchester united's you're you're seeing your club basically being owned being used as As not a debt instrument, but basically yeah like a sort of the bank account something that you can put debt against because The bank and the owners know That your emotional, I mean just it's almost like the same kind of logic right as saying well

Teachers will buy their own supplies because they have this emotional attachment that will make them Pay for school supplies for the kids like church like church everyone you know people would turn up It's like the vatican. You know the people always reveal the vatican and so you The sad thing about malcom glazer obviously The late and the glazer family what they've done to match this night. It's basically like They've had sporting success tamper bay buccaneers. They won the super bowl So there's an element of like, you know funding some kind of success or bring some kind of joy

But it's like do you even i'm just always fascinated by people who can preside over an institution only in institution Where they they know that they are loathed utterly loathed by the vast majority of people who Reveal their institution and yet they can they can proceed and i'm just fascinated in the psychological makeup of You know these owners stan cranky vatican should have acted where they know that they're loathed But it still proceed regardless. I just don't I don't know how you can get out. I think they're quite used to being loathed I think that's my analysis of them. No, but but but yeah, but I don't but here's the thing I don't get

I don't get how I will never understand that I probably shouldn't How a human being or human can absorb that level Of resentment. Well, it's alienation Realistically, right? Yeah, it's a podcast Well, no, so it's I think the answer right is is alienation It's that the whole point of of these kinds of like arms-length models of ownership and having Fans as customers all this stuff It's that all of these things are mediated by transactions the

Any kind of any other kind of relationship that is not mediated by a transaction Is one that we've sort of again over the last 40 years of like consent manufacturing or whatever Have basically managed to winnow out of the human experience Which means that well, it doesn't matter that I have no connection to Liverpool or Arsenal or whatever I have performed the transaction. That means it's mine and you are now my customer Yeah, I bought I bought the shirt the the the ac pound shirt And that means but also means right that the you have as many it means that you have as many rights as a as a fan as a customer I can go into walmart and you know be like, you know, I'm or Aldi or whatever and you know say

I don't particularly like that you're using sweatshops and they give me a okay. I'm gonna fucking buy something else Yeah, I'm a walmart ultra Do not such what gosh, you know it's interesting about this but I think actually fun enough the um That that severance of from reality via the mediation of transactions is actually what brought the european super league down because These owners were so detached in reality. They thought the scheme would work They didn't consult The people who bring into fact, they didn't consult the players the athletes who'd be performing for these clubs. They didn't consult the managers

They basically were like a bunch of people and their financial advisors sitting in rooms across the world Either on yachts or in their sort of private, you know, corporate layers Hermetic Yeah, but no, but actually this is the fascinating thing about Like capitalism being untethered from the market like If you're untethered by all means like, you know, if you're capitalist try and untether yourself from the market But they untethered themselves in reality to such a point where the plan failed

Does that make sense? They just they had they were they had they were so unaware Because if you're going to leverage the emotion of people You've got to do it in a way that you got to exploit people in a way. They're still going to turn up Now you exploit people through religion Mega churches are still full because they've worked our way to give people a return on their investment like ultimately. Yeah, we're gonna I'm gonna fly my private jet and own a mega church But the congregation is still going to be full At some level you can't display a contempt so naked the member the congregation. They won't turn up

And what the super league basically did was They filled They filled the pews with manure And even the most fanatical supporter of the mega church is not going to sit down In a pew filled with manure. I should try having podcast listeners, mate I think what what really happened what happened? I mean, you think what happened as well here, right? Is that there wasn't 40 people used to feel like this about like unions and like worker organizations as well, right? But then those were broken and there was 40 years of consent manufacturing. If not more

Basically suggesting there is no alternative to what we have now and actually you love it You know and the thing is there was not 40 years of of consent manufacturing in that way for football bingo bingo and there wasn't there was not 40 years of consent manufacturing For the european super league they didn't do the work and there's an amazing there's an amazing writer grace robinson who has a brilliant newsletter you can find grace on twitter at grace on football who wrote a superb analysis of Why the european super league failed and grace's argument is based that they didn't They didn't manufacture the consent

They didn't work with the pr companies and I think that they got lucky in football because frankly if they basically got like If they've thrown money at the right people Months in advance they started building the consent through the argument They started getting let's say sovereign wealth fund on board and the capital had been there not as a loan as an investment This could have looked quite different because that's what I found really remarkable about it was how How rapidly it went from like check out this cool thing we're gonna do to like oh, fuck. Oh, shit Like they announced it pretty much instantly like everyone was just like This is the worst fucking thing i've ever heard

