There are, undoubtedly, some characters in the game who are more murky than Peter Kenyon.
But, despite this proviso, you wouldn't want him going out with your daughter, would you?
This week Kenyon, who tries to justify the stability of one of the most psychopathic entities in world football, decided that it was a suitable time to lecture others from his House of Cards. It is time that the non-Big 4 teams "got their houses in order" stated Uncle Fester, carefully avoiding any reference to Chelsea's financial security being based on their ability to repay Roman Abramovich over £600 million ($1,200 million) within a period of 18 months if the oligarch's legal travails should prove too arresting.
Referring to the proposals to dilute the foreign players in the game, Kenyon continued "we shouldn't dumb down the game and use artificial ways to get an even platform".
Coming from the chief executive of a team that utilises as many 'artificial' ways as possible to gain an unfair advantage both on the field of play and off it, this is a little disingenuous.
Artificial levelling of the playing field is a bad thing.
Artificial corruption to tilt the playing field is a good thing.
At Football Is Fixed, we try to assess the game and its hyperrealities while not losing sight of the postmodern template in which it must exist.
There was virtually nothing in the mainstream press about corruption and the impact of betting markets upon football match outcomes until we started this blog around 21 months ago.
There still isn't.
But conversations among the fans have altered considerably.
The Illusion is no longer being bought to anywhere near the same extent.
Certain Illusions are able to repeatedly morph into new corrupt structures in response to externalised analyses, assessments, regulatory impacts and investigative journalism. Financial markets would fall into this category. So many of the key decisions are taken in very shady places with no public oversight. Cartels, monopolies, fragmented cartels, insider trading, collusion and price fixing are the accepted norm. Each crisis is followed by toothless new regulation which merely serves as a new structure for the chosen few to game the system all over again for proprietary profit.
Other narratives are only able to exist for a window, the narrative is not sustainable - think holocaust.
Other Illusions are in the final stages of their fake realities - think horseracing or greyhound racing, where punters understand that they are being fleeced but accept it as a form of addictive self-enslavement.
Both of these 'sports' are entirely gambling entities.
The impact of the bookmakers has converted both of these 'sports' from ones of mass entertainment and attendance to ones of mass apathy and small gatherings of individuals with personality disorders, both on-course and off.
Football, particularly the English Premiership, is following the same path.
There are only two options for fake hyperrealities in a postmodern world.
Either they do the holocaust thing or they do the horseracing thing.
Football is slowly but surely succumbing to a future of psycho-soccer, the ultimate global gambling product.
Of course, nobody will watch it (witness the small attendance for the Manchester United v Portsmouth 39th Step experiment in Lagos).
But addicts will gamble on rigged markets with the aid of a compliant mass media.
We're pretty much already there - welcome to the brave new world of #########, ##########, the Association of Major Levy Payers, ##########, ########, the ###############################################, bungs, private equity, insider trading, coercion, kickbacks, the illegal underground Far East betting markets, rogue players and predatory pricing and trading.
Punishment rarely fits the crime.
Compare two national leaders, each responsible for illegal wars, torture and mass killings, while carefully ignoring the Geneva Conventions.
Each reinvents themselves as faith-based healers.
One is Serbian and is arrested and put on trial for war crimes in Den Haag.
The other is English and is serving his catholic confessional on the peripheries of the horrors that he helped to unleash in the Middle East. It will be a plum job in Belgium rather than a padded cell in the Netherlands for Mr Blair.
Punishment fitting the crime?
Having spent too much time with my lawyers of late, I'll spend the next part of this post addressing justice and punishment in the arenas of geopolitics, finance and football.
* The Guardian and Joey Barton - There is a rancid piece of journalism in The Guardian today on the release of Joey Barton from prison. The reactionary response to the flawed personality of Barton is totally inappropriate from a newspaper that:
i) Gives a voice to spokespeople from Ladbrokes to peddle betting disinformation about the forthcoming markets.
ii) Allows Keith Pullein of the bookmaker-controlled Racing Post to provide equivalent disinformation from a statistical perspective.
iii) Closely works with certain leading agents to plant 'transfer news' stories to facilitate or massage fees for the agents.
iv) Provides regular columns for the players linked to these agents either via ghost writing or interviews.
v) Allows individual players closely associated with the ################### to place their bobbins journalism in the paper.
