Imagine, for one moment, that Richard's Scudamore and Keys never existed, that the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) was never concocted, that hyper-owners were not buying the outcomes of football matches, that European bookmakers were not behaving similarly. No hidden agendas and no corrupted matches - proper football without the odious influence of psychopathic power.
As season 2007/2008 has been, by a considerable distance, the most criminalised version of the Premiership brand yet modelled, we have been thinking these very things.
What would a truly meritocratic Premiership League Table appear like on this, the eve of another of Sky's marketed extravaganzas? Check it out.
1. Arsenal: 33 - 79
2. Man Utd: 33 - 72
3. Everton: 33 - 61
4. Chelsea: 33 - 58
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5. Liverpool: 33 - 57
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6. Portsmouth: 33 - 51
7. Tottenham: 33 - 50
8. Blackburn: 33 - 50
9. Man City: 33 - 49
10. Aston V: 33 - 48
11. Fulham: 33 - 42
12. Sunderland: 33 - 42
13. Wigan Ath: 33 - 40
14. West Ham: 33 - 39
15. Middlesbro: 33 - 39
16. Reading: 33 - 35
17. Newcastle: 33 - 35
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18. Bolton: 33 - 31
19. Birmingham: 33 - 30
20. Derby: 33 - 9
Before we pull a few figures out of this Real Table to compare with the Illusory Table that appears in all other locations, we would just wish to address a few issues on how this Real hierarchy was compiled. Every Premiership match has been assessed for the impact of the PGMOB officials and Real outcomes estimated from a combination of the match data, our proprietary databases and the efficacy of the key match decisions. We make no claim that such a clunky analysis is significant in its levels of robustness, but that isn't the point. Teams that have a major points differential between their Real and their Illusory totalisations is what we are after. And, sure enough, that is what we have got.
* Arsenal approach Super Sunday's match against Man Utd six points adrift and, with Webb getting his 18th live game of the season (no other official has refereed more than 10), hope is not currently a common commodity at The Emirates. Without the machinations of the PGMOB, Arsenal would, in fact, be 7 points ahead of United and the balance of power would be very different indeed - particularly with the Gunners having been relieved of Champions League participation for the run-in. Proper Football would have produced the title for the only team capable of playing Total Football. This outcome would have been good for the game but the manipulated outcome is good for the power brokers, and the game itself is always to be found despairing in this deepening shadow nowadays.
* Chelsea enter the weekend merely three points behind United and most definitely in the race for the Illusory Title - they could theoretically be joint leaders by Monday evening. Reality would, in truth-fact, place the highly unpleasant west London operation fully 21 points adrift of the Real leaders, Arsenal. 21 points?! Instead of being involved in a three-way battle with the Merseyside pair over the Champions League 3rd/4th slots and the European Club Forum 5th position, Abramovich has bought a tilt at the Illusory title.
* In a similar manner to the targeting of Arsenal, it will annoy Gunners fans to realise that, if anything, Tottenham have been even more badly treated by match officialdom in 07/08. It would be our assertion that the link between Spurs and Mansion88 bookmakers is the problem area here. But, do not, for one minute, think that an ethical backlash is being perpetrated by the Premier League. This is not an attempt to kick high stakes gambling out of football but rather an attempt to kick particular sorts of high stakes gambling from the game. Makati City is not as welcome in Gloucester Place as certain autocrats from Bangkok and Manchester City.
* Forget Arsenal, forget Chelsea, forget Tottenham, the London club who have been most horribly abused by the establishment this season is Fulham. In 15 years of observation and data, not one team comes anywhere near Fulham's negative points adjustment of -18. Hodgson's men should be safe; instead, they are virtually relegated after the crown decided that they could put up with the third-in-line-to-the-throne effectively being a ginger-gened commoner but were not willing to extend this generosity of spirit to allowing the potential fourth-in-line to be a mixed race Egyptian.
