How did Liverpool Football Club end up in this sorry mess? They may never walk alone but some of the individuals that they are choosing to currently walk alongside are distinctly out of step with the history of this once great club.
We warned last year, on this site, of the issues relating to being bought out by private equity heads, Tom Hicks and George Gillett - Texan friends and associates of George W. Bush were always in this project to create profits for their coterie of good ol' southern boys while saddling Liverpool FC with potentially crippling debt. Although the new owners have always insisted that they were not the equivalent of the Glazers, the only difference that we are able to perceive is that, at least, the owners of Manchester United were able to correctly learn the club's name. The holding company (branded Kop Football Holdings) is licensed in the capitalist cowboy state of Delaware and the offshore financial centre which is the Cayman Islands. This is indicative of the secrecy of the business structure. Hicks has now come as clean as he is able or willing to wash and announced that, despite his earlier protestations, the owners have indeed landed approximately £250 million worth of debt at the Shankley Gates. The parallels with Manchester United, where 70% of the latest annual profits are set aside to cover the interest payments on the money that the Glazer's borrowed to buy the club in the first place, are all too evident. With liquidity in the banking sector having dried up, the refinancing of the Liverpool deal was problematic although the Royal Bank of Scotland and southern USA masonic Wachovia Bank came to the rescue. Liverpool fans should be wary of Wachovia. Their slogan "Are you with Wachovia?" is seen more as a threat than a marketing tool in the USA and the bank - check out the New York Times article on May 20th 2007 entitled: "Corporate Profits, From Data Sold To Thieves" - allegedly shows greater loyalty to psychopathic capitalists in the black market than to its own customers.
The new stadium ruse is a part of this strategy. Hicks and Gillett like to keep their business affairs on the square, so to speak. To achieve the best value for Liverpool FC with respect to the new ground, a closed auction would have been the preferable choice, as indicated by Game Theory. Value for Liverpool FC is, by no means, the first thing on Hicks' and Gillett's collective agendas however and the stadium will be designed by HKS Architects based in, you guessed it, Dallas, Texas. Rumours that the new Stanley Park Stadium is to be renamed the Texan Masonic Hall are probably wide of the mark.
Planning permission was first granted for the new stadium five years ago and, yet, Liverpool FC are still at the planning stage and such sloth-like movement is impacting upon the club's performances on the pitch and, more importantly in these days of football as a financial product, on the bottom line. They should hurry up. The playing surface is projected to be 8 metres below sea level and, at the current rate of climate change, an Olympic super-sized swimming pool is a more likely outcome.
Hearing The Kop (the fans here as opposed to the Texans) chant for Dubai International Capital (DIC) to come a-camel-riding to the rescue further emphasises the lack of grasp of reality of the supporters. These fans initially embraced the American private equity people as a potential route to be able to compete once again with the Manchester Reds. When it turned out that the gap between the two Reds was wider than ever, other fabulously rich sources became the chant of choice. DIC are also big on private equity and, for readers unaware of the private equity business model, we will offer a brief overview. Using debt, private equity companies takeover an existing business; they strip out as many costs as possible ie wages; the financial markets reward the private equity firm for creating a leaner shareholder capitalist instrument; the share price rises as morale within the company falls; the private equity owners then sell up making a huge profit for themselves and their bankers while leaving a shell-like essence which slowly but surely falters and fails. Its just creative temporal asset stripping really. Interestingly, within mainstream shareholder capitalist structures, private equity is now seen as "last year's thing" due to the liquidity crisis and sovereign-wealth funds are the new psycho-structure of choice. Anyway... The Mr Big, and we mean Big, behind DIC is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum who is well known to all in the horseracing world through is ownership of the powerful Godolphin stables. He is also quite keen on using kidnapped four year old boys as camel jockeys and oversees an economy built on slave and bonded labour - check out any Dubai building site if you don't believe us! Now, it is one thing to be pissed off with American private equity but is this version any better? And, even if there are arguments that Dubai dollars are marginally preferable to Dubya's mates, is it really something that one should be singing about at a football match?
Fortunately, not all Liverpool fans are myopic idiots. A group of Liverpool supporters are trying to succeed where the financial might of DIC has so far failed and buy their club from its American owners. Called Share Liverpool FC (note the clever play on words indicating both capitalism and community), the group suggest selling shares at £5,000 apiece to 100,000 Scousers and sympathisers. The £500 million pounds would be used to buyout Texas and return the club to a more enlightened form of social ownership. Similar structures exist elsewhere and are successful - check out Barcelona, for example. The shareholders will be able to vote for the key positions at the top of the club hierarchy which will make the owners accountable. Surely this is a far better business model than one in which inappropriate individuals palm of illicit profits both directly via the private equity structure and indirectly by their involvement in the global betting markets - destabilising your club and short-selling them on the markets is not really football, is it? Of course, Share Liverpool FC could be even more creative in their redistributive actions by significantly extending the range of burglaries of players and others associated with the club during the matches!
The destabilisation perpetrated by the Texans began just prior to the Marseille home match in the Champions League and their machinations have continued ever since. Intriguingly, the global betting turnover on Liverpool matches increased markedly at the same time. Not content with undermining the manager and the team with transfer market restrictions and by betting against a team that you own, Hicks and Gillett interviewed Jurgen Klinsmann about the vacant manager's post. Except, it wasn't vacant - Rafa Benitez was still in charge of team matters, at least in theory. Benitez is the second reason that Liverpool find themselves in their current state. Vastly overrated from his time at Valencia when he was fortunate enough to inherit a squad of burgeoning talent, Benitez is several rungs below the first tier managers like Wenger, Capello and Mourinho. Benitez got lucky in Istanbul after his ridiculous team selection allowed Kaká to demolish his team in the first half and he has been living on that fluke moment ever since. By focusing solely on the Champions League while professing the familiar refrain that Liverpool are still in the title race - exactly where are the 17 points going to be made up, sir? - Benitez attempts to keep the ground full for largely meaningless games where the prize, in that it exists at all, is a Champions League place for next season. Then he can repeat the process all over again. Looking a little closer, the 17 points need to be made up in just 15 games and Liverpool have already played the three really big clubs at home. Oh, and they have to get past Internazionale in the Champions League in the midst of this "campaign". Get real, hombre! Additionally, the man cannot judge a goalkeeper. Reina is not up to the task but he is Spanish so, I guess, that's alright then. Much, much worse than this and his inability to understand constructive squad rotation is his racism, whether deliberate or subconscious. Buying Latino players and plonking them in the Wirral is all well and good but Spanish, Brazilian and Argentinian players come at a price premium further denting the financial profile of the club. Some of the best value for equivalent and often, superior, talent is Africa and Black players from France for example, and, yet, Benitez ignores this pool of ability. During his time at Valencia, there was only one Black player at the club and he has just sold the massively underemployed and shoddily treated Sissoko (the token Black at Valencia) to Juventus for £8.2 million (at least the Italians rate him) - Pennant and Itandje should belooking nervously over their shoulders! The nadir of Rafa's season came in last night's capitulation to West Ham United but it is certainly not only Benitez who exhibits a racist bias in the English game as the sickly cheering by the West Ham fans at the substitution of Luis Boa Morte all too clearly demonstrated.
Last summer, we posted that several of the teams who were embracing hyper-owners would be in the territory of regret before the season was out. We highlighted Manchester City, Newcastle, Portsmouth and Birmingham City - we even suggested that readers short-sell the former two teams on the Premiership indices. As we stated earlier on in the week, Manchester City are in selective freefall as last night's provision to Derby of their third "real" point of the season indicated while the situation at Newcastle makes Don Quixote seem a strategist.
Keegan is out of his depth; Dennis Wise is not an executive director although he successfully presided over taking Leeds United to their lowest ever league position which obviously impresses Mike Ashley who is performing similar contortions with his company, Sports Direct; the appointment of Tony Jimenez as vice-president (player recruitment) will allow him to bring all his skills from property development into the sphere of the transfer market; their reliance on Michael Owen, who has scored one goal in 14 games and that with his shoulder, is shortsighted etc etc. The last trick left in Ashley's locker is to take off his striped shirt and stand alongside the other blubber bellies as they approach the relegation they so richly deserve. If not this season, then next...
Yesterday, it was announced that the the son of the Russian/Israeli arms dealer who is unable to visit France due to an arrest warrant on his head is looking to sell Portsmouth. Although the club denies the speculation, it would be a foolish mind that believed the utterances that emanate from this particular part of the south coast. Anyway, our contact says its for real and that's good enough for us. With the Pompey Five's impending court case, these are self-destructive fractious times at Fratton.
Our final angle came to pass when the billionaire barber packed up his clippers and comb and returned to the more familiar territory of the gambling sector in Asia having helped to suck Birmingham into the relegation zone and lose them their manager.
When looking at the likes of Abramovich, Gaydamak and Shinawatra, we are reminded of the statement early last century by Ida Tarbell about American company Standard Oil: "Their empire was built on fraud, deceit, special privilege, gross illegality, bribery, coercion, corruption, intimidation, espionage and outright terror". Such "talents" have become the core competencies of modern day shareholder capitalism...
And the conclusion to this post? Oh my gosh, where would the English game be without Arsenal, Everton and Blackburn Rovers? No sell outs here just professional performance which, despite the machinations of the global criminals, still sees them occupying 2nd, 4th and 8th places respectively. Proper football lives on. Just...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Thursday, 31 January 2008
Monday, 28 January 2008
Champions League - You're Having A Laugh
Painful as it is to paraphrase plastic Preston people, the "Premiership - You're Having A Laugh" chant targeting Derby County fans on Saturday was, in our estimation, the joint funniest chant of the season to date (alongside Manchester United's "What The Fuckin' Hell Is That?" greeting of Peter Crouch entering as a substitute at Anfield). Both, however, pale into insignificance in comparison with Altrincham's politically aware "Scab, Scab, Scab, Scab..." aimed at the Alfreton Colliery fans some twenty years after the Nottinghamshire miners had been naively bought off by the Thatcher regime.
All of which is entirely irrelevant to today's post apart from providing the excuse of a title for this piece.
Manchester City are about to go pear-shaped. As we have frequently posted, Thaksin Shinawatra simply sees the Manchester Blues as a short-term electioneering vehicle for his political objectives in Thailand. Prior to the mid-season transfer window, there were leaks and rumours that the good doctor was going to spend several tens of millions of pounds from his illicit offshore financial booty on strengthening the squad for a push for both the FA Cup and a Champions League spot. And did it happen? Of course not. In came Nery Castillo on a year long loan from Shakhtar Donetsk and, yet, even this was a pseudo-signing in that the player paid his own way to be released from his contract. He's also currently useless, having failed to score during his time in the Ukraine and is looking entirely bemused by the realities of life in the Premiership. After this arrival, there has been nothing of note but the departure of Bianchi and the rumours of the sale of Micah Richards (presumably so Shinawatra can recoup some of his outlay before he does a runner). The atmosphere at the club is apparently halfway between chaotic and listless with Elano having given up the ghost and Bianchi grateful to find proper food following his close encounter with English cuisine. Despite the relief of escaping a fast sinking ship, Bianchi carried his Manchester moods back with him to Rome and he was sent off on his Lazio debut for two bookable offences in the five minutes that he was on the field! Anyway, lets check out the bigger picture...
In the first half of the season, Thaksin Shinawatra bought himself good publicity whenever Manchester City were live on television in soccer-mad Thailand. Prior to yesterday's nonsensical performance, City had appeared live ten times with a remarkable sequence of 6 wins, 4 draws and zero defeats. More pertinently, the refereeing decisions in those games were very heavily biased in favour of the Blues with 90% of the key decisions going in their favour. Obviously, Shinawatra's links with AirAsia (the sponsors of the whistleblowing criminals) had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this statistical anomaly. Really. The publicity evidently helped the hyper-gangster as the offspring of his Thai Rak Thai party, the People's Power Party, won almost 50% of a rigged vote in December 23rd's election. This last month has seen extensive machinations between the military coup leaders and Shinawatra's proxy, Samak Sundaravej, over the ballot box stuffing that went on in the rural areas loyal to Shinawatra. The Election Commission and the Supreme Court were heavily pressurised by Sundaravej and Shinawatra to annul the inquiry into vote rigging and, last week, they finally relented marking the end of the military control of the country.
Sundarajev is described by The Economist as being "fiercely right wing" which in the realms of their shareholder-capitalist-speak means that, like Shinawatra, he is a fascist. Sundarajev is happy to be known as merely a stand-in leader until the gangster returns in a blaze of gory glory and Shinawatra sent his Mrs back last week to test the waters and see how serious the courts were about prosecuting the two of them for robbing the country blind in a series of business sales and land deals while he was in power.
The poisonous icing on the cake for the alleged "real Mancunian fans" is that Shinawatra intends to return to Thailand himself in May, which neatly coincides with the completion of another rigged event - the 2007/2008 Premiership season. This should provide just enough time to balance the cooked books, sell his mansion near London, terminate the relevant contracts and to plan the revenge that undoubtedly awaits the coup leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin.
Yesterday marked the beginning of a new reality for Manchester City and it showed in their performance at mighty Sheffield United. Following the FA Cup Third Round, the FA were horrified by the huge empty spaces at virtually all the grounds - if the teams don't take the competition seriously, you can hardly expect the fans to do so. Prior to the 4th Round of the world's greatest tournament (!?), Brooking's brigade were looking at an absolute maximum of 8 Premiership teams reaching the last sixteen as the competition slowly morphed into a postmodern version of the LDV Vans Trophy. As Derby County were one of these 8 teams and they had been taken to extra time and penalties by the other Sheffield team just a few days earlier, the actual maximum was 7. If Shinawatra had still possessed any strategic intent for his Manchester City project, he would have behaved true to form and simply bought the match. Instead, the game marked the Professional Game Match Officials Board's (PGMOB) own revenge and the match official was changed very late from Foy to Wiley and the rest is history as City joined Derby as the non-qualifiers.
So, what of the remainder of the season? Good question. And the answer is by no means as simple as this post suggests.
As a conclusion, we are introducing our new Dietrological Proprietary Information Service for Football Is Fixed readers a little earlier than originally intended. We have very strong opinions on three of Manchester City's remaining league fixtures and we are selling these advices at £75 apiece (£200 for all three) to professionals and amateurs alike. The advices will be released 30 minutes prior to kick off as we have no desire to tilt the markets and subscribers will be warned of the impending games in advance. To register, simply send an email to footballisfixed@googlemail.com declaring how many games you require and we will provide you with the payment details. Obviously, all Dietrological clients will receive such information as part of their membership.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
All of which is entirely irrelevant to today's post apart from providing the excuse of a title for this piece.
Manchester City are about to go pear-shaped. As we have frequently posted, Thaksin Shinawatra simply sees the Manchester Blues as a short-term electioneering vehicle for his political objectives in Thailand. Prior to the mid-season transfer window, there were leaks and rumours that the good doctor was going to spend several tens of millions of pounds from his illicit offshore financial booty on strengthening the squad for a push for both the FA Cup and a Champions League spot. And did it happen? Of course not. In came Nery Castillo on a year long loan from Shakhtar Donetsk and, yet, even this was a pseudo-signing in that the player paid his own way to be released from his contract. He's also currently useless, having failed to score during his time in the Ukraine and is looking entirely bemused by the realities of life in the Premiership. After this arrival, there has been nothing of note but the departure of Bianchi and the rumours of the sale of Micah Richards (presumably so Shinawatra can recoup some of his outlay before he does a runner). The atmosphere at the club is apparently halfway between chaotic and listless with Elano having given up the ghost and Bianchi grateful to find proper food following his close encounter with English cuisine. Despite the relief of escaping a fast sinking ship, Bianchi carried his Manchester moods back with him to Rome and he was sent off on his Lazio debut for two bookable offences in the five minutes that he was on the field! Anyway, lets check out the bigger picture...
In the first half of the season, Thaksin Shinawatra bought himself good publicity whenever Manchester City were live on television in soccer-mad Thailand. Prior to yesterday's nonsensical performance, City had appeared live ten times with a remarkable sequence of 6 wins, 4 draws and zero defeats. More pertinently, the refereeing decisions in those games were very heavily biased in favour of the Blues with 90% of the key decisions going in their favour. Obviously, Shinawatra's links with AirAsia (the sponsors of the whistleblowing criminals) had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with this statistical anomaly. Really. The publicity evidently helped the hyper-gangster as the offspring of his Thai Rak Thai party, the People's Power Party, won almost 50% of a rigged vote in December 23rd's election. This last month has seen extensive machinations between the military coup leaders and Shinawatra's proxy, Samak Sundaravej, over the ballot box stuffing that went on in the rural areas loyal to Shinawatra. The Election Commission and the Supreme Court were heavily pressurised by Sundaravej and Shinawatra to annul the inquiry into vote rigging and, last week, they finally relented marking the end of the military control of the country.
