Richard Scudamore: "Its a fantastic end to the season".
It is fantastic. It is a fantasy.
Sky Television Advertising: "The most amazing weekend ever".
Guy Debord: "... increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities".
Mohammed bin Hammam (Asian Football Confederation President): "Political and vested interests must be completely eliminated... Corruption and match-fixing in the Asian game remain prime concerns".
Richard Scudamore: "... a last day decider is the most important thing for us".
And so we reach the fake finale courtesy of the Premier League, Sky Television and the fragmented cartel of European bookmakers.
Scudamore is a wordsmith as well as a goldsmith and his choices of words are revealing. By describing the seasonal conclusion as fantastic, he elevates the Illusion to spectacular heights. By declaring the importance of the title race going to the wire, Scudamore also exposes the types of hidden agenda that presumably preoccupy the board meetings between himself and his knighted sidekick - "if we can't have the 39th Game to grab some extra profits then we better ensure that the competition covers the full 380 game season".
Scudamore's cage had originally been rattled by Kevin Keegan's assertion that the Premiership is "boring" which, of course, from a footballing perspective, it most certainly is due to the twin impacts of power and fantasy. Always quick to defend his criminalised brand, Scudamore carefully addressed the issue of the Big 4 dominance: "I heard someone say that there are four teams who monopolise - my definition of monopoly is when one does". And, for once, the antisocial-personality-disorder-wordsmith is correct. The leading league protagonists are cartelised rather than monopolised.
However, Scudamore failed to refer to the problems relating to the real monopoly - the monopoly called the Premier League. The peculiar structure which allows virtually all of the major decisions to be made by one heavily tarnished individual is entirely monopolistic. As small a pool of referees as possible directly governed by Scudamore's hidden hand has ensured that we have been presented with the allegedly ultimate weekend in return for the ultimate profit for the bookies, the media and the Premier League coffers.
Monopolies are very difficult to undermine as monopolistic providers have a wide array of tactics to undermine any potential competition. Think back to Kerry Packer's attempts to form a parallel reality to Test Cricket in the 70's. Despite being one of Australia's richest men, Packer was only able to split the sport temporarily before the game adjusted to the new realities, and the unprincipled greed merchants who sold out to the apartheid rand were merely self-harming career wise. Monopolies are also impossible to break up as the feedback loops demolish the profitability of a whole range of sectors who leech off the monopoly body in a parasitic manner. Indeed, US lawyers, in the light of the XM-Sirius deal, are wondering what it would take to get any monopolistic merger stopped.
Which brings us to the product, the commodity that is the Premiership. Just as the Greeks refer to the Turkish rape of Smyrna as "The Catastrophe", the demolition of English football at the hands of a bunch of oligarchs and bookmakers is also catastrophic. The laws of the game have proved immaterial as the match officials have worked to ensure the reality of the Illusion.
We have reached the ridiculous stage where Avram Grant, not content with having presided over the massive corruption which has ensured that Chelsea, a team the equal of Everton, are in the Champions League Final and in the Premiership Title decider, is now suggesting that the rules of the game be altered to allow a play-off between Manchester United and The Fucking Immigrants if the teams are level on points tomorrow evening. When we suggested last week that a series of global play-offs would be a serial moneyspinner, we were not expecting anybody to be really thinking such thoughts. At least, not yet!
It is evident that, if you are manager of a business that is in the game of buying success through corrupt mechanisms, you are going to bend the rules and regulations to seek proprietary profit. Grant speaks it but Abramovich does it; Scudamore speaks it and does it.
This is not football. There have been numerous comparisons made with 1968 when the two Manchester giants went into the last day level on points while Paris burned. The title was won by the less powerful outfit before the more powerful one went on to win a glorious European Cup Final due to Best and Stepney. There is no link between these phases of the image - 1968 was proper football; 2008 is a phantasmagoric fantasy. 1968 was proper revolution; 2008 offers colour-coded pseudorevolutions spectacularised by global power.
Martin O'Neill stated this week that: "Rafa doesn't respect anything". But, who does? Liverpool buy off match officials and Benitez stays schmuck; Chelsea buy the Champions League Semi Final and Benitez does the apoplectic thing. Rafa's rule = corruption is cool when it is in our favour but a travesty of justice when against the Texan Reds. Rafa evidently doesn't do rationality of argument either.
So, what about the fantastic best ever weekend brand? Well, there have been numerous "private" discussions between referees within the PGMOB regarding the choice of match officials for the relegation fantasy. In that relegation will cost a team a small fortune, believers in proper football might have hoped that integrity might have been invited to the Final Day Extravaganza. Not so. One team is down whatever happens and one team will have a heavy dose of corruption against their interests courtesy of a PGMOB official. Considering the £20 million that will ooze out of this club's bank account as a result of demotion, this particular outfit should have spent the week brainstorming trade hyperrealities rather than anything so Real as team formations and tactics. As we said, this is not football.
And the Title? There is not one major Asian layer who still believes the title race to be a going concern. C'est fini. And the winner is... Well, Dietrological clients will find out tomorrow whether we are still with our season long position on United, or whether we have hedged our positions, or whether we are going with Abramovich's money.
Debord: "pseudoplayful enthusiasms are aroused by an endless succession of ludicrous competitions, from sports to elections". Anyway, in 24 hours time, we will be able to start looking forward to the next brand of the product. And, it will be different if only because New Labour has gone and done the xenophobic nonsense thing again. Fresh from his success in achieving 20,000 less immigrants over the last year, the Immigration Minister who hails from an Irish immigrant family, Liam Byrne, has declared that all non-EU footballers who sign for English teams will have to prove their knowledge of the English language. But, why pick solely on players. How good is the English of Rouble Abramovich? Or Thaksin Shinawatra? Or Alisher Usmanov? This is a standard English template - if you are a refugee fleeing persecution then fuck off home; if you are Boris Berezovsky looking for somewhere to park your ill-begotten gains then welcome to Blairworld. Ignoring the fact that behind every great fortune is a forgotten crime, the psychopaths are allowed in while their victims are revictimised. To have The Filthy Rich you have to have The Dirt Poor.
We'll finish today with Debord's description of the spectacle: "... where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitomy of reality".
We hope that you take ironic pleasure from the completion of this Illusion - a pseudo-justification for a counterfeit life - and we may all look forward in anticipation to Senegalese forwards swearing allegiance to the crown just to be able to partake in Scudamore's Hyperreality 2008/09.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
