Ecclesiastes: "The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true".
Utilising quotes from the Hebrew bible is not the standard introduction to a blog post regarding disinformation in the sporting media but, then again, Football Is Fixed is not a standard blog. We are the Practical and we refer our observations of a hyperreality to the Post-Modernist Theoretical. Spectacular society images and neorealities form the matrix of this Unreal.
Jean Baudrillard: "Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum".
The mass media falls firmly into this latter class of "reality" - a hyperreality. Different strata of the globalised simulacra utilise proprietary templates in order to achieve their aims. We intend to focus on football and the prime purpose of this posting is not to prove to you that football is fixed - for if we have not achieved this already, we have failed in our task, and we haven't - but to demonstrate that, when the hyperreal collides with speculative financial markets, there is money to be made by modelling this spectacular society disinformation.
To achieve this contrarian construct, one is required to develop a laterally thought form of meta-analysis. Effectively, the aim is to combine the various strands of hyperreal media disinformation into a workable model. Lets take a standard window of that particularly hyperreal entity, the English Premiership, as our example.
If football is fixed then the Premiership is fixed and then some. Hierarchically, the Premiership occupies the same tier of corruption as the domestic leagues in Russia, Croatia and Serbia which places it well below such territorial bastions of integrity as Italy, Poland and Romania where the corruption endemic in the game is, at least, purged from time to time. The English spectacle does not do self-regulation which, in the absence of any external regulatory framework, allows a carte blanche for systemic corruption.
The results of Premiership matches are decided on the field of play in only one sense - a hyperreal one. The outcomes have nothing to do with the skills and talents that the playing participants bring to the stage but are determined either by trading activities in illegal betting markets or institutional power play underlying the fragmented cartel structure which defines this extended marketplace. Or both.
So, how do we cash in on this nonsense? Is there a momentum created by this cashing in that enforces an incremental improvement in the degree of unreal that the mass media projects to us? The answers to these enquiries are: "Check out below" and "Yes".
The meta-analysis of media disinformation regarding the Premiership may be modelled without any input from the more formal areas of financial market analysis. It is a stand alone entity. For our argument, we will utilise Sky Television as the media source that misinform us regarding Premiership matches - although we could just as easily have selected The Racing Post and/or The Guardian. All of these media are corrupted from a football perspective. Why? Profit, whether corporate-specific, industry wide or individual, is the only motive.
Team A are playing Team B in a high profile televised neoreality which might help determine some inconsequence or other eg who will be provided with an end-of-season prize. The corrupted media KNOW that Team A will win as the referee is controlled together with one assistant and the increasingly significant 4th official. The only potential concern to the insider traders from the bookmaking and media sectors is a tilted book - if the whole planet and her husband believe that Team A will triumph then the liabilities banked in the bookmakers ledgers will be significant. Of course, we can't have that so a schedule of disinformation is developed to ensure that the insiders win at the expense of the gullible. The benefits to the insiders are manifest - their proprietary trading positions will win; the price gained by insiders will be improved as they are taking on the mug money; corporate profits and returns to shareholders will be enhanced; irrational mug money increases liquidity allowing greater greed on behalf of the insiders.
This disinformation comes in many forms and, once one has chosen the criminalised media, the prime task is to identify individual scallies contained therein. Taking Sky as but one example, if one were to simply invert the views and opinions of a selection of the talking heads and to combine this drivel with the disinformational "data" speeding across the screen informing us that: "Team A have never lost when there has been a south westerly wind on a wet Sunday in March after having scored the first goal", one already has the basis of a meta-analytical media disinformation model. However, it is not just the words from mouth that define the dodgy talking heads - body language, forms of forensic psychology together with an holistic overview of the financial realities of the specific betting markets will enhance the meta-analysis. Some of these inversions and analyses are simple and others considerably more complex and these latter areas fall under our isolationist lens and are not to be read by the likes of you!
Of the former, though, in the printed media it is worth checking out the number of column inches providing a particular match view, the placement of these inches within the newspaper, the journalist involved, the importance of the rigged event with regard to betting turnover etc etc. These inputs need to analysed and weighted in order to form the basis of a model based simply on media disinformation.
Language is another key input and below we detail several kneejerk verbals which help to identify the true outcome of a hyperreality.
Ray "Butch" Wilkins seems a regular sort of bloke with his wide-eyed innocent trust-me demeanour. He isn't. He is a source of disinformation. Last week, Man Utd were playing Bolton in a midweek Sky game prior to the big weekend derby against Liverpool. The only competitive disadvantage for the Manchester Reds was if the Bolton match became tiring which would allow the Liverpudlians a pre-match edge in the fitness department. 2-0 up in 20 minutes and United switched off as the required outcome had been achieved - why press for more goals and increase the likelihood of a reactive kicking from Megson's men in what, after all, was a local derby? At half time, the slimey slaphead informed us: "I think United will go on and score lots more goals, I REALLY DO". Of course, the match fizzled out into the agreed 2-0 outcome and Wilkins had earned his retainer. Similar inversions may be made when Jamie Redknapp, his stock of lies being almost spent, prefaces any muttering with the statement "to be honest" or terminates any assertion with "I really believe that".
Obviously, every time Redknapp Jnr lies to the Sky viewer, it is not a feasible trading strategy to simply go opposite the hyperreal untruth. Disinformation is easily flipped into information and the roles of double and treble bluff cannot be discarded in any analysis. Consequently, the sources of disinformation need to be cumulative and properly weighted to provide a suitable overall picture.
Premiership football betting markets are by no means the only inappropriate neorealities and a similar strategy may be developed for the addressing of international financial markets utilising the financial media, newsletters and other (dis)informational sources.
The shameful complicity of the bookmakers, some footballing institutions and the mass media deserves to be confronted. The current template is psychopathic and, by using their disinformation against their interests, we are able to undermine this specific area of corruption. If we all rumble Butch then he is going to be required to spit a truth from time to time as we force the man to climb the pyramid of Baudrillard's phases of the image - effectively creating the dynamic whereby the "fated" event is driven a small distance towards becoming a "real" event. As a result, any meta-analysis of media disinformation has to evolve analytically in real-time via the use of databases of disinformation.
There is an inevitability that we must conclude this post with a quote from the premier social theorist: "To decipher or decode an event is to analyse its relationship with its double: what can it be exchanged for? (and this will be its manifest meaning) - what can it not be exchanged for? (this will be its true meaning)".
Anyway, surely this has to be preferable to banging on about the criminalised individual input of various England footballers during last night's exhibition of albion xenophobia in Baudrillard's city.
Surely...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