Sundarajev is described by The Economist as being "fiercely right wing" which in the realms of their shareholder-capitalist-speak means that, like Shinawatra, he is a fascist. Sundarajev is happy to be known as merely a stand-in leader until the gangster returns in a blaze of gory glory and Shinawatra sent his Mrs back last week to test the waters and see how serious the courts were about prosecuting the two of them for robbing the country blind in a series of business sales and land deals while he was in power.
The poisonous icing on the cake for the alleged "real Mancunian fans" is that Shinawatra intends to return to Thailand himself in May, which neatly coincides with the completion of another rigged event - the 2007/2008 Premiership season. This should provide just enough time to balance the cooked books, sell his mansion near London, terminate the relevant contracts and to plan the revenge that undoubtedly awaits the coup leader General Sonthi Boonyaratglin.
Yesterday marked the beginning of a new reality for Manchester City and it showed in their performance at mighty Sheffield United. Following the FA Cup Third Round, the FA were horrified by the huge empty spaces at virtually all the grounds - if the teams don't take the competition seriously, you can hardly expect the fans to do so. Prior to the 4th Round of the world's greatest tournament (!?), Brooking's brigade were looking at an absolute maximum of 8 Premiership teams reaching the last sixteen as the competition slowly morphed into a postmodern version of the LDV Vans Trophy. As Derby County were one of these 8 teams and they had been taken to extra time and penalties by the other Sheffield team just a few days earlier, the actual maximum was 7. If Shinawatra had still possessed any strategic intent for his Manchester City project, he would have behaved true to form and simply bought the match. Instead, the game marked the Professional Game Match Officials Board's (PGMOB) own revenge and the match official was changed very late from Foy to Wiley and the rest is history as City joined Derby as the non-qualifiers.
So, what of the remainder of the season? Good question. And the answer is by no means as simple as this post suggests.
As a conclusion, we are introducing our new Dietrological Proprietary Information Service for Football Is Fixed readers a little earlier than originally intended. We have very strong opinions on three of Manchester City's remaining league fixtures and we are selling these advices at £75 apiece (£200 for all three) to professionals and amateurs alike. The advices will be released 30 minutes prior to kick off as we have no desire to tilt the markets and subscribers will be warned of the impending games in advance. To register, simply send an email to footballisfixed@googlemail.com declaring how many games you require and we will provide you with the payment details. Obviously, all Dietrological clients will receive such information as part of their membership.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Sunday, 27 January 2008
Out Of Africa
It is a reason not to be cheerful that work commitments have prevented any of our Trading Team from attending the African Cup Of Nations (ACON) in Ghana. The tournament offers proper football with minimal corruption as the personal prizes available to the players extend far beyond the tournament itself - the ACON is a passport to a potentially secure financial future if a player is picked up by any of the numerous European agents attending the event. As is always the case in economics, incentives control reality and very few of the players are willing to be bought off by the criminal underworld of the bookmaking fraternity. Hence, proper football...
The competition has been greeted by the usual moans, groans and, the unfortunately frequent, outright racism that is the standard template of the footballing first world when dealing with its poorer disenfranchised brethren. Premiership managers claim that their seasonal strategies are being disrupted by the ACON when such assertions are merely an indication of a complete lack of strategic thought in the initial instance. Its not as if the dates were secreted away by the Confederation of African Football (CAF). If a given Premiership manager wishes to purchase highly talented players on the cheap, often with associated abusive contracts, they can hardly cry "foul" when their transfer policy falls short. Such spurious arguments are resulting in attempts to have future tournaments put back until the summer months so that the first world European leagues are not affected by the loss of their prized assets. Indeed, some of the top African players in England have supported such a move as the feeling is that their careers are dependent on always kowtowing to the British pound and the Yanqui dollar. The CAF is considering bringing forward the next version of the ACON to the New Year which would work as far as the majority of the European leagues are concerned but not in the bookmaking-controlled territories of England and the Netherlands as the layers in these countries insist on domestic football continuing over the xmas/New Year break as there is much money to be made from the pockets of leisure punters in such windows. The pressure from England, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands towards the competition being held during the ludicrously hot summer months of the northern and central parts of the continent is clearly an exercise in putting the health and safety of players firmly in second place behind the needs and requirements of the clubs, the bookmakers and their shareholders. We should not be surprised - none of the named European nations have exactly covered themselves in glory historically via their imperial and commercial concerns on the dark (sic) continent.
Of course, the health and safety of the players is neither here nor there amongst the major issues impacting upon the global game. Where is the media coverage for the ex-players limping their way through the rest of their lives due to the cortisone injections that used to be a common feature of the game? Has anybody noticed any real response by the global and continental football authorities to the increasing numbers of high-profile deaths of players on the field of play in recent years due to heart failure. Phil O'Donnell is the fourth pro to die in the last six months following Sevilla's Antonio Puerta, Hapoel Be'er Sheva's Chaswe Nsofwa and Walsall's Anton Reid. At least the Spanish authorities gave some dignity to Puerta's death while the Scottish Premier League only reluctantly cancelled a portion of the adjacent league programme after O'Donnell's death - these people are not only biased and incompetent but insensitive too. According to FIFA, 93% of the deaths in sport are caused by sudden cardiac arrests. Adrenaline produced during exercise, often under the added influence of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs), is the prime cause. In one of its better moments, World Soccer magazine notes that, since 1991, the Italian authorities have run checks on all athletes with a resultant tenfold reduction in the incidence of death and at a cost of merely 28 Euros per athlete - beer money when there are betting markets reaching 1.33 billion Euros per match. FIFA's chief medical officer, Professor Jiri Dvorak, points out that "cardiac screening should be mandatory" as "there are one thousand cardiac deaths a year in sport".
Anyway, we digress. But, before forcing African players to play their continental competition under greater meteorological excesses, the Premier League and their member clubs should consider the health risks. Of course, they won't. We're dealing with a modern day slave trade here in African footballing talent and, so long as the Premier League and its members are covered by suitable insurance, any death will be seen as virtually irrelevant.
A final point on the coincidence of tournaments needs to be made here. The UEFA Euro and FIFA World Cup brands occur during the northern hemisphere summer months which clashes with numerous leagues around the world, from the extreme northern latitudes to the extreme southern, but there is never any issue raised regarding the impact of these mega-brands on the leagues affected. Inevitably, the leagues of Russia, Eire, Chile, Australia etc have minimal clout...
Throughout all the pseudo-arguments of the north Europeans lurks the ever-present -ism that is racism. When asked about whether European attitudes look down on African players, Real Madrid's Mahamadou Diarra says: "Yes, that is something you can feel, its palpable... There is a lack of respect but I don't worry - I don't play so that people in Europe say nice things about African football". Which is a good job, really, because respect is the last thing on the minds of the racists. El Hadj Diouf is regarded as somebody who spits at opponents rather than somebody who provides an amazing amount of work together with donations for Senegalese people. "Mido is a paedo" was the hilarious chant of the Newcastle fans (aren't you glad that they've got Michael Owen instead?); when Mikel of Chelsea does a two-footed lunge, it is always worse than when Stevie Gerrard does the same; some, like Kanouté and Rigobert Song just give up on the English game altogether while among those who stay, many are not appreciated for their true talents - think the handling of Sissoko by Buffoon Benitez etc etc. And even when there is a grudging recognition that an African player might just have an iota of talent, this talent is always dressed up in such phrases as "All African players are strong and powerful" rather than appreciating the astonishing multi-talented nature of individuals like Adebayor, Drogba, Essien, Toure etc.
To accentuate this lack of respect further, many European clubs tap into the illegal world of the unofficial soccer academies that litter the cities of west Africa - there are said to be 500 of these alone in Accra, Ghana's capital. Indeed, several of the Africans street-selling trinkets in Kerkyra started their voyage of high risk in the hope of gaining a foot on the lower rungs of the European football ladder.
Which brings us back to World Soccer for, despite it being the best football magazine on the market, it too disses African football. One of their best writers is their African correspondent, Mark Gleeson, but in the last year coverage of football in Africa has been restricted to just one page per issue - bizarrely, exactly the same amount of space that is given to non-FIFA football. The editor, Gavin Hamilton, evidently feels that articles on the merits of the teams of Gibraltar or Gozo are equivalent in importance to a whole continent of diverse and exciting football in Africa. Racist or what? Additionally, the Talent Scout section rarely touches on African players with the focus being almost entirely on South America. For goodness sake, they even get the name of Africa's premier international competition incorrect throughout the current issue of the magazine. Incompetent and racist that would make them...
The only blot on the opening week of the ACON was the disclosure by Benin manager, Reinhard Fabisch, that he was approached by an individual fronting an Asian gambling syndicate from Singapore prior to the match against Mali. This crook was after an inside job and was quickly shown the door. World Soccer, in the current issue, also focuses on rigged games involving an assortment of players, referees, authorities and/or Asian bookmakers in Poland, Albania, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Kazakhstan. The media always accuses the same countries and it is always the Asian bookmakers who are allegedly behind the corruption. It might appear peculiarly contrarian that it is our belief, indeed our knowledge, that the vast majority of corruption is perpetrated by European bookmakers together with a selection of the equivalent players, referees and authorities of the footballing first world. Of course, there has never been one sentence relating to this massive corruption in the decade and a half that I have been reading World Soccer!
Fabisch made an interesting statement following the approach from "Singapore". He said that he assumed that African countries were being approached because the players (and their families) were economically poor and, consequently, they would be more willing to be bought off. Nonsense. Check out the incentives. It is always the rich that do corruption as a core competency. The poor might do it out of necessity -according to Cervantes, it is better to rob than to ask for charity - but the incentives are so skewed in favour of performing to the max that it is highly unlikely than Benin's players would take the short term buck only to have to return to an existence of desperate poverty thereafter. Indeed, in previous versions of the ACON, the British bookmakers were always reluctant to price up the matches simply because they were dealing with proper football and not the hybrid of soccer and greyhound racing that they tend to prefer.
Talent is and will be produced in order to be sold. Talent is a form of value. This talent resides within the individual, not the state. In the words of Jean-François Lyotard : "The harmony of the needs and hopes of individuals and groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is now only a secondary component of its functioning". Lyotard, again: "There are two basic representational models for society: either society forms a functional whole, or it is divided in two". Only the most myopic and biased capitalist could claim that the former exists in today's neo-con world. It is to the massive disadvantage of the vast majority of the population of Africa that this is the case.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
The competition has been greeted by the usual moans, groans and, the unfortunately frequent, outright racism that is the standard template of the footballing first world when dealing with its poorer disenfranchised brethren. Premiership managers claim that their seasonal strategies are being disrupted by the ACON when such assertions are merely an indication of a complete lack of strategic thought in the initial instance. Its not as if the dates were secreted away by the Confederation of African Football (CAF). If a given Premiership manager wishes to purchase highly talented players on the cheap, often with associated abusive contracts, they can hardly cry "foul" when their transfer policy falls short. Such spurious arguments are resulting in attempts to have future tournaments put back until the summer months so that the first world European leagues are not affected by the loss of their prized assets. Indeed, some of the top African players in England have supported such a move as the feeling is that their careers are dependent on always kowtowing to the British pound and the Yanqui dollar. The CAF is considering bringing forward the next version of the ACON to the New Year which would work as far as the majority of the European leagues are concerned but not in the bookmaking-controlled territories of England and the Netherlands as the layers in these countries insist on domestic football continuing over the xmas/New Year break as there is much money to be made from the pockets of leisure punters in such windows. The pressure from England, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands towards the competition being held during the ludicrously hot summer months of the northern and central parts of the continent is clearly an exercise in putting the health and safety of players firmly in second place behind the needs and requirements of the clubs, the bookmakers and their shareholders. We should not be surprised - none of the named European nations have exactly covered themselves in glory historically via their imperial and commercial concerns on the dark (sic) continent.
Of course, the health and safety of the players is neither here nor there amongst the major issues impacting upon the global game. Where is the media coverage for the ex-players limping their way through the rest of their lives due to the cortisone injections that used to be a common feature of the game? Has anybody noticed any real response by the global and continental football authorities to the increasing numbers of high-profile deaths of players on the field of play in recent years due to heart failure. Phil O'Donnell is the fourth pro to die in the last six months following Sevilla's Antonio Puerta, Hapoel Be'er Sheva's Chaswe Nsofwa and Walsall's Anton Reid. At least the Spanish authorities gave some dignity to Puerta's death while the Scottish Premier League only reluctantly cancelled a portion of the adjacent league programme after O'Donnell's death - these people are not only biased and incompetent but insensitive too. According to FIFA, 93% of the deaths in sport are caused by sudden cardiac arrests. Adrenaline produced during exercise, often under the added influence of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs), is the prime cause. In one of its better moments, World Soccer magazine notes that, since 1991, the Italian authorities have run checks on all athletes with a resultant tenfold reduction in the incidence of death and at a cost of merely 28 Euros per athlete - beer money when there are betting markets reaching 1.33 billion Euros per match. FIFA's chief medical officer, Professor Jiri Dvorak, points out that "cardiac screening should be mandatory" as "there are one thousand cardiac deaths a year in sport".
Anyway, we digress. But, before forcing African players to play their continental competition under greater meteorological excesses, the Premier League and their member clubs should consider the health risks. Of course, they won't. We're dealing with a modern day slave trade here in African footballing talent and, so long as the Premier League and its members are covered by suitable insurance, any death will be seen as virtually irrelevant.
A final point on the coincidence of tournaments needs to be made here. The UEFA Euro and FIFA World Cup brands occur during the northern hemisphere summer months which clashes with numerous leagues around the world, from the extreme northern latitudes to the extreme southern, but there is never any issue raised regarding the impact of these mega-brands on the leagues affected. Inevitably, the leagues of Russia, Eire, Chile, Australia etc have minimal clout...
Throughout all the pseudo-arguments of the north Europeans lurks the ever-present -ism that is racism. When asked about whether European attitudes look down on African players, Real Madrid's Mahamadou Diarra says: "Yes, that is something you can feel, its palpable... There is a lack of respect but I don't worry - I don't play so that people in Europe say nice things about African football". Which is a good job, really, because respect is the last thing on the minds of the racists. El Hadj Diouf is regarded as somebody who spits at opponents rather than somebody who provides an amazing amount of work together with donations for Senegalese people. "Mido is a paedo" was the hilarious chant of the Newcastle fans (aren't you glad that they've got Michael Owen instead?); when Mikel of Chelsea does a two-footed lunge, it is always worse than when Stevie Gerrard does the same; some, like Kanouté and Rigobert Song just give up on the English game altogether while among those who stay, many are not appreciated for their true talents - think the handling of Sissoko by Buffoon Benitez etc etc. And even when there is a grudging recognition that an African player might just have an iota of talent, this talent is always dressed up in such phrases as "All African players are strong and powerful" rather than appreciating the astonishing multi-talented nature of individuals like Adebayor, Drogba, Essien, Toure etc.
To accentuate this lack of respect further, many European clubs tap into the illegal world of the unofficial soccer academies that litter the cities of west Africa - there are said to be 500 of these alone in Accra, Ghana's capital. Indeed, several of the Africans street-selling trinkets in Kerkyra started their voyage of high risk in the hope of gaining a foot on the lower rungs of the European football ladder.
Which brings us back to World Soccer for, despite it being the best football magazine on the market, it too disses African football. One of their best writers is their African correspondent, Mark Gleeson, but in the last year coverage of football in Africa has been restricted to just one page per issue - bizarrely, exactly the same amount of space that is given to non-FIFA football. The editor, Gavin Hamilton, evidently feels that articles on the merits of the teams of Gibraltar or Gozo are equivalent in importance to a whole continent of diverse and exciting football in Africa. Racist or what? Additionally, the Talent Scout section rarely touches on African players with the focus being almost entirely on South America. For goodness sake, they even get the name of Africa's premier international competition incorrect throughout the current issue of the magazine. Incompetent and racist that would make them...
The only blot on the opening week of the ACON was the disclosure by Benin manager, Reinhard Fabisch, that he was approached by an individual fronting an Asian gambling syndicate from Singapore prior to the match against Mali. This crook was after an inside job and was quickly shown the door. World Soccer, in the current issue, also focuses on rigged games involving an assortment of players, referees, authorities and/or Asian bookmakers in Poland, Albania, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Kazakhstan. The media always accuses the same countries and it is always the Asian bookmakers who are allegedly behind the corruption. It might appear peculiarly contrarian that it is our belief, indeed our knowledge, that the vast majority of corruption is perpetrated by European bookmakers together with a selection of the equivalent players, referees and authorities of the footballing first world. Of course, there has never been one sentence relating to this massive corruption in the decade and a half that I have been reading World Soccer!