Tottenham sacks jose marino because he wouldn't take the players out on the training ground because of it And then by the next day the whole thing was like, okay, we're not doing anymore Yeah, well, I mean again, it's because they're they tried to change the institution without like Assuming that they would that this institution would react like every other institution that this has happened to in britain or america Or europe or whatever for the last 40 50 60 years Where there is that power and that consent that that long period of there is no alternative That means that you can just Take something away from people and they'll thank you for it because they believe it's necessary

It didn't happen. It's called being english. That's right. And um, Well, yeah, but I think this is why this is so powerful the european super people has won the few times where the relentless march Of increasing expense and exclusivity has actually been stopped Like think about how many losses people on the side of unions have taken and how many losses people Who are against like rent seeking have like taken like it's so, you know, so many of us have lost You know, we lost the referenda and we lost this election that so many losses that Anyone vaguely progressive has taken and this is like a moment where you're like actually

It was you know that there were various corporate interests that were against european super league, but actually A lot of the backlash was led by ordinary fans Was led by players who grew up and work in class backgrounds You know who were like we're not standing for this that is extremely powerful a lot of people like oh, it's just football I was like I get why people are like turned off by and i'm not expecting people to get behind it I'm just saying that this is actually a really useful rallying point Which a lot of organizers I think could usefully engage with I think that's absolutely true Yeah, and it's one of these things where like like you said earlier moosa, right?

Like the like politics doesn't happen all the time and these opportunities Sort of don't am so rare so rare Like people going why can't you get people excited about tax havens or we try with the pan and bar papers But it was too abstract everyone's like well, what do we get behind people are shuffling money offshore? It's not sex is like well imagine like your favorite footballer is never going to play in your town again Your favorite footballer who plays for the other team is never going to come to your town again It's absolutely that's a big So it's so tangible and this is the thing this is a tangible moment of

We're not standing for this This is what else we want while we're here We're going to make them some demands on how things can get better It's one of the few times in life where people are going to be like there is an alternative And one of the things I think it's also important to like press Is that the alternative isn't Just what it was before with the premiership and as everything was because that was incredible The reason they did the european super league is because what was happening before wasn't sustainable

Yeah, it wasn't the plucky premiership and champions league to down on their luck unmoneyed institutions, which Well, that's right. Luigi de paola requires his bribes. All right Oh my god, like the whole fee I mean fee for have the approach to corruption that uh, the parachute regiment have to war crimes Which is we do it and it's good Like the I remember when the whole catar world cup thing was going on and basically the fa Made this huge complaint about how the whole thing had been obviously done on bribes and that no one had actually Voted for catar to have the world cup and and the president of fee for at the time said like It's quite rude of you to say this, but he was basically like we did it

But would you mind shutting up about it? It was weird that that guy's name was yeeps van der bribes So here's the thing, right? I want in the in the in the final analysis, right of um Here's why we can't just go back to how it was I'm going to talk about a few a few of the spits of Strangeness that might be very familiar to a tf listener that have been happening in various football teams around europe One australian man. Yes. No No

Please let me be the insurance guy No, i'm afraid it's um, it's not him. I've written all this insurance for a european sopa league And borrowed eight trillion dollars Uh, I thought I'd go madrid was so on the hunt for new capital that in september 2017 He met the the owner of the team met with Representatives of green seal capital. Yeah I went for tapas with lex and david cameron right

Could discuss a potential loan of 76 million euros as collateral green seal wanted Athletic goes outfitter nike to sign over payments from its sponsoring contract, which had just been extended And that is called invoice factoring. It's one step from reverse factoring We very nearly had our favorite form of uh, it's not debt financing happening in the football show Which I totally didn't expect Amazing very funny that invoice factoring is coming down because basically football clubs now because of this like arms race that happened after 92 where like You realize that in order to keep winning and turning those profits you need to like be hiring these superstar players

You need to pay increasingly massive sums of money a football club just needs money now and they can pay it away later Because they know they have these these streams of income from like TV deals and and ticket buying and stuff They don't get big chunks of money all at once or not huge ones it all comes over time And so if there is a revenue stream a football team will sell that revenue stream to a bank An unscrupulous financial institution or in the case of green seal one australian man Um, and I think that uh, you said sell it to several swiss men the uh, the the the the the moment that like Almost made this inevitable