* Corrupt refereeing is not merely an English disease. L'Equipe last week revealed that poor match decisions had altered the outcomes in 85 Le Championnat games to date this season; the Bundesliga had Hoyzer and the Croat link; Serie A created a Berlusconian calciopoli; the regional agendas of match officials in Spain require a study of the discontents of Iberian history prior to assessing match outcomes etc etc. The fact that other territories are focusing on the non-meritocratic impact of referees is twisted by the British mainstream media to be suggestive of a supremacy of the PGMOB officials. "We must be the best because nobody has caught us with our fingers in the till. So give us Respect". Nonsense. By some distance, England is the most criminalised of the major European territories when it comes to match corruption perpetrated by match officials. And worse, there is a sophisticated coordination to these machinations. The selection of match officials needs not only to be entirely randomised but also the pool of available officials is required to be doubled to around forty. Otherwise we will continue to get the sorts of triad twists where the referees for last weekend's four live matches (extra betting turnover making these major focus events) were Webb, Wiley, Dowd and Riley while, for the current weekend's tv matches, the PGMOB have given us Webb, Wiley, Dowd and Marriner.
* With the exception of Arsenal, Everton and Tottenham, all the power teams are able to purchase a points premium over the season. Some, like Chelsea and Portsmouth, are psychopathic in their ventures, others less so. But the big picture impact of this season's machinations is to produce a Premiership version of increasing income inequality leading to increasing points inequality. As with the capitalist version of this template, the increase in rewards (points or power) bear no positive correlation to individual input or to a meritocracy. Current projections suggest that the average points total of the Big 3 will be higher than in any season since the Murdochracy was moulded; in comparison, the bottom 3 teams will have the lowest average points since M-Day. The short-term impact is to make the tournament less competitive while, in the medium term, such increase in Illusory Inequalities will hasten the formation of the European Super League
Once a sporting event is targeted by the money markets, the event no longer exists as sport. The winners and losers will be falsely credited in the history books; the hierarchy between the top and the bottom will be "randomised" by power, which, of course, is not really randomisation at all. New infrastructures will develop based on the fallacious foundations already concreted for perpetuity. The sport will move through the four stages of the image until it is a purely hyperreal illusion, bearing no similarity to the Reality where the journey began. After a decade and a half where Sky have massively destabilised the sport of English football, we are almost at the stage of this simulacrum, this hyperreality.
We still remember what Reality looks like but the waves of disinformation and the doctoring of the illusion constantly force us to look away from where we KNOW we should still be looking.
To finish, lets do a trivial exposé of controlled media disinformation. Last week, Avram Grant, when not, at the prompting of his new PR team, tying us emotionally to the holocaust experience (all Black players should equally be given the air time to share their feelings about imperialism and slavery), the Chelsea manager was kicking up a proper fuss about Sky bringing forward the Everton league game to next Thursday for live tv coverage. Cue much hand-wringing and bleating about the unfair advantage given to Man Utd in the title race etc etc. This is a chutzpah overload. The arrangement (and it was a private arrangement) between Sky and Chelsea was to bring the game forward for the advantage of both parties. Chelsea will have a two day advantage over Liverpool for the major focus Champions League Semi Final in the following week together with a day's extra rest than Man Utd after the European game before the two meet on the following weekend. Meanwhile Sky are given an extra live game to compensate for the seemingly increasingly common tactic of pulling potential live matches when either the betting markets don't suit or Chelsea make a request for a later start - witness Arsenal v Villa or Man City v Chelsea. The illusory nature of Grant's media onslaught was pure neoreality. Unfair advantages are THE core competency at Stamford Bridge and the new date for the Everton match is related not to the league game but to Abramovich's determination that his motley crew will be in Moscow in May when this year's major sporting reward for global oligarchs will be decided.
The key point here isn't that Chelsea are tilting the playing field. Nothing new there. It is that the mainstream media slavishly reported this illusory deception like it was Real.
Its easy if you try.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