Fabisch made an interesting statement following the approach from "Singapore". He said that he assumed that African countries were being approached because the players (and their families) were economically poor and, consequently, they would be more willing to be bought off. Nonsense. Check out the incentives. It is always the rich that do corruption as a core competency. The poor might do it out of necessity -according to Cervantes, it is better to rob than to ask for charity - but the incentives are so skewed in favour of performing to the max that it is highly unlikely than Benin's players would take the short term buck only to have to return to an existence of desperate poverty thereafter. Indeed, in previous versions of the ACON, the British bookmakers were always reluctant to price up the matches simply because they were dealing with proper football and not the hybrid of soccer and greyhound racing that they tend to prefer.
Talent is and will be produced in order to be sold. Talent is a form of value. This talent resides within the individual, not the state. In the words of Jean-François Lyotard : "The harmony of the needs and hopes of individuals and groups and the functions guaranteed by the system is now only a secondary component of its functioning". Lyotard, again: "There are two basic representational models for society: either society forms a functional whole, or it is divided in two". Only the most myopic and biased capitalist could claim that the former exists in today's neo-con world. It is to the massive disadvantage of the vast majority of the population of Africa that this is the case.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Monday, 21 January 2008
Manchester La La La
The one true universal city of Manchester has always suffered from being a testing ground for the antisocial policies of a centralised government. From the cotton mills and workhouses of the industrial revolution (sic) through to the supercasino and psychopathic football club ownerships of today, we are the laboratory. Fortunately, Manchester has always been the hotbed of resistance to these imperial and post-imperial psychopathic ventures.
Let's do bookmakers/casinos and football...
Ladbrokes promoted the supercasino bid of Blackpool and were devastated when Manchester won the bid to become the nation's addictive capital. This disappointment was further fuelled through the realisation that Ladbrokes former parent company, the Hilton Group, would be quids in due to their ownership of the one skyscraping hotel in the city. The double whammy hit the Ladbrokes share price and it has been downhill ever since. Any sense of schadenfreude after Gordon Brown unpicked the gambling strategies of his predecessors in office was offset by a proper year of annus horribilis for the Magic Sign.
The new Gambling Act 2005 undermined many of the illegal tactics that are commonplace in British casinos. Apart from the obvious and legal ruses like pumping oxygen into the casino, encouraging the coincidence of alcohol and gambling and the barring of any winning clients who might undermine the house through card counting in blackjack, for example, the new Act limits other dodgy tactics relating to the actual gaming side of the operation. The new regime in British government decided that 16 smaller casinos might be a preferable strategy (spreading the misery around?!) and a posse of local councils desperate for urban regeneration registered their interests. But it seems that the restrictions imposed by Brown's lot are too onerous for the potential casino operators when compared with the anything-goes attitude of the psychopath formerly known as Blair. A Ladbrokes spokesperson moaned: "We have conducted a review of our casino strategy and have decided to withdraw from the process due to the length of time it would take to generate sufficient return on the capital spend required". Shame. So the remains of the government's supercasino strategy is in tatters - if Ladbrokes cannot make the new casino strategy pay, who can? To be honest, who cares?
Well, we should, because Britain's leading bookmaker is not so similarly restrained in other areas of its business operations. In Ladbrokes' Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs), there are 8200 gaming machines (located with post-modern pseudo-ergonomic design). In their most recent accounts, Ladbrokes proudly boast that there has been a 25% increase in gross on these machines although they bemoan the lower net sales growth in online poker and the "permanent decline" in the profitability of horseracing. Taking these bullets in reverse order.
The antisocial and highly manipulative control of the horserace betting markets in Britain by the likes of Ladbrokes has destroyed a pastime as punters and spectators have voted with their feet in the face of the rampant corruption of this alleged sport. Horserace meetings used to have crowds equivalent to football; most are now relevant only for their seediness and the stench of insider trading. A more controlled strategy would have produced a sustainable cash cow that Ladbrokes could still be milking. Psychopaths do not do strategic thinking...
The same template exists for online poker. It was blindingly obvious that the South Sea bubble-like rise of the shoddy online poker platforms was a spectacular society corruption of the first degree. Of course, New Labour avoided any regulation and mugs were fleeced with impunity. Once again, a sustainable strategy was replaced by a thirst for a quick rake off and it is an outrage that the resultant state of the online poker sector leads to the more reliable platforms now marketing their integrity rather than any gaming experience!
Ladbrokes wish to replicate the environment of their LBO's in casinos and it is a rare regulatory success that they are now prevented from doing so. The Magic Sign are able to fleece the leisure punter to a far greater extent in these controlled environments. For example, bookmakers are able to massage profits by the utilisation of disinformation which engenders a foolish betting strategy in the punter with the outcome that his/her monies devalue at a rate. In an LBO, the actual return on a pound supposedly randomly bet is worse than if it is truly randomly bet! Additionally, we would be curious to see what changes Ladbrokes have made to the software of their LBO gaming machines to create a 25% increase in gross...
The Ladbrokes share price has done the downhill from 462.50 to 270.75 over the last year (a fall of 41%). Looking more closely, one may see that 39% of this decline has happened due to the impacts of the Gambling Act and the new governmental attitude to casinos. Shame. The most entertaining aspect to the annual reports of bookmaking organisations is that their targets for growth are always worded in a manner which describes the behavioural culture of the organisation. So, when Ladbrokes chief executive, Chris Bell, suggests that the new focus for profit is football and that Ladbrokes intend to "target young gamblers", one must respect their chutzpah.
Of course, the corruption of English football is something well known in Harrow and one is able to understand that, to Ladbrokes, an illegal and highly liquid global betting market is preferable to the 2:15 at Lingfield any day of the week.
And, it is Manchester that has born the brunt of the Premier League's enlightened attitude to a fit-and-proper-person's test with regard to club ownership. Firstly, we had the Glazer's and all supporters of FC United of Manchester must be smiling at how much of Manchester United's pre-tax profits of £59.6 million are simply to be handed over to the bankers who loaned the Glazer's the money to take over the club in the first place. Robbery. So, while Manchester United was a project to determine the efficacy of a leading football club being run directly by American banks, Manchester City was the testing ground for the impact of a club being run by a gangster.
Thaksin Shinawatra is running Manchester City FC for one reason only - to utilise the club as a publicity vehicle in his native Thailand. We stated this from day one but numerous recent incidents have strengthened our case. Matches between Man City Reserves and Thailand on the morning of Premiership games, Man City's loan signings of three sub-standard Thai international footballers, Shinawatra's offer to pay the wages for a foreign coach for the Thai national team etc etc are indicative of this focus. If Shinawatra is able, in some small way, to use the lever of publicity that is Manchester City to enhance the chances of the People's Power Party (PPP) - the reconstituted Thai Rak Thai party of Shinawatra - being elected to government, the club will eventually have served their purpose and the investment will cease to be primary. It might even cease altogether... At the moment, the Thai military and the PPP are in deadlock as Shinawatra's lot, true to firm, were involved in intensive rigging in some of "their" areas in North East Thailand. Rose-tinted City fans should note that none of Shinawatra's projects are focused on medium or longer term strategies in the city of Manchester. The players can be sold, the manager sacked and the smiling assassin can return home having bought an election both cheaply and, one has to say, pretty creatively. And, he'll have dumped on City - I'm resisting the urge to start liking the man here!
Shinawatra is simply a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) for the English Football industry - he brings capital, corruption (AirAsia sponsoring the Premiership referees), market expertise (Thailand "ran" the Asian betting markets for a number of years) and creative strategy. In this manner, the Asian SWF's will always outperform their western equivalents in the hedge funds and the private equity sector.
As Blair sails off into the sunset (for now) with the bonus of £500,000 a year to provide inside information or, in their language, "strategic advice" to JP Morgan (surely all heads of government should be banned from sitting on the boards of business not for 1 year, not for 5, not for 10... But forever. Otherwise business and government end up in the non-democratic embrace in which we find them today), we are left with a rotten system, a part of which is the British gambling sector. Brown has dragged this sector back from the cowboy territory of Blair and Jowell, but only to a minor degree. It is undoubtedly harder for gambling organisations to buy influence in Brownworld compared to Blair's Thatcherite psycholand but there are still going to be 16 casinos and Manchester will have one of them. Bookmakers are still able to corrupt any sport they choose without suffering the consequences of anything so awkward as official oversight. Most televised sport is now fixed. Incremental adjustments to an antisocial gambling sector are not enough. The whole industry requires proper intrusive regulation immediately.
Of course, things were never like they used to be but it surely used to be better than this...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Let's do bookmakers/casinos and football...
Ladbrokes promoted the supercasino bid of Blackpool and were devastated when Manchester won the bid to become the nation's addictive capital. This disappointment was further fuelled through the realisation that Ladbrokes former parent company, the Hilton Group, would be quids in due to their ownership of the one skyscraping hotel in the city. The double whammy hit the Ladbrokes share price and it has been downhill ever since. Any sense of schadenfreude after Gordon Brown unpicked the gambling strategies of his predecessors in office was offset by a proper year of annus horribilis for the Magic Sign.
The new Gambling Act 2005 undermined many of the illegal tactics that are commonplace in British casinos. Apart from the obvious and legal ruses like pumping oxygen into the casino, encouraging the coincidence of alcohol and gambling and the barring of any winning clients who might undermine the house through card counting in blackjack, for example, the new Act limits other dodgy tactics relating to the actual gaming side of the operation. The new regime in British government decided that 16 smaller casinos might be a preferable strategy (spreading the misery around?!) and a posse of local councils desperate for urban regeneration registered their interests. But it seems that the restrictions imposed by Brown's lot are too onerous for the potential casino operators when compared with the anything-goes attitude of the psychopath formerly known as Blair. A Ladbrokes spokesperson moaned: "We have conducted a review of our casino strategy and have decided to withdraw from the process due to the length of time it would take to generate sufficient return on the capital spend required". Shame. So the remains of the government's supercasino strategy is in tatters - if Ladbrokes cannot make the new casino strategy pay, who can? To be honest, who cares?
Well, we should, because Britain's leading bookmaker is not so similarly restrained in other areas of its business operations. In Ladbrokes' Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs), there are 8200 gaming machines (located with post-modern pseudo-ergonomic design). In their most recent accounts, Ladbrokes proudly boast that there has been a 25% increase in gross on these machines although they bemoan the lower net sales growth in online poker and the "permanent decline" in the profitability of horseracing. Taking these bullets in reverse order.
The antisocial and highly manipulative control of the horserace betting markets in Britain by the likes of Ladbrokes has destroyed a pastime as punters and spectators have voted with their feet in the face of the rampant corruption of this alleged sport. Horserace meetings used to have crowds equivalent to football; most are now relevant only for their seediness and the stench of insider trading. A more controlled strategy would have produced a sustainable cash cow that Ladbrokes could still be milking. Psychopaths do not do strategic thinking...
The same template exists for online poker. It was blindingly obvious that the South Sea bubble-like rise of the shoddy online poker platforms was a spectacular society corruption of the first degree. Of course, New Labour avoided any regulation and mugs were fleeced with impunity. Once again, a sustainable strategy was replaced by a thirst for a quick rake off and it is an outrage that the resultant state of the online poker sector leads to the more reliable platforms now marketing their integrity rather than any gaming experience!
Ladbrokes wish to replicate the environment of their LBO's in casinos and it is a rare regulatory success that they are now prevented from doing so. The Magic Sign are able to fleece the leisure punter to a far greater extent in these controlled environments. For example, bookmakers are able to massage profits by the utilisation of disinformation which engenders a foolish betting strategy in the punter with the outcome that his/her monies devalue at a rate. In an LBO, the actual return on a pound supposedly randomly bet is worse than if it is truly randomly bet! Additionally, we would be curious to see what changes Ladbrokes have made to the software of their LBO gaming machines to create a 25% increase in gross...
The Ladbrokes share price has done the downhill from 462.50 to 270.75 over the last year (a fall of 41%). Looking more closely, one may see that 39% of this decline has happened due to the impacts of the Gambling Act and the new governmental attitude to casinos. Shame. The most entertaining aspect to the annual reports of bookmaking organisations is that their targets for growth are always worded in a manner which describes the behavioural culture of the organisation. So, when Ladbrokes chief executive, Chris Bell, suggests that the new focus for profit is football and that Ladbrokes intend to "target young gamblers", one must respect their chutzpah.
Of course, the corruption of English football is something well known in Harrow and one is able to understand that, to Ladbrokes, an illegal and highly liquid global betting market is preferable to the 2:15 at Lingfield any day of the week.
And, it is Manchester that has born the brunt of the Premier League's enlightened attitude to a fit-and-proper-person's test with regard to club ownership. Firstly, we had the Glazer's and all supporters of FC United of Manchester must be smiling at how much of Manchester United's pre-tax profits of £59.6 million are simply to be handed over to the bankers who loaned the Glazer's the money to take over the club in the first place. Robbery. So, while Manchester United was a project to determine the efficacy of a leading football club being run directly by American banks, Manchester City was the testing ground for the impact of a club being run by a gangster.
Thaksin Shinawatra is running Manchester City FC for one reason only - to utilise the club as a publicity vehicle in his native Thailand. We stated this from day one but numerous recent incidents have strengthened our case. Matches between Man City Reserves and Thailand on the morning of Premiership games, Man City's loan signings of three sub-standard Thai international footballers, Shinawatra's offer to pay the wages for a foreign coach for the Thai national team etc etc are indicative of this focus. If Shinawatra is able, in some small way, to use the lever of publicity that is Manchester City to enhance the chances of the People's Power Party (PPP) - the reconstituted Thai Rak Thai party of Shinawatra - being elected to government, the club will eventually have served their purpose and the investment will cease to be primary. It might even cease altogether... At the moment, the Thai military and the PPP are in deadlock as Shinawatra's lot, true to firm, were involved in intensive rigging in some of "their" areas in North East Thailand. Rose-tinted City fans should note that none of Shinawatra's projects are focused on medium or longer term strategies in the city of Manchester. The players can be sold, the manager sacked and the smiling assassin can return home having bought an election both cheaply and, one has to say, pretty creatively. And, he'll have dumped on City - I'm resisting the urge to start liking the man here!
Shinawatra is simply a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) for the English Football industry - he brings capital, corruption (AirAsia sponsoring the Premiership referees), market expertise (Thailand "ran" the Asian betting markets for a number of years) and creative strategy. In this manner, the Asian SWF's will always outperform their western equivalents in the hedge funds and the private equity sector.
As Blair sails off into the sunset (for now) with the bonus of £500,000 a year to provide inside information or, in their language, "strategic advice" to JP Morgan (surely all heads of government should be banned from sitting on the boards of business not for 1 year, not for 5, not for 10... But forever. Otherwise business and government end up in the non-democratic embrace in which we find them today), we are left with a rotten system, a part of which is the British gambling sector. Brown has dragged this sector back from the cowboy territory of Blair and Jowell, but only to a minor degree. It is undoubtedly harder for gambling organisations to buy influence in Brownworld compared to Blair's Thatcherite psycholand but there are still going to be 16 casinos and Manchester will have one of them. Bookmakers are still able to corrupt any sport they choose without suffering the consequences of anything so awkward as official oversight. Most televised sport is now fixed. Incremental adjustments to an antisocial gambling sector are not enough. The whole industry requires proper intrusive regulation immediately.
Of course, things were never like they used to be but it surely used to be better than this...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Saturday, 19 January 2008
For Some "No Taxation"; For The Rest "No Taxation Without Representation"
"Promoting choice and value for all gas and electricity customers" is allegedly the raison d'être of Ofgem - one of the British government's utilities watchdogs. This bold claim is hardly supported by recent events. Such occurrences provide a fine example of the skewing of incentives in order to render the regulatory bodies toothless.
The government, via Ofgem, are seeking a levy of £9 billion ($18 billion) on the recent profits of the electricity companies. This windfall tax will be collected, on your behalf, by the government and, no doubt, used for important causes like paying for the London Olympics or bailing out Northern Rock to the tune of another few billion. What is certain is that not one penny will find its way back in the pockets of the customers who have been repeatedly robbed by the emerging British energy cartel. As an excellent example of industrial coercion tactics, the cartel claims that this windfall tax, if implemented, will push up the prices charged to customers, setting the whole cycle of corruption off once again. This is evidently merely a form of indirect taxation - the money finds its way into Treasury coffers via the intruding hand of the middleman, Ofgem. A carve up, in other words... Ignoring the blindingly obvious reasoning that surely the money should be returned to those who were scalped in the first place, perhaps by a six month zero payment window, lets examine Ofgem's role in this scam.
