Do FA have balls to defy UEFA and their ‘corporate brothel’?

UEFA’s ‘warning’ about what the Premier League called ‘unintended consequences’ of the introduction of a regulator was the latest defensive reflex by the bureaucratic, self-interested monolith, which has transitioned football from people’s game to corporate brothel.

You want to exclude England and English clubs from your precious competitions? Go ahead. You won’t financially dare, but we have to break with this unfair model and all the satellites of sin that orbit it, not perpetuate it with our presence any longer.

The FA should, but won’t, call their bluff because they have repeatedly been acquiescent to their twisted models.

Profound change is crucial to both structure and finances, even if the Premier League resists it and UEFA is scared of it. The game is knackered and is collapsing; 58% of the top 92 are technically insolvent and annual losses of £10m a year are average in the Championship. Something so popular shouldn’t be struggling so much.

Sensible economics and values are often simply absent and there’s a void where they should be. Push should come to shove. UEFA has no one’s interest except their own at its heart and needs to be replaced by a transparent organisation, free from the vested interest and dark, shadowy corners where dark, shadowy people do their dark, shadowy business. If this is a scare story, consider us not scared.

READ: England: Neville responds to Euros ban warning with UEFA’s stance deemed a ‘last throw of the dice’

The idea that the Premier League is ‘successful’ is not only ludicrous, but it reveals a set of values that are not compatible with economic sanity, fairness and competitive sport, warped by questionable owners and their questionable practices. We have a situation where clubs are selling players to their own companies, for God’s sake.

Everything is for sale to the highest bidder. This is a sport where the sacred real estate of shirts are sold for a relative pittance to heinous, possibly in some cases, illegal gambling companies. An industry which has colonised football and its culture, made it dependent on its income and has bent the whole sport to its will, perverting it and some of its fans profoundly.

It’s successful if you think sky-high wages and transfer fees, ticket, food and merchandise are simply the inevitability of that nebulous thing called market forces and we should just accept that like good right-thinkers, we should just be happy to let the market decide to fleece us and never mind those who are excluded. Care only about yourself, no one else matters, it’s the Premier League way. Maximise all income, regardless. Everything only has the worth that people will pay. Know the price, not the value.

The league would proudly say it was successful. After all, its executives are absolutely rolling in cash, as are a relative few in the industry. But that so-called success has gone hand-in-hand with a radical shrinking of competition to such an extent that only three sides can win it, maybe even less.

They’ve convinced some of their audience, through ceaseless marketing and pliant broadcasters, that this isn’t a problem. Convincing you to vote to repeatedly get kicked in the face and think it’s in your best interest is a successful 21st century right-wing capitalist orthodoxy, as I’m sure the responses to this will amply prove.

They pretend it’s a real competition and that anyone can win if they spend enough money and pay homage to the correct Gods. But if competition is crucial, which the drooling, slack-jawed acolytes may not think it is, preferring exhibition football, it’s obviously a failure. Except fairness was never the point. Financial colonisation and consequent profiteering was.

The irony of this is that all a regulator will do is to stop evil murderous regimes from owning clubs and stop clubs from collapsing under the weight of debt. Hardly a radical revolution and it’s only needed because the FA have proven so ineffective.

UEFA will still be free to kick around the ever more inappropriately named Champions League as a format, desperate to make it more interesting because, under their governance, it’s ground to a predictable trawl through the same fixtures every year but unable to understand that ‘big’ games that you can unaffectedly lose, and having a Swiss format which guarantees even more dead rubbers, will not rescue a dying competition from choking to death on its own financial vomit.

Listen to the broadcasters breathlessly talking about ‘exciting’ match-ups, all the while in the knowledge that the usual teams can lose up to three times and go through and they can lose this ‘big’ game and not care. They know there’s only minimal jeopardy in the new format, which is why they agreed to it. Big clubs qualify, get more money, buy more players, ensure more success and less competition and that predictability attracts more money, to ever less interest. You and me see it, but they’ve been blinded by the white light of big money.

If you asked fans, football would look very different. But they wouldn’t think of doing so. Swallow these loveless ejaculations, don’t question them, no matter how salty.

The Champions League would only include champions and be a knockout tournament from the start, clubs’ spending would be properly capped at the lowest affordable level, to make games more about talent and coaching and less about money and predictability. The ceaseless, grubby sponsorship deals would end. Ticket prices would return to sanity and the greasy exploitation of every aspect of the game would end. But UEFA don’t want that. God forbid. Their whole raison d’etre is to tell us what we want.

But they are our enemy and England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should leave it and watch everyone follow suit, because our complaints are everyone’s complaints. Have some guts. They want a fight, let’s give them one. Of course, they don’t. They want any talk of rebellion to be quashed and not to have to do anything.

If you are in any doubt that the inmates have taken over the asylum, I’d point you to the mad, ludicrous and amusing frying pan of mess that is Chelsea, as a kind of end game of all this money madness. If you can’t see what is wrong at Stamford Bridge, you have been mind-wiped by this surrealist fantasy, where nothing has any logic or meaning and has turned a once-proud football club into a hollow, meaningless, soul-free financial facility.

This is the reality UEFA and the Premier League want to pretend is perfectly normal and sane. At some point we have to reject it and the horse it rode in or it will kill what we love, if the price is right.