Wasn't it was 92 might be the ultimate cause but the proximate cause was the neymar junior trade. Yeah, so, um neymar One of the world's best footballs one of the best footballs of his generation um was bought by barcelona I think in 2014 But from santos and we saw the beginning of it there. So who's bought for about I think 70 million But only about 20 million that actually went to the brazilian club santos the other 50 went to Different intermediaries. I think 2 million went to a marketing fee. I mean, it's just bizarre like this money went all these different pockets So neymar goes to barcelona

Becomes arguably one of the top three footballers in the world barcelona won a load of titles with him there And then he moves to paris angermann for a world record fee of 222 million euros all hell breaks loose because Basically the way it worked was barcelona said neymar's so valuable to our stats He he can't leave so we'll basically put a clause in his contract that says unless someone pays this amount of money

222 million euros. He can't leave and barcelona were like no one's gonna pay that was just like a fuck off price basically Right, right. Well, well then paris angermann came in with the kind of with that kind of money And put the money down and paid it probably in cash actually knowing that suitcases for a name Neymar goes to paris angermann and that That sum of money just distorts the entire market

It just distorts the entire i'm sure there's some economic analysis of what that rapid injection of cash does to any system But it just completely overloaded it was like just pumping cholesterol into your veins Um, the heart of football's transfer system just put out Because all of a sudden yeah, all of a sudden basically barcelona walking around with all this money And everyone's like, okay, you can afford really expensive footballers now And all the transfer prices across europe just got jacked up as a result of that and as and what happens right is in this system As soon as one person pays something for something

Then everyone else has to match it, right? So as soon as if you get a big if basically if a if a bank or a rich backer Will give you enough money to beat the previous record That's the new price for everything and that money has to come from some kind of productive somewhere somehow And a lot of the people who are paying the interest rates who are paying the um Who are paying the the interest rates on that debt who are paying for the stuff itself Who are paying the crazy agent fees and marketing fees and stuff It's people who are in having to buy increasing the expensive sky packages

It's people who are having to buy increasing the expensive tickets and so on and so on But that's also why all the clubs even though they're like engaging in these mega transactions and are these like global Untouchable global institutions are also constantly on the verge of bankruptcy Because everything is just ratcheting up in price more and more and more and more It's one of these uh, you might call it a contradiction Yeah, it's the hyper gentrification of football. Why does this? Why does this remind me of uh funding rounds for startups? Interesting it's the kind of the soft bank model where you can just buy victory by pumping a bunch of money into it

And suddenly it's worth that because I just paid that for here. Here's an example of exactly that happening Which is uh, we talked about this yesterday moosa, which is the swap of uh, arthur mellow and miralem, uh, panitch Where nobody in in barcelona or uventus know the fans the coaching staff No one wanted to make that trade it was bad It was bad for both teams But in terms of balance sheets it gave the opportunity for both clubs to basically value their own assets that they would trade to one another And so they basically just said I reckon he's worth 60 million. I reckon he's worth 72 million All right pay me 12 million i'll send him over you send him over and all of a sudden both even the only 12 million changed hands

Both clubs were able to just write down their new valuations of their assets because they were like We both reckon that these players are just worth this arbitrary number and that's how much they're worth And then that's how much money they have Effectively right wild absolutely exactly the exact perfect describes absolutely wild and it's basically just like cowboy accounting And we all know what happens just before cowboy accounting historically back to the south sea bubble football and all know what happens When clowns yeah when clowns start making money Bad things happen. I remember like when you know, I was when the financial crash happened. I was talking to a friend and he said um

Two years before the financial crash in 08 A load of those um private equity firms sold up They sold up their assets and they just like retired to the Hamptons and just sat there They just been they've been sitting in the Hamptons for two years waiting for the crash And they're gonna come they're gonna swoop back in and scoop up all the distress debt It's horrible just watching it all play out when when you see the money start leaving When you see like the smart money when you see the early money leaving the economy You're like

Here comes the crash and the scary thing is the really scary thing is and we haven't talked about this in the podcast The broader context of the economic crash that is going to hit europe that is overdue That that is what terrifies me. We haven't even seen what the economic crash is going to do to europe not the pandemic But the actual crash is just due significantly That frightens me so much because so many of the lessons this work. So many lessons weren't learned from the last crash So many the checks and balances haven't been restored I you know, that makes sense and I'm really frightened, but yeah, I'm so frightened by that I mean even even just sort of to bring it bring it sort of narrowly focused on on football