The only democratic validity for a government watchdog is on the very rare occasion where the government watchdog serves the bottom of the pyramid rather than the more privileged levels. It is an entirely Orwellian construct for a government watchdog to have the reverse of this function and, yet, in shareholder capitalism, that is exactly the case virtually all of the time. For Ofgem to live up to its motto, its incentives need to be reordered. The government watchdog should be paid on performance and, if it repeatedly fails to reach reasonable goals at the expense of the energy cartel, it should be dismantled and reconstituted in a more valid form.
Allan Asher of the consumer watchdog, Energywatch, is correct in asserting that the free market in energy in Britain is malfunctioning. There are only six firms supplying the market and cartels and fragmented cartel structures abound in all such marketplaces. The markets are opaque and a whole range of devices are utilised to prevent any new competition. This very same tactic is leading to the joyful demise of the majors in the music sector - too much market power, too little strategy and an inability to adapt to the management of change. Even spooky Alastair Darling poked his head above his pool of incompetence long enough to question whether there was any relation between the cost of production of energy and the inflated prices charged to customers. When even The Economist recognises that a liberalised market isn't working surely it is time for some proper infrastructural alterations. Otherwise, you remain in the territory of indirect taxation and all must understand that there should be no taxation without representation. Ofgem must represent the customer.
On the subject of tax, Brian Barwick must have been born under a particularly unfortunate astrological sign. Not only has the man got absolutely nothing going for him but his trump suit is incompetence. How much checking of Fabio Capello's tax issues were undertaken prior to him being offered the job of England manager? Were the FA given assurances by the authorities in Italy that the purge against rich people would not lead to prosecutions for Capello and others? Would it not have been a good idea for the FA to publicise the reality rather than being reactive to a news story which originally broke in Italy?
And taxes and Capello finish today's rant! Capello should take our advice and ditch the old school when he names his first England squad for the match against The Land Of The Private Banks. Goldchip Ltd, the private bookmaker for the England squad, has just announced first year profits, as a legal bookmaker, of £600,000 for the year ending January 2007. Goldchip, as we have shown before, is an interesting little operation. Owned by Steve Smith, a business partner of Michael Owen, Goldchip operated unofficially until February 2006 when a decision was made to exit the black market. Outrageously, this practice was not illegal as Smith claims that the unofficial version of Goldchip was taking bets on behalf of an unnamed third-party bookmaker. As Matt Scott pointed out in The Guardian: "As a declared "small" company Goldchip's turnover cannot be higher than £5.6m, indicating a profitable return of more than 10%". Such a Return On Turnover is higher than the published figures of the mainstream bookmakers but has parity with the "real" accounts of the these layers - the ones that are prepared strictly not for taxing eyes. Now, Goldchip first reached infamy when the story broke about Wayne Rooney owing Smith £700,000 - that's 16% higher than the declared annual profit on just one account in an earlier year where, one might surmise, declared profits (if any had been declared) might have been rather less than £600K. Now, following publicity, Smith did the first decent thing in his life to date and reached an arrangement with Rooney's agent over the "debt". If an individual manager is clearing over £12 million a year's worth of betting then one might also surmise that people on half a million quid per month (prior to supplementary income) might produce turnover greater than just 50% of the activity of just one manager. It would be our guesstimation that the declared turnover is orders of magnitudes too small and that Goldchip Ltd still operate a very tight interaction with one of the major bookmaking organisations. In this manner, much of the turnover may be squirrelled to private markets that exist entirely outside the regulatory system, in that any such regulatory system actually exists anyway.
Capello needs to learn fast. Otherwise, England's future will be decided on the private betting markets as was always the case... Just kick Owen out and be done with it...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
The government, via Ofgem, are seeking a levy of £9 billion ($18 billion) on the recent profits of the electricity companies. This windfall tax will be collected, on your behalf, by the government and, no doubt, used for important causes like paying for the London Olympics or bailing out Northern Rock to the tune of another few billion. What is certain is that not one penny will find its way back in the pockets of the customers who have been repeatedly robbed by the emerging British energy cartel. As an excellent example of industrial coercion tactics, the cartel claims that this windfall tax, if implemented, will push up the prices charged to customers, setting the whole cycle of corruption off once again. This is evidently merely a form of indirect taxation - the money finds its way into Treasury coffers via the intruding hand of the middleman, Ofgem. A carve up, in other words... Ignoring the blindingly obvious reasoning that surely the money should be returned to those who were scalped in the first place, perhaps by a six month zero payment window, lets examine Ofgem's role in this scam.
The only democratic validity for a government watchdog is on the very rare occasion where the government watchdog serves the bottom of the pyramid rather than the more privileged levels. It is an entirely Orwellian construct for a government watchdog to have the reverse of this function and, yet, in shareholder capitalism, that is exactly the case virtually all of the time. For Ofgem to live up to its motto, its incentives need to be reordered. The government watchdog should be paid on performance and, if it repeatedly fails to reach reasonable goals at the expense of the energy cartel, it should be dismantled and reconstituted in a more valid form.
Allan Asher of the consumer watchdog, Energywatch, is correct in asserting that the free market in energy in Britain is malfunctioning. There are only six firms supplying the market and cartels and fragmented cartel structures abound in all such marketplaces. The markets are opaque and a whole range of devices are utilised to prevent any new competition. This very same tactic is leading to the joyful demise of the majors in the music sector - too much market power, too little strategy and an inability to adapt to the management of change. Even spooky Alastair Darling poked his head above his pool of incompetence long enough to question whether there was any relation between the cost of production of energy and the inflated prices charged to customers. When even The Economist recognises that a liberalised market isn't working surely it is time for some proper infrastructural alterations. Otherwise, you remain in the territory of indirect taxation and all must understand that there should be no taxation without representation. Ofgem must represent the customer.
On the subject of tax, Brian Barwick must have been born under a particularly unfortunate astrological sign. Not only has the man got absolutely nothing going for him but his trump suit is incompetence. How much checking of Fabio Capello's tax issues were undertaken prior to him being offered the job of England manager? Were the FA given assurances by the authorities in Italy that the purge against rich people would not lead to prosecutions for Capello and others? Would it not have been a good idea for the FA to publicise the reality rather than being reactive to a news story which originally broke in Italy?
And taxes and Capello finish today's rant! Capello should take our advice and ditch the old school when he names his first England squad for the match against The Land Of The Private Banks. Goldchip Ltd, the private bookmaker for the England squad, has just announced first year profits, as a legal bookmaker, of £600,000 for the year ending January 2007. Goldchip, as we have shown before, is an interesting little operation. Owned by Steve Smith, a business partner of Michael Owen, Goldchip operated unofficially until February 2006 when a decision was made to exit the black market. Outrageously, this practice was not illegal as Smith claims that the unofficial version of Goldchip was taking bets on behalf of an unnamed third-party bookmaker. As Matt Scott pointed out in The Guardian: "As a declared "small" company Goldchip's turnover cannot be higher than £5.6m, indicating a profitable return of more than 10%". Such a Return On Turnover is higher than the published figures of the mainstream bookmakers but has parity with the "real" accounts of the these layers - the ones that are prepared strictly not for taxing eyes. Now, Goldchip first reached infamy when the story broke about Wayne Rooney owing Smith £700,000 - that's 16% higher than the declared annual profit on just one account in an earlier year where, one might surmise, declared profits (if any had been declared) might have been rather less than £600K. Now, following publicity, Smith did the first decent thing in his life to date and reached an arrangement with Rooney's agent over the "debt". If an individual manager is clearing over £12 million a year's worth of betting then one might also surmise that people on half a million quid per month (prior to supplementary income) might produce turnover greater than just 50% of the activity of just one manager. It would be our guesstimation that the declared turnover is orders of magnitudes too small and that Goldchip Ltd still operate a very tight interaction with one of the major bookmaking organisations. In this manner, much of the turnover may be squirrelled to private markets that exist entirely outside the regulatory system, in that any such regulatory system actually exists anyway.
Capello needs to learn fast. Otherwise, England's future will be decided on the private betting markets as was always the case... Just kick Owen out and be done with it...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Big Ground, Shit Fans (And Owner)
Newcastle United are not a big club. The only reason that Newcastle remain in the Premiership is due to the bias in decision making from the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) representatives - Newcastle were last season's most favoured team and they are this season's second most favoured team. Saturday's 6-0 "performance" at Man Utd was dire. By sacking their one valuable member of staff in Sam Allardyce, Newcastle are doing the self-destruct thing. We advised Dietrological clients at Half Time of the massive fitness differential between the two teams in the First Half and 4 goals in the last 20 minutes are suggestive of too much festive consumption and absolutely no motivation. If Rob Styles hadn't been doing his darnedest to ensure that the break was reached without United leading in order to save the bookies a hammering, the score could have reached double figures. Big team?
It remains a constant source of surprise to us that the Newcastle fans are regarded as such staunch supporters. Similarly to West Ham, Leeds, Man City, Boro and a host of other clubs, when things are not going well Newcastle fans add considerable pressure to the stadium leading to the players always taking the safe option rather than enduring the moans and groans which greet every misplaced pass. By limiting tactics to predictability, the team are unable to generate the creative patterns which might develop goal opportunities. This is just a vicious cycle.
Sheffield Wednesday, Sunderland, Portsmouth, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Burnley and Ipswich Town have all won the top English league since Newcastle last triumphed in 1926/27 while Wolverhampton Wanderers, West Bromwich Albion, Southampton, Ipswich Town, Wimbledon and Coventry City have won the FA Cup since Newcastle last managed it. Big team?
Shepherd was a disgrace. His incompetence and arrogance alienated the support which established further divides in the unity of Newcastle Not-so-United. The managerial appointments were hardly inspiring either. Souness??
Since taking over, Mike Ashley has watched his financial empire decline precipitously over the last year with Sports Direct's share price seemingly correlated with Newcastle's on pitch endeavours (the share price has plummeted from 301.0 to 95.5 this morning). Having spent too much on buying the club (£134 million) and having also had to pay off much of the debt, Ashley is now feeling the credit squeeze more than most. We warned over the summer that the financial robustness of Newcastle was flimsy and matters have simply got worse in the intervening period. Big teams are run by gangsters, American investment banks, private equity firms, oligarchs, mafia, arms dealers and the like. Mr Minimum Wage and his second tier sporting leisure brands are simply not in the same league. Big team?
Derby County have gained 7 points this season scoring 10 goals in the process. 4 of those points and 3 of the goals came against Newcastle. Big team?
Somewhat surprisingly, the only team more favoured by PGMOB referees this season have been Portsmouth! Considering Redknapp's BBC Panorama tribulations and his subsequent arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting last November, this might be seen as an unusual occurrence - the general template is for subtle punishment to be the reward for public undermining of the integrity of the game, think Leeds. A further peculiarity is the complete absence of any column inches in the mainstream press regarding the Pompey Five in the 7 weeks since the arrests. No articles about the corruption in the game, no assessment about the regulatory loopholes that allow this corruption and absolutely nothing to undermine Redknapp. Indeed, it has been business as usual for Portsmouth since the November 27th arrests, or so it might seem on first glance. The market for the managerial vacancy at Newcastle was dominated by insider trading from within the Portsmouth camp. There were sources within Pompey willing to lay Redknapp at every market price as it oscillated from 12/1 to 2/11 to 50/1 in a little earner which rivals the similar insider scoop on the Southampton-Portsmouth managerial switch of yesteryear.
Yet, it is our assessment that Redknapp and the Portsmouth team have been heavily affected by the impact and fallout of the November police raids. Portsmouth have deteriorated markedly since the arrests. In this period, Newcastle have had three heavily referee assisted victories at Villa, Reading and Ipswich while the other five games have yielded 1 draw and 4 defeats with only one goal scored. Even with the considerable help of referee, Chris Foy, on Sunday, Pompey were totally outplayed by Sunderland and our contact tells us that the internal atmosphere is chaotic. With four players away in Ghana and a February visit to court on the horizon, Redknapp is evidently distracted by the ongoing legal saga.
Derby County visit Fratton Park at the weekend offering one of those markets that should be non-tradeable but is actually a nice little earner for all concerned. Their meeting on the first day of the season was a hot match and we expect no different this time. It is a sad indictment of the weakness of Derby County that, if you remove the results from the three fixed games against Newcastle (twice) and Portsmouth (once), their resultant seasonal performance would be:
Played 19 Won 0 Lost 17 Drawn 2 Goals For 5 Goals Against 43 Points 2.
NB Shortly after the completion of this post, it was announced that Newcastle United are now to be the Bookmaker's Dream Team with Owen and Keegan in control. The childishly brief press release screamed "The Messiah has returned" - this is not a call to ecstasy for fundamentalist absolutists of all shades but an indication that self-delusion remains the Geordie core competency. It will all end in tears, no doubt after a brief resurgence in form to promote the sale of merchandising. Big Ground, Shit Fans (And Owner And Manager)...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
It remains a constant source of surprise to us that the Newcastle fans are regarded as such staunch supporters. Similarly to West Ham, Leeds, Man City, Boro and a host of other clubs, when things are not going well Newcastle fans add considerable pressure to the stadium leading to the players always taking the safe option rather than enduring the moans and groans which greet every misplaced pass. By limiting tactics to predictability, the team are unable to generate the creative patterns which might develop goal opportunities. This is just a vicious cycle.
Sheffield Wednesday, Sunderland, Portsmouth, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Burnley and Ipswich Town have all won the top English league since Newcastle last triumphed in 1926/27 while Wolverhampton Wanderers, West Bromwich Albion, Southampton, Ipswich Town, Wimbledon and Coventry City have won the FA Cup since Newcastle last managed it. Big team?
Shepherd was a disgrace. His incompetence and arrogance alienated the support which established further divides in the unity of Newcastle Not-so-United. The managerial appointments were hardly inspiring either. Souness??
Since taking over, Mike Ashley has watched his financial empire decline precipitously over the last year with Sports Direct's share price seemingly correlated with Newcastle's on pitch endeavours (the share price has plummeted from 301.0 to 95.5 this morning). Having spent too much on buying the club (£134 million) and having also had to pay off much of the debt, Ashley is now feeling the credit squeeze more than most. We warned over the summer that the financial robustness of Newcastle was flimsy and matters have simply got worse in the intervening period. Big teams are run by gangsters, American investment banks, private equity firms, oligarchs, mafia, arms dealers and the like. Mr Minimum Wage and his second tier sporting leisure brands are simply not in the same league. Big team?
Derby County have gained 7 points this season scoring 10 goals in the process. 4 of those points and 3 of the goals came against Newcastle. Big team?
Somewhat surprisingly, the only team more favoured by PGMOB referees this season have been Portsmouth! Considering Redknapp's BBC Panorama tribulations and his subsequent arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting last November, this might be seen as an unusual occurrence - the general template is for subtle punishment to be the reward for public undermining of the integrity of the game, think Leeds. A further peculiarity is the complete absence of any column inches in the mainstream press regarding the Pompey Five in the 7 weeks since the arrests. No articles about the corruption in the game, no assessment about the regulatory loopholes that allow this corruption and absolutely nothing to undermine Redknapp. Indeed, it has been business as usual for Portsmouth since the November 27th arrests, or so it might seem on first glance. The market for the managerial vacancy at Newcastle was dominated by insider trading from within the Portsmouth camp. There were sources within Pompey willing to lay Redknapp at every market price as it oscillated from 12/1 to 2/11 to 50/1 in a little earner which rivals the similar insider scoop on the Southampton-Portsmouth managerial switch of yesteryear.
Yet, it is our assessment that Redknapp and the Portsmouth team have been heavily affected by the impact and fallout of the November police raids. Portsmouth have deteriorated markedly since the arrests. In this period, Newcastle have had three heavily referee assisted victories at Villa, Reading and Ipswich while the other five games have yielded 1 draw and 4 defeats with only one goal scored. Even with the considerable help of referee, Chris Foy, on Sunday, Pompey were totally outplayed by Sunderland and our contact tells us that the internal atmosphere is chaotic. With four players away in Ghana and a February visit to court on the horizon, Redknapp is evidently distracted by the ongoing legal saga.
