Oliver Holt with his I watched City back in the day quotes, apparently when we were a real club. What a ****, he hates City.
He’s sad. He has some quaint notion that football used to be all English gents in sheepskins or Crombies and a decent business that helped keep the local club going, with a shilling at the turnstile on match day getting you a perch on a railing to watch football played in the mud on a wet and gloomy January Saturday!
Newsflash! English football has always been run by the moneyed class and once the Premier League decided they wanted to export the game to the world, then the world took notice and the global moneyed class decided they wanted a piece of the action!
Football is and, at the top, always has been, about money and putting it to good use. Now that it is not just white fellas with a British accent, some “traditionalists” yearn for the olden days, where we all knew which teams were going to be winning the trophies, building bigger stadiums for their larger catchment areas, and separating themselves from the “lesser clubs.”
Money. It’s not a British thing, unless it goes exactly where YOU want it to go, to do exactly what YOU want it to do. If not, then it must be dirty, corrupt, unseemly, or just “not British!”
Throw in some colored skin, a robe, some funny looking writing on your advertising hoardings and, well, it’s just not
cricket err, English football anymore, is it?!
Once the Football League offshoot became the global presence it wanted, it lost control of where the money to support and elevate the game was going to come from, so it has decided it is going to try to legislate the “other” out of the game. Well, it’s not worked and British football is not going back to Division One any more than foreign ownership is disappearing or giving up the billions of pounds at stake in running the clubs.
Sadly, it seems like the American influence is “white and clean” enough to pass muster, but once you start dealing with the real Johnny Foreigners, well, that’s a different matter. You simply can’t trust ‘em, can you, Ollie old boy?!
It is a DISGUSTING AND OPENLY RACIST, ANTI-EQUALITY narrative that has gone on far too long and needs to be extinguished once and for all.
There needs to be a set of plain and simple financial rules that are NOT TARGETED at certain clubs. This would go a long way towards helping KEEP the Premier League in the position it is in and stopping it from legislating itself out of it preeminent position in the global football hierarchy.
What those rules are is another story, but the moping and jingoistic nonsense regarding CERTAIN foreign ownership is a joke. The high horse mentality of journalists who live on the rest of these clubs is also more than a little hypocritical.
Holt marveled at the Qatar World Cup, while apparently forgetting to comment on the slave labor that built the stadiums and the human rights abuses committed to give him all those goodies he enjoyed when they rolled out the red carpet for the world’s game…and the world’s press!
These journalists all feel like they’re a privileged class and should be entitled to say what they want, when they want. And, I’m not saying they shouldn’t. However, they should be called on the carpet for their blatant hypocrisy, whataboutism, and unfair coverage of large swaths of the game when it suits their agenda or the agenda of their paymasters.
We are long past time when certain journos should be pointed out for who they are and what they’ve said when it has been hypocritical or biased, just as I hope they are as detailed in their research and stories when they go to press…but who am I kidding?!
Some of these muppets are stealing a living on their name and the access it has availed them. Therein may lie an answer. Name first, then access, if required.
simple.wikipedia.org