When someone when that earthquake comes these houses of cards won't be ready And so I think what you can see the europeans in the context of of just moment to moment the european super league looks like High-handed captains of industry arrogantly sort of scooping up their game and saying it's mine now It's closed and that's partly what it was but also It was very very scared business owners realizing the shaky foundations upon which they stood

It was both of those things The financial crash is going to be so interesting and not in a good way in terms of what it's going to take out Because everything that isn't lashed to something is going to get blown away in the hurricane And there are going to be some pretty I think surprising casualties and frightening casualties I just I'm just amazed the fact that We haven't begun a conversation about tax havens yet in relation to football Because everyone talks about money in the system like the money's right there The money is sitting offshore everyone knows where it is but to go after it to go after those deep pockets

You know to really crack down on that because we're just dancing around the issue really of when we talk about shell companies before all these big governments are dying to have the issue of Tax havens because they know Boris Johnson can talk what we like about protecting Premier League. He's saying that really because actually Now the UK's at the European Union the Premier League is such a like marquee Product yeah, it's one of the few marquee products that Britain and specifically England still has in its arsenal And the european super liquid have destroyed that What Boris Johnson is not going to do is go the further step and be like actually

We need to go after the money that's been The tax that's basically been illegally has been evaded that's sitting offshore He won't go after that because too many of his friends have got money there. Yeah, and also that's a great way It's a great way to throw yourself off your balcony two or three times. Yeah, that's right He was so suicidal He jumped off his balcony climbed back up and then jumped off again tragic very greasy staircase Well, that's everything that I do a lot. I think I do a lot of is I look a lot at what's happening with them You know these poor investigative journalists all across the world just being whacked over the last few years, you know

Malta, Slovakia, just to name those two countries where people just dig a bit too deep in the wrong places and that actually is We haven't talked about like organized crime in our football really, but like that is a whole other level Trained australian assassins are coming for trash future right now Guys armed with boomerangs. I'm just the guest listen if you want to come to anyone I'm just I'm just the guest this podcast All they know is we're about three and a half hours drive from Liverpool. They can't track us down Exactly. Thank you. Moosa. That was a permanent host of this podcast and liable for everything we've ever said

The permanent and main host yeah, thank you for having us on trash future moosa Personally, if they got to moosa, I wouldn't say anything more after that. So that would be enough to shut me up I'm I'm unfortunate. I'm I'm depressingly easy to get to so if anyone wants, I mean My opinions are so sort of mundane and bogged down the nose come for me. Um, so yeah, everyone knows where I am We usually ask the guests where can people find you? And that's not Catch me outside. No, you can find me uh At stadio on twitter. Uh, my twitter handle

It's out of kwonga at ok double the or nga Um, but yeah, you can probably find me ranting about the futility of checks and balances in football most places actually bars pubs online I just want to say I think this that brings it that brings it to a very nice close I think uh, so I just want to say number one moosa. Thank you very much for coming and uh hanging out with us this evening I'm talking about football. Thanks the deep dive. No, I appreciate it. Thanks the deep dive and just like I like you get into the other The wider context of this is so important. It's so important number two. None of us are feeling even remotely suicidal So we're all happy. Yeah, uh, healthy. I'm making plans for the future. I I have booked

Um, uh phonox and I've booked e1 studios. I have booked I have booked club nights in the summer. I'm feeling good I'm looking forward to a bunch of lessons on how to fly a small plane Which I will be conducting solo over some isolated territory. I just won't be learning how to land No, of course not No, she's a busy lady So anyway, look, uh, thank you. Anyway, thank you very much again moosa for coming on Thank you to all of you out there on podcast land for listening

Uh, fuck the super league, but also, you know, kind of fuck how it's been going as well Yeah, um, we've returned from uh, we went briefly from frying pan into fire. We're now back in frying pan. That's right um, and yeah, but also yay also Congratulations to all the regular people Who don't have like a huge amount of like social capital who just stood up against this thing? You know shout out to them and that's the thing the lesson here is like people people showed out and protest works It really works kittari ultras And uh, don't forget we have a patreon five bucks a month. You get a second episode every week

He would like to buy some a series shares in trash teacher They have all of the debt none of the voting rights. You can do that on the patreon. Perfect. All right, um So don't forget also to listen to studio Uh and listen to all the tf spin-offs, you know what they are And anyway, we'll see you when the bonus episode where they are in a couple of days. Hi everyone. Bye. Bye Oh