Derby County visit Fratton Park at the weekend offering one of those markets that should be non-tradeable but is actually a nice little earner for all concerned. Their meeting on the first day of the season was a hot match and we expect no different this time. It is a sad indictment of the weakness of Derby County that, if you remove the results from the three fixed games against Newcastle (twice) and Portsmouth (once), their resultant seasonal performance would be:
Played 19 Won 0 Lost 17 Drawn 2 Goals For 5 Goals Against 43 Points 2.
NB Shortly after the completion of this post, it was announced that Newcastle United are now to be the Bookmaker's Dream Team with Owen and Keegan in control. The childishly brief press release screamed "The Messiah has returned" - this is not a call to ecstasy for fundamentalist absolutists of all shades but an indication that self-delusion remains the Geordie core competency. It will all end in tears, no doubt after a brief resurgence in form to promote the sale of merchandising. Big Ground, Shit Fans (And Owner And Manager)...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Saturday, 12 January 2008
The Incentives Of Sporting Corruption
Everybody has got a price.
According to our own individual and hidden agendas, shareholder capitalism enforces that we all set proprietary thresholds relating to our employment and consultancy choices, our environmental footprint and our degree of competitiveness in the workplace. Some people also set proprietary benchmarks relating to the use of inside information, bribery, kickbacks, corruption, criminality and coercion.
The shareholder capitalist model is dependent on a key chain of inputs - capital > incentives > innovation > corruption. Via the creation of such a psychopathic system, people are forced to make their individual choices in the knowledge that this system is a cowboy territory where excessive rewards are gained by reaching the bottom of the barrel ahead of one's competitors.
As we have repeatedly pointed out, the absolute lack of regulation for the major operators in this warped system is the backdrop which enables the corruptions and the resultant illicit profits to be achieved. If there was any real external overview of business and financial behaviours, we would be in the marginally preferable territory of stakeholder capitalism whose input chain is truncated to capital > incentives > innovation. Obviously, such a system still has no validity as vast swathes of our global village are denied access to the first step of this process through a lack of capital, property, assets or the option of nepotistic fast tracking.
And such regulation that does exist is highly regressive ie the individuals outside of the corrupt loop are targeted while the big boys (and it is almost exclusively boys) are allowed to feather their off-shore financial nests without anything so irritating as red tape. This week, the sporting world has provided us with some suitable examples to demonstrate this fallacious system.
Tennis and athletics are actually cleaner than most other predominantly solo sports. Yet, media attention has been firmly focused on these two sports for over six months now and the process of the "cleansing" of the sports has finally now reached fruition. Prior to looking at other sports, we'll swiftly assess the ludicrously blinkered approach of the law and the institutions to the mass of corruption which dominates male sport across the world.
As we have pointed out previously, 80% of clinical psychopaths are male and the first issue to be raised is this - why is the media focus on alleged corruption only happening in women's sport? Yesterday, Olympian Marion Jones was sentenced to six months in jail for lying about steroid use and her involvement in a drugs fraud case. She had pleaded guilty, had been stripped of her Olympic medals and is banned from running. Mother-of-two, Jones, asked the judge, Kenneth Karas, to be "as merciful as a human being can be" which fell on deaf ears as Karas gave her the maximum sentence allowed under the plea bargain "because of the need for general deterrence and the need to promote respect for the law". Nonsense. Ben Johnson, Kelli White, Justin Gatlin, LaTasha Jenkins and, now, Marion Jones - spot the pattern? All are Black North Americans athletes and all were banned. There was no US-based prosecution or trial of leading white cyclist, Floyd Landis, after testing revealed that the Tour de France 2006 winner had an abnormally high testosterone/ epitestosterone ratio. After being stripped of the title, Landis' punishment was being sacked by his team, Phonak Hearing Systems, which is slightly less challenging than six months spent in a US penitentiary, really. Staying on the sport of cycling, Landis was part of the US Postal Service team that projected Lance Armstrong to seven consecutive le Tour titles despite repeated rumours about Armstrong's illegal use of Erythropoietin (EPO) used in conjunction with pharmaceutical masking substances to avoid detection.
So far, so racist, which is the standard US template (we hope that our readers spotted the accuracy of our analysis of Obama Hussein Barack's 15% opinion poll lead in New Hampshire evaporating into a 2% defeat via a reactive racist vote following Iowa). A philosopher friend of mine, who really should know better, stated to me the other day that America is not a racist society due to their openness to immigration. Nonsense, again. American business welcomes immigrants into the country as cheap and/or illegal labour - the wall being built along the US border with Mexico suggests that this strategy is not publicly popular in the hyper-state. A few fortunate non-white immigrants do indeed reach the strata of the American middle class but the vast majority remain outside the system, are ghettoised or are despatched back from whence they came.
Women's tennis is, apparently, the other key area of concern in the world of sporting corruption. Larry Scott, the Women's Tennis Association chief executive (why a man?), said some players claimed they had been asked to throw matches. Scott said: "One has to assume that people running organised crime would be involved in trying to gain an advantage by corrupting the competition". After making subtle allusions regarding the input of Russian mafia money, Scott continued: "... but we have no proof".
So, we are expected to rest easy in the comforting illusion that Black North American athletes and (possibly) the Russian mafia are the core protagonists in global sporting criminality. Do we now accept that only Black runners take EPO/ Nandrolone or Amphetamine-based stimulants? This must be news to over 50% of the Champions League Second Phase Qualifiers and over 50% of the Premiership football teams who utilise Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) without fear of prosecution! And we are delighted to hear that betting market corruption is the fault of those damn Ruskies, despite the lack of evidence, which is most certainly news to our Trading Team as we would be able to prove in a court of law the involvement of bookmakers from Britain, the Far East, Israel and Gibraltar (as well as Russia) in the corruption of global football as well as South Asian bookies in the criminalisation of international cricket. Interestingly, over a decade ago, a former broker of mine used to trade heavily on inside information on corrupted Men's tennis matches - presumably, as the source of the machinations were in US client state, Israel, this sort of corruption does not count!
All solo sports are targeted by bookmakers due to the ease of buying a suitable outcome. There are no issues with other team members or match officials as such encounters are heavily governed by the performances of the two participants. Darts, snooker, pool, golf and tennis all suffer a loss of collective integrity based on this bookmaker-induced criminality. Visually, the corruption is difficult to spot as top snooker players, for example, are able to deliberately miss a pot without it being obvious. The underperformance only becomes observable when one assesses the betting patterns - it is not by chance that virtually every snooker and darts player is tattooed from head to foot in Ladbrokes, Victor Chandler or Paddy Power logos!
The arbitrary selection of Women's tennis and Black athletes appears even more nuanced when one focuses on the impact of the corruption. Corrupt athletes win a few medals while some insiders are able to profit to some extent from a few tennis matches featuring coerced, and frightened, players. Compare and contrast with a certain Premiership manager whose average betting level was over £30,000 on EVERY Premiership match with just ONE bookmaker, a situation that the High Court decided was not in the public interest to pursue. Or, what about the behaviour of some of the dirty dozen Premiership referees who tilt their lack of professionalism to the the needs of certain betting markets? Or, what about issues relating to the global liquidity of the football betting markets where most major Premiership games feature £500 million - £1 billion betting markets? What about the Quest whitewash or the Woolmer murder whitewash? Indeed, the only instance of anybody involved in English football actually suffering for links to corruption in recent times is poor Mike Newell. Of course, Newell's "crime" was whistleblowing which is, apparently, of far more pernicious concern with respect to the integrity of English football. So, Newell was sacked and is experiencing life on the dole while his former club, Luton Town are on the verge of extinction! That will act as a warning to future whistleblowers, methinks...
Which brings us back to the shareholder capitalist structure: capital > incentives > innovation > corruption. Firstly, we'll look at PESs and then betting market realities to expose the invalidity of the shareholder capitalist model with respect to all sports.
The possibility of kudos, medals, financial gains and fame drives many individuals and teams to stretch legality in order to achieve. This is personally risky due to the lack of knowledge of the long term effects of many PESs and also it is a corruption of the particular sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is a complete waste of time as only the peripheral are fingered while the outfits linked to pharmaceutical companies are able to cheat without fear of detection - think back to Bayer Leverkusen's astonishing Champions League Final season which had absolutely nothing to do with the parent company's medical input. Really! If WADA wished to control doping, it is easily possible. No such effort will be made while it is the First World that is benefiting from such corruption.
With regard to betting markets, the situation is entirely one of incentives. A typical horse race has prize money of £4,000 and yet the betting market will be liquid to many millions of pounds. Which money will dominate the race outcome? An international centre forward is approaching the end of his career and fancies another helicopter while his team need to gain points to avoid the relegation zone, as he pulls back his leg to shoot (wide, obviously), it will be the whirr of the rotor blades that the man is thinking about rather than the fans on the terraces. Or, a Premiership referee has been coerced into undertaking the betting strategy of a leading British bookmaker with a little cash thrown in as an additional inducement. When this official is deciding the merits of a particular penalty decision, the rules of the game will be the very last item to cross his mind.
Betting markets corrupt all sports. Full stop. The lack of regulation allows huge fortunes to be amassed from the financial inputs of those oblivious to this global corruption. "You pays your money and takes your choice" has been warped to "you pays your money directly to the mafia".
Of course, in a system that treats free markets as an ideology, this situation is par for the course. Free markets gravitate towards inappropriate structures of corruption like insider trading, cornering of markets, monopolies, cartels etc. There is no societal attempt to prevent this corruption - as we have mentioned before, insider trading in Britain's financial markets was banned 28 years ago (prior to this date, it was regarded as a perk of the job!?) and we still await the first prosecution!
People suffering from Psychopathic Personality Disorders (PPDs) are at the top of this criminal system. There are arguments and counter-arguments about whether PPDs is an issue of nature or nurture but, either way, the psychopathic individuals are genetically and/or societally blameless for the onset of their condition. The choices that they make in later life are another matter entirely however...
Currently, the psychopaths make the rules and the rest of us are expected to dance to their tune. Surely, a more preferable narrative would be for people to run their own lives while the psychopaths dance the night away in some location where they are unable to blight the world through their criminal endeavours.
Let's call it the Napoleon-St-Helena strategy!
And, a suitable location? We would suggest Darfur (with a wall built around it, of course) and with the Sudanese refugees taking their rightful place in the safety of the New First World.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
According to our own individual and hidden agendas, shareholder capitalism enforces that we all set proprietary thresholds relating to our employment and consultancy choices, our environmental footprint and our degree of competitiveness in the workplace. Some people also set proprietary benchmarks relating to the use of inside information, bribery, kickbacks, corruption, criminality and coercion.
The shareholder capitalist model is dependent on a key chain of inputs - capital > incentives > innovation > corruption. Via the creation of such a psychopathic system, people are forced to make their individual choices in the knowledge that this system is a cowboy territory where excessive rewards are gained by reaching the bottom of the barrel ahead of one's competitors.
As we have repeatedly pointed out, the absolute lack of regulation for the major operators in this warped system is the backdrop which enables the corruptions and the resultant illicit profits to be achieved. If there was any real external overview of business and financial behaviours, we would be in the marginally preferable territory of stakeholder capitalism whose input chain is truncated to capital > incentives > innovation. Obviously, such a system still has no validity as vast swathes of our global village are denied access to the first step of this process through a lack of capital, property, assets or the option of nepotistic fast tracking.
And such regulation that does exist is highly regressive ie the individuals outside of the corrupt loop are targeted while the big boys (and it is almost exclusively boys) are allowed to feather their off-shore financial nests without anything so irritating as red tape. This week, the sporting world has provided us with some suitable examples to demonstrate this fallacious system.
Tennis and athletics are actually cleaner than most other predominantly solo sports. Yet, media attention has been firmly focused on these two sports for over six months now and the process of the "cleansing" of the sports has finally now reached fruition. Prior to looking at other sports, we'll swiftly assess the ludicrously blinkered approach of the law and the institutions to the mass of corruption which dominates male sport across the world.
As we have pointed out previously, 80% of clinical psychopaths are male and the first issue to be raised is this - why is the media focus on alleged corruption only happening in women's sport? Yesterday, Olympian Marion Jones was sentenced to six months in jail for lying about steroid use and her involvement in a drugs fraud case. She had pleaded guilty, had been stripped of her Olympic medals and is banned from running. Mother-of-two, Jones, asked the judge, Kenneth Karas, to be "as merciful as a human being can be" which fell on deaf ears as Karas gave her the maximum sentence allowed under the plea bargain "because of the need for general deterrence and the need to promote respect for the law". Nonsense. Ben Johnson, Kelli White, Justin Gatlin, LaTasha Jenkins and, now, Marion Jones - spot the pattern? All are Black North Americans athletes and all were banned. There was no US-based prosecution or trial of leading white cyclist, Floyd Landis, after testing revealed that the Tour de France 2006 winner had an abnormally high testosterone/ epitestosterone ratio. After being stripped of the title, Landis' punishment was being sacked by his team, Phonak Hearing Systems, which is slightly less challenging than six months spent in a US penitentiary, really. Staying on the sport of cycling, Landis was part of the US Postal Service team that projected Lance Armstrong to seven consecutive le Tour titles despite repeated rumours about Armstrong's illegal use of Erythropoietin (EPO) used in conjunction with pharmaceutical masking substances to avoid detection.
So far, so racist, which is the standard US template (we hope that our readers spotted the accuracy of our analysis of Obama Hussein Barack's 15% opinion poll lead in New Hampshire evaporating into a 2% defeat via a reactive racist vote following Iowa). A philosopher friend of mine, who really should know better, stated to me the other day that America is not a racist society due to their openness to immigration. Nonsense, again. American business welcomes immigrants into the country as cheap and/or illegal labour - the wall being built along the US border with Mexico suggests that this strategy is not publicly popular in the hyper-state. A few fortunate non-white immigrants do indeed reach the strata of the American middle class but the vast majority remain outside the system, are ghettoised or are despatched back from whence they came.
Women's tennis is, apparently, the other key area of concern in the world of sporting corruption. Larry Scott, the Women's Tennis Association chief executive (why a man?), said some players claimed they had been asked to throw matches. Scott said: "One has to assume that people running organised crime would be involved in trying to gain an advantage by corrupting the competition". After making subtle allusions regarding the input of Russian mafia money, Scott continued: "... but we have no proof".
So, we are expected to rest easy in the comforting illusion that Black North American athletes and (possibly) the Russian mafia are the core protagonists in global sporting criminality. Do we now accept that only Black runners take EPO/ Nandrolone or Amphetamine-based stimulants? This must be news to over 50% of the Champions League Second Phase Qualifiers and over 50% of the Premiership football teams who utilise Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) without fear of prosecution! And we are delighted to hear that betting market corruption is the fault of those damn Ruskies, despite the lack of evidence, which is most certainly news to our Trading Team as we would be able to prove in a court of law the involvement of bookmakers from Britain, the Far East, Israel and Gibraltar (as well as Russia) in the corruption of global football as well as South Asian bookies in the criminalisation of international cricket. Interestingly, over a decade ago, a former broker of mine used to trade heavily on inside information on corrupted Men's tennis matches - presumably, as the source of the machinations were in US client state, Israel, this sort of corruption does not count!
All solo sports are targeted by bookmakers due to the ease of buying a suitable outcome. There are no issues with other team members or match officials as such encounters are heavily governed by the performances of the two participants. Darts, snooker, pool, golf and tennis all suffer a loss of collective integrity based on this bookmaker-induced criminality. Visually, the corruption is difficult to spot as top snooker players, for example, are able to deliberately miss a pot without it being obvious. The underperformance only becomes observable when one assesses the betting patterns - it is not by chance that virtually every snooker and darts player is tattooed from head to foot in Ladbrokes, Victor Chandler or Paddy Power logos!
The arbitrary selection of Women's tennis and Black athletes appears even more nuanced when one focuses on the impact of the corruption. Corrupt athletes win a few medals while some insiders are able to profit to some extent from a few tennis matches featuring coerced, and frightened, players. Compare and contrast with a certain Premiership manager whose average betting level was over £30,000 on EVERY Premiership match with just ONE bookmaker, a situation that the High Court decided was not in the public interest to pursue. Or, what about the behaviour of some of the dirty dozen Premiership referees who tilt their lack of professionalism to the the needs of certain betting markets? Or, what about issues relating to the global liquidity of the football betting markets where most major Premiership games feature £500 million - £1 billion betting markets? What about the Quest whitewash or the Woolmer murder whitewash? Indeed, the only instance of anybody involved in English football actually suffering for links to corruption in recent times is poor Mike Newell. Of course, Newell's "crime" was whistleblowing which is, apparently, of far more pernicious concern with respect to the integrity of English football. So, Newell was sacked and is experiencing life on the dole while his former club, Luton Town are on the verge of extinction! That will act as a warning to future whistleblowers, methinks...
