I secretly wanted to see Old Trafford burn yesterday. Maybe not completely to the ground but damaged enough that the FA would stand up and call for an all hands meeting on football. The way we tend to think about football is the clubs are in financial trouble, do whatever is necessary to increase revenues to get them out of that financial trouble. And then in the process we create more structural imbalance and further alienate the fans.
It’s a bit like how we handle financial crises. Back in the day, companies would go through bankruptcies. The workers would largely keep their jobs but owners and executives would lose out and we would reorganise. Now governments give companies insurance no matter what, so owners and executives undertake increasingly risky actions in the knowledge that they will be bailed out no matter what, and rack up executive compensation with stock, further increasing the gap between themselves and the frontline workers.
Football doesn’t need to go the way of corporate. The teams can meet and spell out principles like “fairness” and “sustainability”, and then use these to design what the game looks like England. And England should take the lead because we have far more money than anyone else so we can afford to make concessions. Leadership. Every other league is killing itself trying to keep up with us. Let’s limit spending, ticket prices, etc in the aim of creating fairness.
