I really don't give a fuck about them paying any loan off. They didn't do it for the sake of it, they bought an undervalued asset that they'll realise a massive profit on at some point if they don't mong it all up. I can't even be arsed thinking of my club in those terms.
Is football a simple matter or either being an odious billionaire’s vanity project or whoring yourself out to become one? Both the Mancs and our lot owned by fund managing yank twats and in varying degrees of hock of one form or another as a result of buy outs by unscrupulous investors who didn’t give a toss for football but saw a growth opportunity at just the wrong side of the credit crunch. Chelsea owned by some Russian crook. It's like the cold war but the reds own the blues and the blues own the reds. Ownership and what's happening off the pitch seem to matter a whole lot more than the game itself to some. I try to think when, if ever, I’d considered who owned Liverpool when I’d been fanatical about them as a little kid – but I come up short. That part of the game wasn't a significant part of the debate. Now fans worry as much about the bank balances of their clubs as their league position, and as far as I'm concerned this new dimension of the game seems to be a reflection of everything that is shit about the world.
Ownership of things doesn't interest me. Custodianship was the way I’d seen it before the mongs moved in, someone honourably looking after an institution until they could offer no more, at which point they handed it on to another safe pair of hands, someone who’d been being trained for years and would be as selfless in their task as their predecessor - like Willy fucking Wonka
Naive perhaps, but rather that than contracts and debt and TV rights and stadium naming and banks sticking their names on your team’s shirt, and all the other baggage that surrounds a simple team game. I mean the popularity of footy is surely rooted in the ability to take men out of the boardroom or away from the coal face and just get stuck in and forget about the boring seriousness of their lives.
But you can’t argue with.... natural progression...so they say. It's just that it's been exploited to the nth degree now, so much further, so there’s nothing that isn’t owned by someone.
It's all wrong. Not that long ago there were things that mattered to a lot of people that weren’t primarily commercial, but that debate seems to have ended. The idiots have won. Now all that's sacred and protected are the casinos on Wall Street and in The City. Well fucking enjoy it, but don't mind me waving two fingers and smirking.