Which brings us back to the shareholder capitalist structure: capital > incentives > innovation > corruption. Firstly, we'll look at PESs and then betting market realities to expose the invalidity of the shareholder capitalist model with respect to all sports.
The possibility of kudos, medals, financial gains and fame drives many individuals and teams to stretch legality in order to achieve. This is personally risky due to the lack of knowledge of the long term effects of many PESs and also it is a corruption of the particular sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is a complete waste of time as only the peripheral are fingered while the outfits linked to pharmaceutical companies are able to cheat without fear of detection - think back to Bayer Leverkusen's astonishing Champions League Final season which had absolutely nothing to do with the parent company's medical input. Really! If WADA wished to control doping, it is easily possible. No such effort will be made while it is the First World that is benefiting from such corruption.
With regard to betting markets, the situation is entirely one of incentives. A typical horse race has prize money of £4,000 and yet the betting market will be liquid to many millions of pounds. Which money will dominate the race outcome? An international centre forward is approaching the end of his career and fancies another helicopter while his team need to gain points to avoid the relegation zone, as he pulls back his leg to shoot (wide, obviously), it will be the whirr of the rotor blades that the man is thinking about rather than the fans on the terraces. Or, a Premiership referee has been coerced into undertaking the betting strategy of a leading British bookmaker with a little cash thrown in as an additional inducement. When this official is deciding the merits of a particular penalty decision, the rules of the game will be the very last item to cross his mind.
Betting markets corrupt all sports. Full stop. The lack of regulation allows huge fortunes to be amassed from the financial inputs of those oblivious to this global corruption. "You pays your money and takes your choice" has been warped to "you pays your money directly to the mafia".
Of course, in a system that treats free markets as an ideology, this situation is par for the course. Free markets gravitate towards inappropriate structures of corruption like insider trading, cornering of markets, monopolies, cartels etc. There is no societal attempt to prevent this corruption - as we have mentioned before, insider trading in Britain's financial markets was banned 28 years ago (prior to this date, it was regarded as a perk of the job!?) and we still await the first prosecution!
People suffering from Psychopathic Personality Disorders (PPDs) are at the top of this criminal system. There are arguments and counter-arguments about whether PPDs is an issue of nature or nurture but, either way, the psychopathic individuals are genetically and/or societally blameless for the onset of their condition. The choices that they make in later life are another matter entirely however...
Currently, the psychopaths make the rules and the rest of us are expected to dance to their tune. Surely, a more preferable narrative would be for people to run their own lives while the psychopaths dance the night away in some location where they are unable to blight the world through their criminal endeavours.
Let's call it the Napoleon-St-Helena strategy!
And, a suitable location? We would suggest Darfur (with a wall built around it, of course) and with the Sudanese refugees taking their rightful place in the safety of the New First World.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Thursday, 10 January 2008
A Particular System Of Objects
Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs) are a post-modernist artifice in which a traditional betting environment has had its modern objects liberated from their original function. This new infrastructure exists within the societal scam that is British bookmaking but the purpose of the modernity of the environment is to optimise the returns to the bookmakers by utilising a range of post-modernist and/or psychological devices.
"Consumption, insofar as it is meaningful, is the systematic act of the manipulation of signs". And, the LBOs offer a perfect environment to test and prove Baudrillard's differential reasoning. Originally, the bookmakers used primitive forms of psychopathic business strategies to maximise their returns from those with a gambling addiction. Proximity to pubs was one such ruse that remains valid to this day; delayed race start times gave the bookies an edge over the "blind" punter; the security door and the frosted glass psychologically defined the bettor as a societal loser, something to be hidden away; the creation of a chaotic environment made any attempt at pseudo-rationality in decision-making virtually impossible.
To my discredit, I once very briefly considered undertaking a consultancy project for one of the leading English bookmakers. The project aim was to maximise the amount of money that the addicts would hand over to the deserving cause of turf accountancy. The scope of the consultancy was pomo-in-extremis - the company wished to create the model interior to most suit their financial targets utilising colour, form, atmosphere, modular components together with excessive control of the informational flow and the preying on the psychological styles and disorders of the gathered group. We will assess these manipulations in turn.
The LBOs offer a major advantage to the bookmakers in comparison with the racecourse, the internet or the telephone. It is a controlled environment. Totally. Nothing has been left to chance. The positioning of the television screens in relation to the seating, the types of material in the seating, the location of standing places, solo locations and group areas, the disinformational matrix of un-data, the colours of the seats and tv backgrounds, the use of glass/daylight and advertising prompts suitably located, the quality of the images, the misuse of clocks and time etc etc. And, once one steps into this environment with its rarefied atmosphere of reality, the CCTV's ensure that the web performs optimally - the modular design style allowing a process of continuous improvement from the perspective of the abusive bookie.
The control of the information flow is a critical aspect of the reality-mix. Taking the un-sport of horseracing as an example, we are able to immediately conclude that the LBOs are the worst location for maximising the potentially valuable information which might be utilised to limit your losses and exposures. In front of an internet screen, you may access scores of firms and achieve preferable prices by referring to one of the numerous betting odds comparison sites. At the racecourse, one may read the tic-tac, monitor the rails and assess the meaning behind the major bookies returning money to the ring - are they offsetting liabilities by hedging or are they taking a proprietary angle? You can pay extra to monitor the body language of the corrupt trainers and jockeys and, in that it matters, assess the fitness of the poor beasts. When the likes of Toby Balding, Barry Hills, Paul Nicholls or Nicky Henderson, to name but a few, had a hot favourite, my staking level would always be augmented by my behavioural assessment of the key protagonists pre-race. The LBOs, in contrast, are a virtual price monopoly. Furthermore, the prices displayed together with their dynamics may not bear any resemblance either to the prices shown at other LBOs owned by the same company or to the prices available in the ring. Value is further reduced by the refusal of the LBOs to accept a decent size of bet together with outrageous overround percentages and, until recently, a highly regressive tax regime. The LBOs also enforce an obligation to buy - they utilise the psychology of need to create optimistic behavioural atmospheres that engender belief rather than disbelief. The LBOs consequently do not allow the option of trading against an occurrence and all professionals understand that contrarian trading is the first step on the road to investment riches. To quote Warren Buffett: "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful". Or Deleuze: "Sense depends on non-sense".
And this neatly brings us on to the behavioural aspects of the LBOs. We have no desire to spend too much time assessing the behavioural traits of irrationality that underpin the investment marketplace that are the LBOs. The psychological styles/disorders mentioned here are merely some of the most prevalent conditions which the bookmakers choose to address for profit maximisation. Punters are disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, cognitive dissonance is a factor as we cherish long-held "beliefs", anchoring leads to us being overly influenced by external suggestion (a core focus for LBOs), status quo bias is not actually a complete lack of musical good taste but the behavioural term for the chasing of losses (another key area for the psycho's), punters conceptualise without assessing the holistic overview of the reality being presented to them, gamblers are persistently over-confident due to representativeness heuristic, magical thinking takes the bettor even further from the loci of true reality, hindsight bias is another omnipresent feature which is closely linked to memory bias etc etc. The micro-control of this captive group psychology is a major area of research at all the large betting organisations. The serial conditioning of the group engenders learned helplessness and irrational group think as the voices one trusts plead with us to lose our cash by following the twisted logic of the disinformational talking head.
And all of this corruption is dressed up in the illusion of freedom, the creative use of leisure time on the level playing field offered by the toss of a dice. "Free to be yourself" in fact means "...free to project one's desires onto produced goods; "Free to enjoy life" means free to regress and to be irrational and thus to adapt to a certain social organisation of our behaviour with regard to products. As a punter, the only manner to treat the environment offered by the LBOs is to partially invert Baudrillard's overview of "the way the rationality of objects comes to grips with the irrationality of needs" to become a cynical realistic: "the way the irrationality of needs of the gambler comes to grips with rationality of the irrationality of objects of the bookmakers".
The LBOs are a post-modern artifice, a subtle but base deception founded on trickery and greed. In the atmosphere of this artifice, identity, truth, reason and meaning are warped into equilibrium states of behavioural difference producing a herd-like response to the detriment of the gambler's assets.
According to Foucault, we have become our own prison guards and have learned to mould our behaviour in accordance with the needs of modern capitalism. This behaviour of self is augmented, in Lacan's words by "how human subjectivity is formed and shaped by institutions... We live in ideology, blinded by an 'imaginary' consciousness that prevents us from gaining access to objective truth". The object of the gambler's desire is a Baudrillardian "exchange based on nothing other than corruption".
And, what is the response of our guardians to this societal corruption? Gamcare and the Gambling Commission together with the government's free market attitude to gambling legislation/advertising/marketing and a refusal to address the corruption of the markets and our realities. That's the response... Despite the deceleration towards not-so-super-casinos, the public have been persuaded by the general consensus of "it matters more when there's money on it" and "what's yours worth?". And, as Lyotard says: "consensus is the ultimate form of totalitarianism". Those of us who choose to confront corruption as a core competency understand that the corruption generally remorphs itself into a new and equally invalid form, setting off the whole cyclical process of detection and readjustment to the new corrupted realities.
According to Lyotard, it is only the most major narratives that may be made narrative impossibilities - these are stories that can no longer be told as they no longer convince eg Auschwitz. It is a pity that gambling corruption is not yet anywhere near the reality of being a narrative impossibility.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
"Consumption, insofar as it is meaningful, is the systematic act of the manipulation of signs". And, the LBOs offer a perfect environment to test and prove Baudrillard's differential reasoning. Originally, the bookmakers used primitive forms of psychopathic business strategies to maximise their returns from those with a gambling addiction. Proximity to pubs was one such ruse that remains valid to this day; delayed race start times gave the bookies an edge over the "blind" punter; the security door and the frosted glass psychologically defined the bettor as a societal loser, something to be hidden away; the creation of a chaotic environment made any attempt at pseudo-rationality in decision-making virtually impossible.
To my discredit, I once very briefly considered undertaking a consultancy project for one of the leading English bookmakers. The project aim was to maximise the amount of money that the addicts would hand over to the deserving cause of turf accountancy. The scope of the consultancy was pomo-in-extremis - the company wished to create the model interior to most suit their financial targets utilising colour, form, atmosphere, modular components together with excessive control of the informational flow and the preying on the psychological styles and disorders of the gathered group. We will assess these manipulations in turn.
The LBOs offer a major advantage to the bookmakers in comparison with the racecourse, the internet or the telephone. It is a controlled environment. Totally. Nothing has been left to chance. The positioning of the television screens in relation to the seating, the types of material in the seating, the location of standing places, solo locations and group areas, the disinformational matrix of un-data, the colours of the seats and tv backgrounds, the use of glass/daylight and advertising prompts suitably located, the quality of the images, the misuse of clocks and time etc etc. And, once one steps into this environment with its rarefied atmosphere of reality, the CCTV's ensure that the web performs optimally - the modular design style allowing a process of continuous improvement from the perspective of the abusive bookie.
The control of the information flow is a critical aspect of the reality-mix. Taking the un-sport of horseracing as an example, we are able to immediately conclude that the LBOs are the worst location for maximising the potentially valuable information which might be utilised to limit your losses and exposures. In front of an internet screen, you may access scores of firms and achieve preferable prices by referring to one of the numerous betting odds comparison sites. At the racecourse, one may read the tic-tac, monitor the rails and assess the meaning behind the major bookies returning money to the ring - are they offsetting liabilities by hedging or are they taking a proprietary angle? You can pay extra to monitor the body language of the corrupt trainers and jockeys and, in that it matters, assess the fitness of the poor beasts. When the likes of Toby Balding, Barry Hills, Paul Nicholls or Nicky Henderson, to name but a few, had a hot favourite, my staking level would always be augmented by my behavioural assessment of the key protagonists pre-race. The LBOs, in contrast, are a virtual price monopoly. Furthermore, the prices displayed together with their dynamics may not bear any resemblance either to the prices shown at other LBOs owned by the same company or to the prices available in the ring. Value is further reduced by the refusal of the LBOs to accept a decent size of bet together with outrageous overround percentages and, until recently, a highly regressive tax regime. The LBOs also enforce an obligation to buy - they utilise the psychology of need to create optimistic behavioural atmospheres that engender belief rather than disbelief. The LBOs consequently do not allow the option of trading against an occurrence and all professionals understand that contrarian trading is the first step on the road to investment riches. To quote Warren Buffett: "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful". Or Deleuze: "Sense depends on non-sense".
And this neatly brings us on to the behavioural aspects of the LBOs. We have no desire to spend too much time assessing the behavioural traits of irrationality that underpin the investment marketplace that are the LBOs. The psychological styles/disorders mentioned here are merely some of the most prevalent conditions which the bookmakers choose to address for profit maximisation. Punters are disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, cognitive dissonance is a factor as we cherish long-held "beliefs", anchoring leads to us being overly influenced by external suggestion (a core focus for LBOs), status quo bias is not actually a complete lack of musical good taste but the behavioural term for the chasing of losses (another key area for the psycho's), punters conceptualise without assessing the holistic overview of the reality being presented to them, gamblers are persistently over-confident due to representativeness heuristic, magical thinking takes the bettor even further from the loci of true reality, hindsight bias is another omnipresent feature which is closely linked to memory bias etc etc. The micro-control of this captive group psychology is a major area of research at all the large betting organisations. The serial conditioning of the group engenders learned helplessness and irrational group think as the voices one trusts plead with us to lose our cash by following the twisted logic of the disinformational talking head.
And all of this corruption is dressed up in the illusion of freedom, the creative use of leisure time on the level playing field offered by the toss of a dice. "Free to be yourself" in fact means "...free to project one's desires onto produced goods; "Free to enjoy life" means free to regress and to be irrational and thus to adapt to a certain social organisation of our behaviour with regard to products. As a punter, the only manner to treat the environment offered by the LBOs is to partially invert Baudrillard's overview of "the way the rationality of objects comes to grips with the irrationality of needs" to become a cynical realistic: "the way the irrationality of needs of the gambler comes to grips with rationality of the irrationality of objects of the bookmakers".
The LBOs are a post-modern artifice, a subtle but base deception founded on trickery and greed. In the atmosphere of this artifice, identity, truth, reason and meaning are warped into equilibrium states of behavioural difference producing a herd-like response to the detriment of the gambler's assets.
According to Foucault, we have become our own prison guards and have learned to mould our behaviour in accordance with the needs of modern capitalism. This behaviour of self is augmented, in Lacan's words by "how human subjectivity is formed and shaped by institutions... We live in ideology, blinded by an 'imaginary' consciousness that prevents us from gaining access to objective truth". The object of the gambler's desire is a Baudrillardian "exchange based on nothing other than corruption".
And, what is the response of our guardians to this societal corruption? Gamcare and the Gambling Commission together with the government's free market attitude to gambling legislation/advertising/marketing and a refusal to address the corruption of the markets and our realities. That's the response... Despite the deceleration towards not-so-super-casinos, the public have been persuaded by the general consensus of "it matters more when there's money on it" and "what's yours worth?". And, as Lyotard says: "consensus is the ultimate form of totalitarianism". Those of us who choose to confront corruption as a core competency understand that the corruption generally remorphs itself into a new and equally invalid form, setting off the whole cyclical process of detection and readjustment to the new corrupted realities.
According to Lyotard, it is only the most major narratives that may be made narrative impossibilities - these are stories that can no longer be told as they no longer convince eg Auschwitz. It is a pity that gambling corruption is not yet anywhere near the reality of being a narrative impossibility.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Saturday, 5 January 2008
The Swindler, Some Racists, Slave Traders And Mark Halsey
"I'm a professional. I am 100% right".
So said referee Mark Halsey during the Half Time interval to Ipswich manager Jim Magilton after making a sending off decision that was, in fact, 100% wrong. However, the man is most certainly a professional...
There are two fundamental factors that allow corruption to occur in a financial marketplace. Firstly, one needs a lack of regulatory oversight to enable capitalism and corruption to perform their paso doble unhindered by anything as constraining as the law. If repetitive abuses of the system create the dynamic for a dose of restrictive regulation then self-regulation is the cry that goes up - no red tape unless it is self-administered. Secondly, one requires the key individuals to undertake the strategies of the sectoral power base whether such power resides in a monopoly, a duopoly, a cartel (fragmented or otherwise), an oligarchy or the deep state. Mark Halsey's professional unprofessionalism is a template that exists across the spectrum of shareholder capitalist business structures.
