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It’s time to nationalise the Premier League
With the failure of the free market system in society as a whole, football should take a more socialist approach to how it runs itself
One of the curiousities of American society, writes Steven Wells in the Guardian, is that their sports system is so fair: "if you watch the NFL draft, where the crappest teams gets first pick of the best players" you see that it's "part of a system designed to make sure that all the assets don't end up in the hands of a greedy few. And you realise there's a name for such a system: socialism."
Yet in British and European football a far more free-market approach has always prevailed. So while the Thatcherite consensus of the last 20 years falls apart around our ears, Wells makes a modest proposal: "the Premier League is just screaming out to be nationalised.
"Given the utter collapse and total failure of the Friedmanite free market model, the nationalisation of the Premier League (and the stupidly named leagues below it) would face almost no serious ideological opposition, and would probably prove massively popular with the vast majority of football fans, particularly those who are fans of clubs that - under the present system - have no realistic chance of ever again winning anything meaningful."
Across the whole sport, people are coming to similar conclusions says Wells. "Even Andy Burnham, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, admits it's time to reassess the Premier League's relationship with money. Of course, realistically any such nationalisation would have to be Europe-wide, but given the EU's much vaunted cultural remit, would that really be a problem?
"Football is integral to European culture. Easily as important as food or art. Leaving it in the hands of unregulated capital makes no more sense than letting entirely profit-motivated private companies run the environment, the arts, transport, broadcasting, banking, the mortgage industry or architecture."
Signing off from his call to arms, Wells advocates that we "draw on Europe's social democratic traditions (and German and Spanish football's experiences with collective ownership)" and "seize the moment and nationalise all of Europe's top leagues, with or without shareholder and/or ownership compensation. By which, of course, I mean without." ·
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Don't ya'll jest lurve The Grauniad. Filled with brilliant articles, ideas and comments it inspires its readership to think outside the box. Trouble is, that's the brain box!
The American sports system that Steven Wells praises as 'fair' is actually a ploy by the ownership cartel specifically designed to maintain the financial value of each and every franchise. It is not socialist but oligarchic; it is not capitalist but autocratic; it is about returns on investment not standards of performance; it is fixated on gate receipts and city and state subsidies to such an extent that the franchise is transported to a different location when the opportunity to obtain a better return on an investment is presented. MK Dons comes to mind in U.K. but Wimbledon still persevere .. in the States it couldn't. Left wing egalitarianism has once more arrived at an Orwellian , or is that Stevenwellsian, solution,