"A history without desire, without passion, without tension, without real events, where the problem is no longer one of changing life, which was the maximal utopia, but of surviving, which is the minimal utopia".
"This disproportion between the human brain and the specific task of the species is a glaring one in the immense majority of our activities (gambling on horses, jogging, TV, not to mention 'sleaze' and politics)".
"... those hyperbrains glued to their computers which, though already considerably underused, diminish themselves even more by having a machine function in their stead".
The Illusion; The Self-Legitimation of Reality; The Self-Legitimation of Knowledge.
The Silly Season was invented for Baudrillard; the absence of any Reality forces a compliant media to focus on waves of Illusion, Hyperreality and Neoreality in order that our conversational agendas are positively correlated with the system's hidden agendas.
And this post is proof that the self-legitimation process works. We are engaging in their Illusion, albeit from a postmodern perspective.
So, Deloitte-Touche have produced their Annual Rich List for World Soccer. For 17 years, this nonsense has been launched and lauded by the media. It is virtually valueless. Why so?
Out of a whole host of reasons, we'd like to focus on just three. And these three areas relate, respectively, to the Baudrillard statements at the top of this post.
* The Deloitte-Touche figures only provide a thin slice of Reality. Far too much of the financial activity in Global Soccer never reaches anywhere near the balance sheets and profit and loss columns of Accountancy World. Proprietary gambling by clubs, the under-the-table payments lubricating the transfer markets, the black-market-economy relating to the buying off of match officials via kickbacks, bribes and/or coercion, illicit capital flows between various power loci within the industry, the offshore financial centres, the money laundering and tax evasion, the perks of a non-regulated trading environment across the board - none of these exogenous major parameters are included in the Deloitte-Touche "analysis". This renders their document worse than worthless - just because you are monitoring the weather, doesn't mean that you comprehend the changes in the climate.
* By feeding irrelevancies into their autistic model, the accountants have produced tabloid research of the lowest degree.
Allegedly, Premiership revenues exceeded £1.5 billion ($3 billion) for the first time in season 2006/07.
Some Premiership matches are liquid to the tune of £1 billion on the Asian Underground Betting Markets.
Total annual revenue = £1.5 bn. Total betting on one match =£1.0 bn.
This next season, the Illusion will ignore the Hyperreality whereby the global betting turnover on one Premiership game will be the equivalent to the total declared annual revenues of the entire Premier League. How Illusory do they wish to be?
* Not content with seeing a very small section of a very big picture, the number-crunchers, those "hyperbrains" with their quantitative "models", do what they do best - they press some buttons that allow a machine to think on their behalf. Illogical Inputs lead to even more Illogical Outputs - Rubbish In, Rubbish Out. So, Deloitte-Touche tell us that all 20 Premiership teams are in the Global Top Fifty. The report also speaks out in support of hyper-owners, saying it was confident that the Premier League's new foreign owners, such as former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, will have a positive effect on the game. The study pointed to the fact that the 2008 Champions League finalists Chelsea and Manchester United both have foreign owners. And Al Capone was fairly successful for a while but that does not make the business model valid.
The Psychopathic will get The Prizes.
"The improvement in cost control which would demonstrate a normal business culture of maximising profitability does not appear to be happening at Premier League clubs" - Dan Jones of Deloitte-Touche.
"The maximisation in illegal revenue streams which would demonstrate a normal business culture of maximising profitability most definitely appears to be happening at Premiership clubs" - Football Is Fixed.
We warned on Monday to expect "backstabbings" at Stamford Bridge and Cuddly Kenyon did not let us down. "Half an hour before Chelsea made the announcement about Grant officially known, I was called by Kenyon. He informed me that the departure of Grant will not affect me" - Henk Ten Cate. Five days later, Kenyon, always his own man, sacked him.
Such dysfunctionality is replicated at the FA. Three times last year, Jack Warner, the controversialist FIFA man at CONCACAF, contacted Geoff Thompson from the FA to request a visit from England to help celebrate Trinidad & Tobago Football's centenary. Three times he was rebuffed.
Warner lost the plot, a response which is rare when he is in close proximity to a financial pot, and erupted: "Nobody in Europe likes England [true]. England - who invented the sport - has never had any impact on world football. England, at no time, has had the love and support of Europe. For Europe, England is an irritant [true again]. There are moves to give it [the 2018 World Cup] to England. I must fight that".
Then, in came European Consultancy Network (ECN) and the world became a different place.
You are going to be hearing a lot about ECN in the next decade. ECN is FIFA's and Sepp Blatter's way of gaining a slice of all of the action for the inner sanctum of their coterie of non-meritocratically elected staff. Markus Ziegler and Peter Hargitay are the FIFA men behind ECN and they will be advising the English FA on which pockets have to be stuffed in order to land the hosting rights to the tournament. Top of the greasing list was Jack Warner. Thompson gets back in contact, Warner clarifies his comments, the match gets the go-ahead, no mention is made by the FA, even off the record, of the 2018 World Cup Bid while one has to assume that Jack has got his fingers in the till, again.