In this post, we look at four areas of corruption that are loosely linked in style but very different in subject matter. We will check the corrupting of both football and politics by racism and greed and we'll revisit (briefly) the abusive mechanisms destroying English football together with the abuse of the global financial system by the US, the hyper power. The markets so addressed are the global football betting markets and the transfer market in African players, the prediction markets for the American election and the subprime market that is currently destabilising the entire financial system. As will be seen, the same corrupt infrastructures and hierarchies rear their heads across the board.
We use two methods to view our subject areas. Mao entertainingly believed in "truth from facts" which was one of his good calls. And, a more principled angle comes from J.K. Galbraith: "There is a dangerous cliché in the financial world [that] everything depends on confidence. One could better argue the importance of unremitting suspicion". Let us suspiciously begin...
Market manipulation is the cause of the subprime scandal, the global slowdown, the credit squeeze, the inter-bank liquidity crisis and the recession that lurks just around the corner. We have posted previously how much of the global macroeconomic agenda is developed at the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos and in numerous offshoots strategies that evolve from this meeting. As the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the private equity firms, hedge funds and investment banks meet with the chosen heads of business and government to mull over our future realities in this truly non-democratic manner, some individual players develop proprietary hidden agendas. Undoubtedly, the firm that we possess the most professional respect for in this global grey market is the leading investment bank, Goldman Sachs. But this respect is merely professional - their trading style is strictly psychopathic and it is Goldman Sachs who are responsible for the machinations that have created today's momentous recessionary pressures. A little background on Goldman Sachs... Analytically, Goldman Sachs are in a different league to the other investment banks. They have more losing days than the other firms and yet still top the profits table year after year. They are able to achieve this success through a strict culture, excessive use of inside information, much cloned trading and a highly original attitude to risk. To Goldman Sachs, the question is not "am I taking too much risk?" but rather "am I taking enough risk and is it the correct type of risk?". The resultant highly speculative and highly profitable trading strategy is exemplary in its execution. Fair dinkum. Its a competitive market place and Goldman Sachs have the best business model and the majority of the best traders - to this extent, they deserve to win their trophies. However, being a psychopathic organisation, a professional competitive advantage is not enough.
Okay, back to the plot... Its May 2006 and economic incompetent George W. Bush has just sacked economic incompetent John Snow as US Treasury Secretary. Bush approached Hank Paulson, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, with the job offer. Paulson would agree only if he could implement his own policies without the restraining hand of government (if, indeed, the Bush dynasty does restraining hands...). Desperate to bring genius to his bunch of cow-hands, Bush agreed. Winding forward to January 2007, in Davos and the Goldman Sachs people are telling all and sundry how bullish they feel about the future direction of the financial markets. But, at the same time, Goldman Sachs' analysts were developing a trading strategy which was effectively a proprietary bet that the value of mortgage-backed securities would fall. They have profited handsomely from this contrarian posturing/trading and earnings in the fourth quarter showed a 2% rise on the previous year while ALL of their competitors were being dragged down by subprime related investments. Without the role of Hank Paulson, this might be seen as a slick piece of trading. It wasn't. It was corruption. Goldman Sachs is the investment bank equivalent of AC Milan - the binding motto is "once a player, always a player". Paulson's former Goldman Sachs co-worker, Bob Steel, was nominated as Undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance and the two men set about the task at hand. Indeed, Christopher Dodd, a Democratic senator, has publicly questioned whether the invisible hand of Hank was behind the macroeconomic manipulations that created a suitable atmosphere for the subprime chaos. Incredibly, Paulson is also a member of the IMF board of governors who recently agreed that the economies of China and India were, in fact, 40% smaller than thought which, at a stroke, further strengthened Goldman Sachs' short positions in the market against the system.
Think about the democratic invalidity of this structure before we leave this global corruption. An investment bank takes over the treasury of the global imperial power to engender a trading strategy which, while raising significant profits for insiders and shareholders, results in a global recession for the rest of us. With considerable chutzpah, Paulson has set up the Hope Now Alliance to help the victims of the trading strategy he himself implemented. Outrageous.
Staying with the world's one remaining primitive culture brings us to that triumph of democracy - the US presidential election. Following the vote in Iowa, there is considerable momentum building behind Barack Obama to win both the Democratic (sic) nomination and even the race for the White House itself. Intrade are currently setting their binary market at Obama 55.2-56.9 and Clinton 40.0-42.5 on the Democratic nomination. Prediction Markets are becoming very popular platforms for the trading of binary markets - a binary market is one that may be reach equilibrium at 100 or 0, such as an individual being elected or not, the FTSE finishing the day higher or not etc. Political Prediction Markets are considerably more accurate than standard opinion polls as people lie to pollsters but stay true to their cash (making the assumption that traders are rational beings). In this current marathon US campaign, the gap between the money and the polls is greater than usual with the markets downplaying the likelihood of an Obama victory compared with the pollsters. Why so? Racism is a core competency of the shareholder capitalist agenda. Both abroad and at home, US policies increase income inequality based on a colour chart of prejudice. The Barack Obama campaign is highlighting this fundamental feature of much of what the US claims is society. Lets look at a few facts. The Republicans are desperate for Obama to get the Democratic nomination as their analysts are more than aware that the racism inherent in society will tilt the presidential fight in favour of the right if he wins. Clinton is a much scarier option as the Clinton campaign will use equivalence in gutter tactics. A non-democratic peculiarity in some states adds to this farce of an electoral system. Some key states of the union allow citizens to vote for both Democratic and Republican nominees regardless of their political inclinations which is a structure primed for tactical voting. Furthermore, huge swathes of the Black population are disenfranchised from the US electoral system. Non-registration, depoliticisation on a party level and a constant national agenda to imprison as many Blacks as possible, thus removing their right to vote, makes the Black vote nowhere near as strong as it deserves to be. America, after bowing briefly to civil rights in the 60's, has spent most of the last 40 years developing strategies to deny the vote to Black people (check the prison profiles of predominantly Black crack arrests compared with predominantly white cocaine arrests). Furthermore, the divide-and-rule policies imposed on the ghettos leads to little parity of purpose between the Black and Hispanic underclasses. So, this free democracy (sic, again) will produce an election costing over a billion dollars which will merely serve to demonstrate the racist culture of the hyper state. The fact that there are some major market operators choosing to make money out of this systemic racism is simply another odious example of the markets as an ideology at work. In 1964, Malcolm X wrote: "...they'll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you'll get your freedom". Unfortunately, he reckoned without the impact of the deep state.
Racism impacting upon the markets is also the basis of our third example of corruption - the transfer system for African players into Europe. On the eve of the African Cup Of Nations finals in Ghana, there is an excellent article in today's Observer newspaper highlighting the plight of young wannabee footballers in West Africa who are being tricked by rogue agents and dumped on the fringes of western Europe after perilous journeys across to Las Islas Canarias or Malta (see: http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,2234283,00.html). The misery of the reality of life for the people of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) produces huge incentives for these kids (and their families) to pawn everything on the very remote chance that they will soon be in one of the top European leagues. The regulations, or lack of them, allow unregistered agents, largely from the Middle East and Eastern Europe, to rob the poorest on the planet while FIFA stands buy with the usual useless platitudes. This modern day slave trade destroys already miserable lives. Of far less importance but also worthy of note is the fact that this human trafficking distorts the transfer system. Although there are a few properly regulated academies in Accra sponsored by north European teams, the vast majority are not accredited. It would be an optimistic thing to believe that Ghana might be helped to clean up its act to celebrate the continental tournament which they are about to host but don't hold your breath. The shareholder capitalist system is built on incentives. Despite the lies of purchasing power parity, the situation at the bottom of the pile is worse than ever and the incentives to take these lottery-esque probability risks on the off-chance of something approaching an existence is a damning indictment of an abusive system and a sport that does not care about its poorer brethren.
Which brings us to the corruption in football in England. The Football Is Fixed blog attempts to demonstrate the parallels between corrupt infrastructures with a lack of regulatory restraints in football and to compare with the similar structures in other areas of the global financial system. The real human impact of Mark Halsey favouring Portsmouth is insignificant alongside a global recession, a modern day slave trade or systemic racism in the empire but by focusing on the templates of corruption in a simple sport we, with some success, demonstrate that a standard psychopathic agenda underpins all corrupt edifices. Consequently, it should not be seen as unusual that there are also parallels in the solutions to the excesses of these psychosystems. All markets require full disclosure, no insider trading, no private markets, proper regulation that fights corruption rather than ignores it. In football, this requires an end to the illicit nature of the underground betting markets in Asia together with a desire to ensure that the outcome on the pitch resembles reality rather than a reflection on the betting liabilities of a bunch of bookmakers. Our main Chinese contact believes that the European firms lack strategic vision and suffer from internal discord which impedes their credibility as thinking organisations. Indeed, the Chinese market makers have a clear understanding of both the institutional structures and fissures in the European marketplace but are prevented from fully exploiting this market advantage in a meritocratic marketplace by the refusal of the Europeans to allow an open market.
Something needs to happen soon. The main feature of the world's allegedly favourite competition this weekend has been the massive empty spaces at all the grounds even when the visitors are semi-glamourous. People might not yet understand the full extent to which they are being shortchanged by the corruption of the national game but they do understand that somebody somewhere is taking the piss big style.
Of course, overseeing this corruption across both the political and footballing arenas is the dark shadow of the Murdochracy which defines the spectacular realities on which you are expected to focus. The Murdochracy doesn't discuss racism or political corruption or slavery or rigged football matches. But it does do Republicanism in all its shades. And corruption too, while, in the words of John Pilger, the Murdochracy is devoted to the promotion of "war, conquest and human division".
If his parents hadn't called him Rupert, perhaps he would have turned out less psychopathic...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
So said referee Mark Halsey during the Half Time interval to Ipswich manager Jim Magilton after making a sending off decision that was, in fact, 100% wrong. However, the man is most certainly a professional...
There are two fundamental factors that allow corruption to occur in a financial marketplace. Firstly, one needs a lack of regulatory oversight to enable capitalism and corruption to perform their paso doble unhindered by anything as constraining as the law. If repetitive abuses of the system create the dynamic for a dose of restrictive regulation then self-regulation is the cry that goes up - no red tape unless it is self-administered. Secondly, one requires the key individuals to undertake the strategies of the sectoral power base whether such power resides in a monopoly, a duopoly, a cartel (fragmented or otherwise), an oligarchy or the deep state. Mark Halsey's professional unprofessionalism is a template that exists across the spectrum of shareholder capitalist business structures.
In this post, we look at four areas of corruption that are loosely linked in style but very different in subject matter. We will check the corrupting of both football and politics by racism and greed and we'll revisit (briefly) the abusive mechanisms destroying English football together with the abuse of the global financial system by the US, the hyper power. The markets so addressed are the global football betting markets and the transfer market in African players, the prediction markets for the American election and the subprime market that is currently destabilising the entire financial system. As will be seen, the same corrupt infrastructures and hierarchies rear their heads across the board.
We use two methods to view our subject areas. Mao entertainingly believed in "truth from facts" which was one of his good calls. And, a more principled angle comes from J.K. Galbraith: "There is a dangerous cliché in the financial world [that] everything depends on confidence. One could better argue the importance of unremitting suspicion". Let us suspiciously begin...
Market manipulation is the cause of the subprime scandal, the global slowdown, the credit squeeze, the inter-bank liquidity crisis and the recession that lurks just around the corner. We have posted previously how much of the global macroeconomic agenda is developed at the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos and in numerous offshoots strategies that evolve from this meeting. As the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the private equity firms, hedge funds and investment banks meet with the chosen heads of business and government to mull over our future realities in this truly non-democratic manner, some individual players develop proprietary hidden agendas. Undoubtedly, the firm that we possess the most professional respect for in this global grey market is the leading investment bank, Goldman Sachs. But this respect is merely professional - their trading style is strictly psychopathic and it is Goldman Sachs who are responsible for the machinations that have created today's momentous recessionary pressures. A little background on Goldman Sachs... Analytically, Goldman Sachs are in a different league to the other investment banks. They have more losing days than the other firms and yet still top the profits table year after year. They are able to achieve this success through a strict culture, excessive use of inside information, much cloned trading and a highly original attitude to risk. To Goldman Sachs, the question is not "am I taking too much risk?" but rather "am I taking enough risk and is it the correct type of risk?". The resultant highly speculative and highly profitable trading strategy is exemplary in its execution. Fair dinkum. Its a competitive market place and Goldman Sachs have the best business model and the majority of the best traders - to this extent, they deserve to win their trophies. However, being a psychopathic organisation, a professional competitive advantage is not enough.
Okay, back to the plot... Its May 2006 and economic incompetent George W. Bush has just sacked economic incompetent John Snow as US Treasury Secretary. Bush approached Hank Paulson, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, with the job offer. Paulson would agree only if he could implement his own policies without the restraining hand of government (if, indeed, the Bush dynasty does restraining hands...). Desperate to bring genius to his bunch of cow-hands, Bush agreed. Winding forward to January 2007, in Davos and the Goldman Sachs people are telling all and sundry how bullish they feel about the future direction of the financial markets. But, at the same time, Goldman Sachs' analysts were developing a trading strategy which was effectively a proprietary bet that the value of mortgage-backed securities would fall. They have profited handsomely from this contrarian posturing/trading and earnings in the fourth quarter showed a 2% rise on the previous year while ALL of their competitors were being dragged down by subprime related investments. Without the role of Hank Paulson, this might be seen as a slick piece of trading. It wasn't. It was corruption. Goldman Sachs is the investment bank equivalent of AC Milan - the binding motto is "once a player, always a player". Paulson's former Goldman Sachs co-worker, Bob Steel, was nominated as Undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance and the two men set about the task at hand. Indeed, Christopher Dodd, a Democratic senator, has publicly questioned whether the invisible hand of Hank was behind the macroeconomic manipulations that created a suitable atmosphere for the subprime chaos. Incredibly, Paulson is also a member of the IMF board of governors who recently agreed that the economies of China and India were, in fact, 40% smaller than thought which, at a stroke, further strengthened Goldman Sachs' short positions in the market against the system.
Think about the democratic invalidity of this structure before we leave this global corruption. An investment bank takes over the treasury of the global imperial power to engender a trading strategy which, while raising significant profits for insiders and shareholders, results in a global recession for the rest of us. With considerable chutzpah, Paulson has set up the Hope Now Alliance to help the victims of the trading strategy he himself implemented. Outrageous.
Staying with the world's one remaining primitive culture brings us to that triumph of democracy - the US presidential election. Following the vote in Iowa, there is considerable momentum building behind Barack Obama to win both the Democratic (sic) nomination and even the race for the White House itself. Intrade are currently setting their binary market at Obama 55.2-56.9 and Clinton 40.0-42.5 on the Democratic nomination. Prediction Markets are becoming very popular platforms for the trading of binary markets - a binary market is one that may be reach equilibrium at 100 or 0, such as an individual being elected or not, the FTSE finishing the day higher or not etc. Political Prediction Markets are considerably more accurate than standard opinion polls as people lie to pollsters but stay true to their cash (making the assumption that traders are rational beings). In this current marathon US campaign, the gap between the money and the polls is greater than usual with the markets downplaying the likelihood of an Obama victory compared with the pollsters. Why so? Racism is a core competency of the shareholder capitalist agenda. Both abroad and at home, US policies increase income inequality based on a colour chart of prejudice. The Barack Obama campaign is highlighting this fundamental feature of much of what the US claims is society. Lets look at a few facts. The Republicans are desperate for Obama to get the Democratic nomination as their analysts are more than aware that the racism inherent in society will tilt the presidential fight in favour of the right if he wins. Clinton is a much scarier option as the Clinton campaign will use equivalence in gutter tactics. A non-democratic peculiarity in some states adds to this farce of an electoral system. Some key states of the union allow citizens to vote for both Democratic and Republican nominees regardless of their political inclinations which is a structure primed for tactical voting. Furthermore, huge swathes of the Black population are disenfranchised from the US electoral system. Non-registration, depoliticisation on a party level and a constant national agenda to imprison as many Blacks as possible, thus removing their right to vote, makes the Black vote nowhere near as strong as it deserves to be. America, after bowing briefly to civil rights in the 60's, has spent most of the last 40 years developing strategies to deny the vote to Black people (check the prison profiles of predominantly Black crack arrests compared with predominantly white cocaine arrests). Furthermore, the divide-and-rule policies imposed on the ghettos leads to little parity of purpose between the Black and Hispanic underclasses. So, this free democracy (sic, again) will produce an election costing over a billion dollars which will merely serve to demonstrate the racist culture of the hyper state. The fact that there are some major market operators choosing to make money out of this systemic racism is simply another odious example of the markets as an ideology at work. In 1964, Malcolm X wrote: "...they'll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you'll get your freedom". Unfortunately, he reckoned without the impact of the deep state.
