"The whole system of information and the media is a gigantic machine for producing the event as sign... - in short, for producing non-events" - Jean Baudrillard.
And what could be a bigger non-event than a former Premiership footballer paying off some gambling debts by doing an inside job for a bookmaker? The player in question earned £50K, the amount he was indebted to the layers, for getting himself sent off and persuading three of his colleagues to get booked in a match. And this is news? From the periphery of an essence of a hyperreality, the media have dragged up this inconsequentiality of an event. Inconsequential to all but the player concerned, that would be...
And where should the hyperreal finger of blame be pointing? At the bookmakers who acted on this "inside information" or on the player who activated the scam in desperation? Well, Arsène Wenger hyperventilated at his Friday news conference before stealing the weekly prize for reactionary thought by declaring that the player "should be banned for life with no hearing". Surprisingly, considering the machinations undertaken against his Arsenal team, Wenger still seems to hover in a state of semi-denial as to the hyperreal state of the illusion known as the Premiership. Wenger's mutterings could have been recorded on a psychotherapist's couch - disjointed musings as flashes of the hyperreality impacted on his subconscious: "...match fixing is horrible. I never could believe that it could happen here... You want justice to be done. If you want to win the game and you know that the matches are fixed, the sport has no chance... At the moment the gambling exists and it is difficult to stop it... Until now I never had a feeling it was not fair". Presumably, Wenger is fusing two separate neorealities here - the peripheral one regarding Mr 50K and the rather more serious one relating to the corruption in the Premiership. Mr 50K does not provide an iota of proof as to the true levels of corruption underpinning the betting markets which, in turn, undermine the integrity of the game. Mr 50K does provide a media window - a small opportunity to move the illusion towards reality for as long as the media allow the story to run. In the world of the illusion, that is all he is.
The player at the eye of this media storm is said to be "ashamed and full of remorse". What about the bookmakers? Any indication of shame or remorse there? And this is peripheral nonsense in the big scheme of things. A Premiership player, or anyone else for that matter, is able to place bets of £2.5 million in the Far East on the day of a Premiership match without any issues. £50K... News?...
The FA, apparently, have strict rules against anyone "betting on matches or competitions in which they are involved or have influence over". Laughable - the FA is managing to myopically avoid an awful lot of liquidity out there. As usual in the world of regulation and oversight, incompetent or corrupt are the choice of calls here.
Dietmar Kamper: "When the horizon disappears, what then appears is the horizon of disappearance". And so with our chain of hyperrealities relating to the grey area where Premiership Football meets the Global Betting Markets. Mr 50K represents a new horizon, but a fake horizon. Or at least, it is fake until we consent to it as a piece of societal illusion. According to Lyotard: "Consensus is the ultimate form of totalitarianism" and we must withhold our consent to these entirely fallacious hyperrealities.
The player is "recuperating" at the Sporting Chance clinic in Hampshire. Undoubtedly named by Orwell, this ruse of privatisation charges players for being victims in a corrupt system and, for marketing purposes, allows snippets of privacy to leak into the media for the purposes of guerrilla promotion dressed up as illusory realities. The man chased his losses to the bookies and is now chasing his losses to the labyrinthine world of private medicine. Pity the man, don't blame him. Blame the unregulated system for allowing the football and gambling sectors to cosy up so inappropriately closely. Pity the people betting the opposite way on this inside job. At the very least, one would like to think that the guilty bookmaker would return its winnings on this boiler room scam. We will dream on...
The scam is simple. Players help to rig matches. Forwards and goalkeepers are particularly high risk positions. Whether coerced or willingly involved, the player offers a prime route to control of match outcome. Bookmakers trade inside control of games against their competitors. This is called proprietary trading and, surprisingly, is not called insider trading, for that is what it undoubtedly is. Possession of the corruption is regarded as competitive advantage - that competitive advantage is the control of the outcome of that football match you have just remortgaged the extension to attend with your family. Comprendez?
Burnley Hillbilly, Happy Hillman, was the first player to have the rulebook thrown at him for insider goings-on and that was about 120 years ago. There has not been much regulatory activity since. While in the meantime, unfortunately, the wisdom of the early guardians of the game who kept football and gambling strictly apart, and that is properly "strict" not like the FA's version of "strict", has been superceded by the creation of edifices that fully define the sport of football as, primarily, a gambling medium.
The Grand National - a hyperreality loosely based on horse cruelty.
The English Premiership - a hyperreality loosely based on fan cruelty.
Baudrillard: "Illusion is the fundamental rule... Either the world is wholly real, or it is wholly illusion. Any compromise between the two is weak thinking... Given the mass of evidence, there is no plausible hypothesis but reality. Given the mass of evidence to the contrary, there is no solution but illusion".
The interest no longer lies in the intricacies of the matrix that is the Premiership tournament. Medals and demotions, like the hierarchical prize money, are the signs of reward and authenticity. Yet they are, at best, valueless and, at worst, devaluing. The "real" interest lies in observing the body of the hyperreality itself. Macro rather than solely micro. How will this corruption unwind? Which hyperrealities await on the journey to football's termination?
Baudrillard concludes: "The only suspense that remains is that of knowing how far the world can de-realise itself before succumbing to its reality deficit or, conversely, how far it can hyperrealise itself before succumbing to an excess of reality (the point when, having become perfectly real, truer than true, it will fall into the clutches of total simulation)".
Whether one chooses to address climate change, the linkage between football and gambling, the oil industry, the war of terror, the privatisation of utilities, "free" trade, the financial sector etc etc, pseudorealities are at the focus of the marketing paradigm as the overlords of the systemic corruption optimise their short-term objectives to everybody's long-term distress.
Propaganda and lies...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