Wow. An ethical entity?
An Autocrat's All Star XI against England Reserves so that highly paid consultants might bribe the three CONCACAF representatives to support the English World Cup Bid, OR, a celebration of the T&T Centenary featuring the founding nation of modern football?
Or, for comparison, check out last night's bookmaker-controlled Friendly between Eire and Colombia in London with Mark Clattenburg refereeing. Inevitably, it became a betting event. What happened to the ethic of referee neutrality in international matches?
And ethics bring us to the final port of call on today's version of our serial moaning-on-and-on...
Yesterday, we satirised the BBC's "Who Will You Support?" promotion in an incredibly witty and, some might say, ironic fashion. Today, we have heard about "Who Should I Cheer For?" which is an ethical take on the Euro 2008 competition.
Quoting Amin Alkhatib: "With no British team qualifying for Euro 2008, many football fans are asking: who should I cheer for? The World Development Movement has developed an ethical ranking website that may help football fans to answer just that question.
"At www.whoshouldicheerfor.com globally conscious football fans can find out how well each country performs on a range of ethical indicators. So if you want to find out which country is doing the most to protect the environment or which spends the most on aid or the military, www.whoshouldicheerfor.com could be just the website you’re looking for.
"The criteria include aid spending, carbon emissions, military spending and corruption... England’s ranking, if they had qualified, would have been second to last".
Oh my gosh, who would win if goals were given for the banning of cluster bombs and the closing of outdated nuclear reactors? Lets check out how Euro 2008 would progress.
GROUP A
1. Switzerland; 2. Portugal; 3. Czech Republic; 4. Turkey.
GROUP B
1. Austria; 2. Croatia; 3. Germany; 4. Poland.
GROUP C
1. Romania; 2. France; 3. Netherlands; 4. Italy.
GROUP D
1. Sweden; 2. Spain; 3. Greece; 4. Russia.
QUARTER FINALS
Switzerland - CROATIA
AUSTRIA - Portugal
ROMANIA - Spain
SWEDEN - France
SEMI FINALS
AUSTRIA - Croatia
Romania - SWEDEN
FINAL
Austria - SWEDEN.
So, there you have it. Sweden should win it. It is interesting that the only nation regarded as less ethical than England is Russia, firmly placed in 16th position. And it was that self-same Russia that we focused on as a wild card bet for this summer's tournament in our post yesterday.
A Spectacular Illusion in total negative correlation with an Ethical Illusion.
Although, how Austria got to the Final when they possess Jörg Haider and a propensity for child abuse, we're not sure. The World Development Movement doesn't measure degrees of autocracy/fascism, nor does it rank child poverty/abuse. Perhaps a more exacting and exact version of the Ethical Table might be produced including these parameters and others such as sexism, unemployment, speciesism etc.
However, most probably, Sweden would still win and England and Russia would still occupy the lowest two positions...
For some reason, England is proving to be a particular culture shock on this visit. Everything is just so tacky and wacky... The pensions industry is fretting that people are cancelling pension provision in order to be able to afford to live now - an entirely rational economic decision. The pensions sector simply hasn't factored in the Reality that there is a mass defection from their games of fear and, increasingly, more and more people neither see retirement as a necessity nor an option.
Work, with a suitable Work/Life Balance, until you drop. If it gets really shit then take a Hegesian route away from an undignified end to one's life. No Fear. No Cost. Simple.
The weird bubble of yummy mummy pseudo-ethical reality is also a major reactionary force in all locations which base their culture on Islington. Yoga teachers are swapping their skills with plumbers without any money changing hands as the yummy's (of both genders) rediscover community, and people are staying in one another's homes as a vacational strategy as the yummy's rediscover friendship. Alienated by their capitulation to a system, whose sole purpose is to maximise the economic input-output ratio, these masses are now rediscovering a more social, ethical and environmental way of living.
The really weird thing is that all these yummy's think that they represent The Awakening. Not so. For thirty years while these yummy's have been grabbing the fruits of an invalid and vicious autocratic system in order to line their existences with plundered gold, to the detriment of all others crushed by this pyramid selling scheme, there have been others who warned of the consequences of unfettered shareholder capitalism while, in parallel, rejecting the consumerist, share-buying and property-owning route to pseudo-wealth. The yummy's took the bait and are now lecturing us on the error of our ways, in their tut-tutting, reactionary and elitist fashion.
It is not known if there are (m)any yummy's reading this blog, but just in case any have slipped through the net, we are finishing today with a joke that must be remembered for all future altercations with this new-moral-army. Offence is the best form of Defence.
Q: What were the first words uttered by Alice Fritzl on being released from the Austrian cellar after 24 years of being incarcerated and sexually abused by her father?
A: "haben Manchester City alles schon gewonnen?" ("Have Manchester City won anything yet?").
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