Racism impacting upon the markets is also the basis of our third example of corruption - the transfer system for African players into Europe. On the eve of the African Cup Of Nations finals in Ghana, there is an excellent article in today's Observer newspaper highlighting the plight of young wannabee footballers in West Africa who are being tricked by rogue agents and dumped on the fringes of western Europe after perilous journeys across to Las Islas Canarias or Malta (see: http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,2234283,00.html). The misery of the reality of life for the people of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) produces huge incentives for these kids (and their families) to pawn everything on the very remote chance that they will soon be in one of the top European leagues. The regulations, or lack of them, allow unregistered agents, largely from the Middle East and Eastern Europe, to rob the poorest on the planet while FIFA stands buy with the usual useless platitudes. This modern day slave trade destroys already miserable lives. Of far less importance but also worthy of note is the fact that this human trafficking distorts the transfer system. Although there are a few properly regulated academies in Accra sponsored by north European teams, the vast majority are not accredited. It would be an optimistic thing to believe that Ghana might be helped to clean up its act to celebrate the continental tournament which they are about to host but don't hold your breath. The shareholder capitalist system is built on incentives. Despite the lies of purchasing power parity, the situation at the bottom of the pile is worse than ever and the incentives to take these lottery-esque probability risks on the off-chance of something approaching an existence is a damning indictment of an abusive system and a sport that does not care about its poorer brethren.
Which brings us to the corruption in football in England. The Football Is Fixed blog attempts to demonstrate the parallels between corrupt infrastructures with a lack of regulatory restraints in football and to compare with the similar structures in other areas of the global financial system. The real human impact of Mark Halsey favouring Portsmouth is insignificant alongside a global recession, a modern day slave trade or systemic racism in the empire but by focusing on the templates of corruption in a simple sport we, with some success, demonstrate that a standard psychopathic agenda underpins all corrupt edifices. Consequently, it should not be seen as unusual that there are also parallels in the solutions to the excesses of these psychosystems. All markets require full disclosure, no insider trading, no private markets, proper regulation that fights corruption rather than ignores it. In football, this requires an end to the illicit nature of the underground betting markets in Asia together with a desire to ensure that the outcome on the pitch resembles reality rather than a reflection on the betting liabilities of a bunch of bookmakers. Our main Chinese contact believes that the European firms lack strategic vision and suffer from internal discord which impedes their credibility as thinking organisations. Indeed, the Chinese market makers have a clear understanding of both the institutional structures and fissures in the European marketplace but are prevented from fully exploiting this market advantage in a meritocratic marketplace by the refusal of the Europeans to allow an open market.
Something needs to happen soon. The main feature of the world's allegedly favourite competition this weekend has been the massive empty spaces at all the grounds even when the visitors are semi-glamourous. People might not yet understand the full extent to which they are being shortchanged by the corruption of the national game but they do understand that somebody somewhere is taking the piss big style.
Of course, overseeing this corruption across both the political and footballing arenas is the dark shadow of the Murdochracy which defines the spectacular realities on which you are expected to focus. The Murdochracy doesn't discuss racism or political corruption or slavery or rigged football matches. But it does do Republicanism in all its shades. And corruption too, while, in the words of John Pilger, the Murdochracy is devoted to the promotion of "war, conquest and human division".
If his parents hadn't called him Rupert, perhaps he would have turned out less psychopathic...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
Creating The Incentives To Win The World Cup 2010
It would have to be accepted as a reasonable judgement if an impartial reader made the assumption that we take a certain degree of schadenfreude in the repetitive underperformance of the England football team. We do that thing both because none of our Trading Team feel any affinity with the country and also because anything that messes around with the heads of a nation of xenophobes has to be seen as a grin. In an attempt to demonstrate a belated form of balance in our coverage of the national side, we outline below a medium term strategy which, if implemented, would produce an excellent chance of success coming to fruition in South Africa in 2010.
Firstly, we need to return to the prime reasons why the current crop of players have failed to deliver. As we pointed out following the hilarious defeat to Croatia, the blame must be shared between, in declining order of negative impact, the bookmakers, the FA, the media, the players and the nationalistic fanbase. Some of these negativities are structural and require a very specific strategy to peripheralise their destabilisation while others may be solved directly. For instance, there is little that may be done to change the reality that it is always in the interests of the bookmakers for English sports teams to underperform due to the massive liquidity of the patriotic pound. The only strategy available is to by-pass the bookies by taking the control of the England team from their grubby little hands. Similarly, it is not possible to remove the council of idiots within the FA - it is a travesty that Brian Barwick remains in the pay of the game following his atrocious mismanagement of recent times. The media will also remain in the hands of the bookmakers but, despite this considerable dead-weight attached to the team, there is a route to that sought after glory. Check this out...
Fabio Capello is one of the best half dozen managers on the planet and, to our knowledge, he has never had any links with the bookmaking world. His record of success in different leagues and with a range of separate club hierarchies over a considerable window of time is indicative of the man's professionalism. So, here's the initial advantage - you have got a proper manager who neither works alongside bookmakers in a Keegan-stylee nor lists ineptitude as his one core competency in a McClaren stylee.
The bookmakers prefer ownership of the managerial position but, when direct influence is not an option, the promotion of self-harming individuals is a valid fallback strategy. When, as now, neither of these possibilities are on the table, the layers depend on the least favourable choice - failure through player underperformance. The reason why this third route is not the corruption of choice for the bookmakers is obvious - what if the very skilled Italian manager elects to discard the players who undertake the dirty work of the bookmakers? We are then in a meritocratic world which is the very last thing on the bookies list of preferences.
Okay so, who has Capello to bin? Regular readers will be aware that we would place Michael Owen and Frank Lampard at the very top of this list. Both players, at both club and country level, show inappropriate correlations between their playing statistics and certain key betting market patterns. Whether their criminality is forced through coercion or bribery or is a personal choice is of no interest here - these individuals are doing the work of the bookmakers and, consequently, these types of player are out. We would also wish to see the back of the following players for reasons of either age, motivation or lack of ability - Robinson, Ferdinand, Campbell, James, Bridge, Smith, Downing, Terry and Beckham. The English Under-21 team reached the semi finals of the European Championships last summer despite some key individuals being unavailable. Although the generally held view is that there is a dearth of quality English players, we would beg to differ. The following 38 member squad is full of exciting players with the added benefit that they are not soiled by any links to the layers.
GOALKEEPERS: Carson, Green, Foster and Almunia.
DEFENDERS: Richards, Carragher (we are told he would return if the friends of the bookies are kicked out), Brown, Taylor, A. Cole, Lescott, Onuoha and Richardson.
MIDFIELDERS: Gerrard, Barry, Jenas, Bentley, Nolan, Lennon, Young, J. Cole, Hargreaves, Wright-Phillips, Milner, Johnson (Man City), Randall (Arsenal), Noble, Dyer, Carrick, Reo-Coker, Huddlestone and, in your dreams, Paul Scholes.
ATTACKERS: Walcott, Defoe, Rooney, Crouch, Agbonlahor, Bent (Spurs) and Heskey.
There are another dozen players who are arguably of sufficient potential - there is no shortage of talent despite what the mainstream media pours out. And the media are key to the success of this strategy towards mid-term success.
It is not by coincidence that the amount of press coverage given to just a few of the players on our discard list is extensive. Indeed, we would suggest that more column inches are given to Owen, Lampard and Beckham than the entire 38 player squad outlined above. The bookmakers utilise the mainstream media to force through their proprietary agenda and, if we selected to do so, we could name journalists from ALL the papers together with their linkages to particular bookmakers or groups of bookmakers. For the purposes of this post, we choose to finger just one bod - Jim Holden who writes utter rubbish for the otherwise excellent World Soccer magazine. In his latest dispatch on behalf of the bookies, Holden attempts (and completely fails) to make a case for the dropping of Stevie G. Using a impotent mixture of lies and invalid stats, Holden cuts and pastes the arguments of the British bookies in favour of leaving out the Liverpool maestro so that Fat Frank may continue as the midfield muppet master. If Lampard wasn't crooked, there would be little to choose between the two players, although we would still favour Gerrard, but, once Lampard's external interests are taken into account, the choice is a no-brainer (which, unfortunately for the English, was a level-of-intellect-too-far for McClaren). But, don't just take our opinion as fact. Dietrological have extensive contacts in the Italian game and, to a uomo, there is widespread disbelief that England do not build their future around Gerrard - one colleague at La Gazzetta dello Sport compares the potential of Gerrard to Totti, Zidane and Kaká. And, what is their view on Lampard? As we mentioned just last week, Inter, Milan, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus all turned down the opportunity to take Fat Frank when Mourinho was wisely trying to palm him off over the summer.
International football moves in long term cycles due to the lack of a transfer system and, in the corrupt sport of English football, the windows of opportunity for meritocratic success are minimal. Its all a matter of incentives. The players that we select to be discarded have absolutely no incentive to perform to maximum effect for the national side because their paymasters at either club or bookmaker level would prefer otherwise. If you are already on £5 million a year before bonuses and merchandising and, additionally, the layers are offering you inducements to underperform, the incentive becomes a disincentive. The bookmakers and their client press hope to bridge over this window of lack of influence at managerial level by ensuring that the likes of Lampard and Owen are able to tilt the markets at pitch level until someone more suitable to the bookmaker's agenda is in the managerial hotseat. By sacking the crims, the national team could have a window of opportunity to actually win something more consequential than Andorra away. But, it is only a window of opportunity as, making the assumption that Capello plans strategically, the new reality would create a whole new batch of incentives. For example, if the bookies have no control on the national team, they will fall back on one or both of the two tactics that always work in their psychopathic hidden agendas. Firstly, coercion... One or more of the influential members of the 38 will be threatened with being outed - a common tactic in the homophobic footie world. Or secondly, cash... Everybody has their price and the bookies will be willing to dip deep into their satchels to gain ultimate control over selected key players.
As a result of the economics of corruption, the potential for international footballing success only comes once per generation and South Africa 2010 is that hotspot. Of course, the downside to Capello being successful will be the eruption of nationalistic fervour but we are able to face up to that potentiality just to see the criminalised layers get the financial beating that they thoroughly deserve at the hands of the general populace.
Oh my gosh, we would be laughing...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Firstly, we need to return to the prime reasons why the current crop of players have failed to deliver. As we pointed out following the hilarious defeat to Croatia, the blame must be shared between, in declining order of negative impact, the bookmakers, the FA, the media, the players and the nationalistic fanbase. Some of these negativities are structural and require a very specific strategy to peripheralise their destabilisation while others may be solved directly. For instance, there is little that may be done to change the reality that it is always in the interests of the bookmakers for English sports teams to underperform due to the massive liquidity of the patriotic pound. The only strategy available is to by-pass the bookies by taking the control of the England team from their grubby little hands. Similarly, it is not possible to remove the council of idiots within the FA - it is a travesty that Brian Barwick remains in the pay of the game following his atrocious mismanagement of recent times. The media will also remain in the hands of the bookmakers but, despite this considerable dead-weight attached to the team, there is a route to that sought after glory. Check this out...
Fabio Capello is one of the best half dozen managers on the planet and, to our knowledge, he has never had any links with the bookmaking world. His record of success in different leagues and with a range of separate club hierarchies over a considerable window of time is indicative of the man's professionalism. So, here's the initial advantage - you have got a proper manager who neither works alongside bookmakers in a Keegan-stylee nor lists ineptitude as his one core competency in a McClaren stylee.
The bookmakers prefer ownership of the managerial position but, when direct influence is not an option, the promotion of self-harming individuals is a valid fallback strategy. When, as now, neither of these possibilities are on the table, the layers depend on the least favourable choice - failure through player underperformance. The reason why this third route is not the corruption of choice for the bookmakers is obvious - what if the very skilled Italian manager elects to discard the players who undertake the dirty work of the bookmakers? We are then in a meritocratic world which is the very last thing on the bookies list of preferences.
Okay so, who has Capello to bin? Regular readers will be aware that we would place Michael Owen and Frank Lampard at the very top of this list. Both players, at both club and country level, show inappropriate correlations between their playing statistics and certain key betting market patterns. Whether their criminality is forced through coercion or bribery or is a personal choice is of no interest here - these individuals are doing the work of the bookmakers and, consequently, these types of player are out. We would also wish to see the back of the following players for reasons of either age, motivation or lack of ability - Robinson, Ferdinand, Campbell, James, Bridge, Smith, Downing, Terry and Beckham. The English Under-21 team reached the semi finals of the European Championships last summer despite some key individuals being unavailable. Although the generally held view is that there is a dearth of quality English players, we would beg to differ. The following 38 member squad is full of exciting players with the added benefit that they are not soiled by any links to the layers.
GOALKEEPERS: Carson, Green, Foster and Almunia.
DEFENDERS: Richards, Carragher (we are told he would return if the friends of the bookies are kicked out), Brown, Taylor, A. Cole, Lescott, Onuoha and Richardson.
MIDFIELDERS: Gerrard, Barry, Jenas, Bentley, Nolan, Lennon, Young, J. Cole, Hargreaves, Wright-Phillips, Milner, Johnson (Man City), Randall (Arsenal), Noble, Dyer, Carrick, Reo-Coker, Huddlestone and, in your dreams, Paul Scholes.
ATTACKERS: Walcott, Defoe, Rooney, Crouch, Agbonlahor, Bent (Spurs) and Heskey.
There are another dozen players who are arguably of sufficient potential - there is no shortage of talent despite what the mainstream media pours out. And the media are key to the success of this strategy towards mid-term success.
It is not by coincidence that the amount of press coverage given to just a few of the players on our discard list is extensive. Indeed, we would suggest that more column inches are given to Owen, Lampard and Beckham than the entire 38 player squad outlined above. The bookmakers utilise the mainstream media to force through their proprietary agenda and, if we selected to do so, we could name journalists from ALL the papers together with their linkages to particular bookmakers or groups of bookmakers. For the purposes of this post, we choose to finger just one bod - Jim Holden who writes utter rubbish for the otherwise excellent World Soccer magazine. In his latest dispatch on behalf of the bookies, Holden attempts (and completely fails) to make a case for the dropping of Stevie G. Using a impotent mixture of lies and invalid stats, Holden cuts and pastes the arguments of the British bookies in favour of leaving out the Liverpool maestro so that Fat Frank may continue as the midfield muppet master. If Lampard wasn't crooked, there would be little to choose between the two players, although we would still favour Gerrard, but, once Lampard's external interests are taken into account, the choice is a no-brainer (which, unfortunately for the English, was a level-of-intellect-too-far for McClaren). But, don't just take our opinion as fact. Dietrological have extensive contacts in the Italian game and, to a uomo, there is widespread disbelief that England do not build their future around Gerrard - one colleague at La Gazzetta dello Sport compares the potential of Gerrard to Totti, Zidane and Kaká. And, what is their view on Lampard? As we mentioned just last week, Inter, Milan, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Juventus all turned down the opportunity to take Fat Frank when Mourinho was wisely trying to palm him off over the summer.
International football moves in long term cycles due to the lack of a transfer system and, in the corrupt sport of English football, the windows of opportunity for meritocratic success are minimal. Its all a matter of incentives. The players that we select to be discarded have absolutely no incentive to perform to maximum effect for the national side because their paymasters at either club or bookmaker level would prefer otherwise. If you are already on £5 million a year before bonuses and merchandising and, additionally, the layers are offering you inducements to underperform, the incentive becomes a disincentive. The bookmakers and their client press hope to bridge over this window of lack of influence at managerial level by ensuring that the likes of Lampard and Owen are able to tilt the markets at pitch level until someone more suitable to the bookmaker's agenda is in the managerial hotseat. By sacking the crims, the national team could have a window of opportunity to actually win something more consequential than Andorra away. But, it is only a window of opportunity as, making the assumption that Capello plans strategically, the new reality would create a whole new batch of incentives. For example, if the bookies have no control on the national team, they will fall back on one or both of the two tactics that always work in their psychopathic hidden agendas. Firstly, coercion... One or more of the influential members of the 38 will be threatened with being outed - a common tactic in the homophobic footie world. Or secondly, cash... Everybody has their price and the bookies will be willing to dip deep into their satchels to gain ultimate control over selected key players.
As a result of the economics of corruption, the potential for international footballing success only comes once per generation and South Africa 2010 is that hotspot. Of course, the downside to Capello being successful will be the eruption of nationalistic fervour but we are able to face up to that potentiality just to see the criminalised layers get the financial beating that they thoroughly deserve at the hands of the general populace.
Oh my gosh, we would be laughing...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
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