2014-05-05 18:03:37
Hi and thanks for the question. Well Bernard is half right. I’d prefer City to win the league because it would be easier to forget: we could all roll our eyes and say “well with all that money they had to win it”. Liverpool, however, as Joost rightly says, would be more deserving champions and for that reason it would be harder to take since they are United’s main rivals. It hurts to say this, but they’ve played the best football this year with a smaller, leaner squad than any of the bloated superclubs that have made up the top four in recent years.
Yes, the commercialisation of football is something that disgusts me, and yes Manchester United more or less kicked that off with the original sin of floating on the stock exchange in ’91 (although the pedant in me obliges me to add that Tottenham were the 1st club to do this).
Unfortunately the genie’s out of the bottle, and although it’s easy to characterize Liverpool as a working-class team, they’re also owned by American capitalists. Despite this, yes they do look more like a football team than the oil-rich sheikhs or Russians.
But I have a nagging feeling that supporting a major club in England these days is like cheering for Microsoft against some Gulf-based sovereign wealth fund. But I still can’t turn off the bit of me that follows Man. Utd, or indeed find anything that interests me as much.
As for whether I’d be happy to eat my words if they were taken over by other oil sheiks (I suppose Dubai hasn’t got a team yet, mind you there’s no oil in Dubai just bullshit and speculation). To be honest with you I’d probably carry on regardless, but I do think there’s a reason why that won’t happen and that’s because Man. Utd will always be Man. Utd, no matter who owns it.
The reason the sheikhs invest in second-tier clubs such as City or PSG is because they had less visibility before the takeover and were thus a more effective billboard for what is essentially an advertising campaign for shady, unelected governments. Consider this: Qatar “invests” in both Barcelona and PSG but if they were to buy Barcelona it would be impossible for them to subsume its identity as it’s such a huge club with unbreakable historical and political links with Catalonia. PSG might as well play in Bordeaux for all the links they have with Paris.
I should really get back to work now, all the best.
MCH
