It seems that, subconsciously, I have decided to celebrate May Day by focusing to a significant degree on corruption this month and today you are going to get more of the same. The intention of this post is to attempt to establish further the foundations of a construct that squeezes the corruption from the game of football. To illuminate our arguments, we will use two different areas - i) the underground, semi-legal and non-regulated global betting industry and ii) the selection of referees for Premiership games.
The perpetrators behind the capitalisation of football are going for the "having the cake and eating it" trip. These power bases target absolute control thereby maturing the marketplace through the development of a cartelisation, duopolisation, monopolisation or fragmented cartelisation systemic structure. By creating the dynamics for a maturing market via their greed, these operators effectively undermine their preferential market positioning as external observation of their machinations reveals the urgent necessity of regulation, transparency and integrity. This is typical of the short-termism found in all psychopathic behaviour. A more enlightened grouping of insiders would tilt the playing field in their proprietary favour but only to the degree that such manipulations are not observable to many market outsiders - most stakeholder capitalism functions on this latter level. But we are not in stakeholder territory anymore...
GLOBAL BETTING MARKETS - In numerous previous posts, we have described the infrastructure of the global football trading system. It is our firmly held belief that the First World money that is being dumped on the Premiership clubs is an investment primarily based in the opportunities offered by these markets. We confidently predict the first £1 billion ($2 billion) betting market on a single match within the next 2-5 years (the major games are already grossing half this figure). When prize money for performance related excellence is trumped to this magnitude by the financial benefits of corruption, the game is in trouble. This is analogous to the mature British horseracing markets where the 2:15 at Catterick might have prize money of £3000 while millions are bet on the race. Where is the dominant money? The layers pay off the connections of their book liabilities and everybody wins apart from the mugs.
The degree of corruption that is about to be unleashed onto the global game, but specifically the English Premiership, will take the game past the point of no return and our great game will become permanently rotten to the core at the most professional levels. Don't get me wrong, it is bad enough at the moment - any sector/league that is attracting the likes of Abramovich, Murdoch, Al-Fayed, Thaksin Shinawatra, Gaydamek, Kroenke, the Glazers, Hicks and Gillet, Magnussen and Lerner is in trouble.
The global football betting markets MUST be regulated and legalised and forced to operate with the degree of transparency and openness that has to be expected of a highly liquid, mature trading market. This must happen imminently. A massive proportion of the global turnover exists in Asia but all regions have a responsibility to formalise and regulate these markets. A few prompts...
* The betting markets should be traded via New York, London and Tokyo plus significant other territories eg Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore.
* All information/news relating to the events should be released to the market exchanges to undermine insider advantage as with all other market participants.
* All relevant regulation to apply to football betting markets including a ban on insider trading and all other forms of market manipulation.
* Open source global pricing data to be publicly available.
* Proper rules of disclosure with respect to the trading decisions of those in privileged informational loci.
* Effective regimes to sniff out the pockets of corruption that will still exist in a cellular masonic structure within the marketplace. Forensic market analysis is an incredibly revealing area.
* Security of trade and payment.
* Provision of Proprietary Research and Analysis.
PREMIERSHIP REFEREES - Critical to the regulation of the global betting markets is the effective management and monitoring of key power operators within the marketplace. Every sector possesses a unique infrastructure and, in football, a key individual is evidently the referee. An incredibly simple non-corruptible construct might be as we suggested in an earlier post:
"...lets see 38 referees in the Premiership. 19 men and 19 women. Lets have technology determine the legality or otherwise of penalties, goals and sending offs. All officials will only referee any given team once per season. All microphones that are worn by officials to be on an open communication line. No sponsorship of individual teams by bookmakers. Referees should not work with the same assistant referees. Referees and players banned from betting (directly or indirectly)".
The people who gain from the corruption of our game require a small control group of referees. The Bundesliga utilises over forty referees while the Premiership uses less than twenty (and there are still rumours of the development of a core group of just 10 individuals). In Game Theoretic terms, the smallest number of individuals that NEED to be involved in a corruption is ALWAYS the prime number. Every extra person increases the probability of informational leakage and/or the discovery of the systemic scam. Every dynamic that causes movement away from this potential equilibrium position will increase the cleanliness of our game. In theory, a centralised system of bribery and corruption is more preferable for the perpetrators than a network of individual operators who, through double marginisation, achieve inefficient returns.
Shareholder Capitalist entities repeatedly slice away at obstructive regulation, opposition, competitors, level playing fields and meritocracy in any other form as they seek to impose their own control template. To maintain any hope of a future input for the people who are paying for this global brand ie you and me, we must be attempting to undertake our own slicing of their corrupt edifice by researching, analysing, reporting, solving and publicising the machinations that are corrupting our sport.
This is a tug of war and there's some big bastards on their team. But, public perception is a key core area that influences spectacular society's agendas and blogs are a prime source of this dynamic.
The dispiriting angle on this whole struggle for the game of football is that we are all effectively fighting for a semi-corrupt structure rather than a systemic one. There is no revolution here. We were all too slow (or otherwise engaged) to see that Rupert Murdoch is a slightly different operator than Ken Bates and realism now dictates that our primary target is a stakeholder but, unfortunately, still capitalist structure for what is, after all, the people's game.
I'm sure that I used to campaign for something slightly more utopian than a caring conservative infrastructure. I trust/hope that it is the world that has moved and not me.