####################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################################
It has come to something when we would have to say that the Telegraph offers a more balanced and less corrupt coverage of the sport than The Guardian.
The key point here is this. Barton did his crime and did his punishment.
The players and bookmaker's lackeys who write for The Guardian are being paid handsomely for their role in the demise of our great game.
Crime.
But no punishment.
* Nike and Joey Barton - The scrapping scouser has been dropped by Nike for "bringing the brand into disrepute".
We would have thought that Nike are quite capable of achieving such brand depreciation by themselves via their rampant use of sweatshop labour in the Third World (sic).
Why pick on Barton?
Disproportionate punishment, that's why...
* Insider trading in the City of London - Since insider trading was changed from being a perk of the job to being a crime in 1981, there has not been one conviction for such rigging of the markets.
In over a quarter of a century, insider trading has never occurred.
Apparently.
Disability Benefit and Dole Fraud are rampant but Market Fraud is conspicuous by its absence.
Further regulation was introduced in 2001 allowing, finally, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) the power to bring criminal charges.
Still nothing.
Until this year when the FSA has, from out of the blue, launched three insider cases in a week. Traders at Swiss bank UBS and JPMorgan Cazenove were arrested for alleged insider dealing on Tuesday as police raids sent a chill through the UK capital’s trading rooms. Tuesday’s raids came less than a week after the agency charged a veteran former Cazenove partner with a dozen counts of insider dealing between 2003 and 2005.
Insider trading is also rife in football - certain Premiership managers ######################################## in the Premiership season, for instance.
For goodness sake, some industry insiders have even bought information from Dietrological (our Football Information Provision Service) and offered us inside information in return.
Any sign of any prosecutions here?
Get real...
* Corruption in Basketball - Although you would have been hard-pressed to notice it if you only read the output of the Murdochracy, Tim Donaghy, the NBA referee who rigged games on behalf of bookmakers was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment on Tuesday.
This is a cover up.
The lenient sentence is one giveaway but there are many others.
No attention was paid to the several hundred phonecalls between Donaghy and fellow referee Scott Foster during the period of his misdemeanour.
Why has there been no absolute proof to rebut Donaghy's accusations that results were manipulated to boost television ratings and the league's visibility?
Donaghy whistleblew the fraternisation between match officials, coaches, owners, players, the authorities and bookmakers but no new regulation has been introduced to prevent future repeats of this episode.
Of course, the Murdochracy carefully filter the news hyperrealities that ##################################.
Hence the Donaghy story was buried.
As one reader wrote earlier in the month: "I am very tempted to put some money on the Premiership title not being decided until the final game of the season, this and every other year until Sky lose their grip".
Murdoch is untouchable.
No punishment.
* Financial Shenanigans in the USA - A Congressional Sub-Committee last week estimated that the US Treasury loses $200 billion dollars per year in offshore tax abuses.
Check out the conviction rates for Tax Fraud. Many bastions of western shareholder capitalism even offer a regulatory structure whereby tax evasion is legal.
Or, check out the financial rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the Federal Reserve. The lack of strategic thought in the rescue package effectively allows these two insolvent mammoths of mammon to issue their own debt and exchange it for loans from the government - the equivalent of, as The Economist puts it: "having access to the printing press" for US dollars.
Punishment fitting the crime again...
* Teflon Agents - On top of the Luton Town fracas which clearly demonstrated that whistleblowing is punishable by banishment and excommunication, while illegal bungs activity is rewarded with official impunity, many agents abuse Black players, in particular, in their very murky sector.
So Willie McKay is Joey Barton's agent and yet, for example, The Guardian is very careful how they word any column inches relating to the agent/ horserace trainer/ bookmaker character from Glasgow.
Furthermore, there is never any mention of how agents manipulate the loopholed regulations for profit at the expense of African players.
Economics is all about incentives and an agent has far more interest in developing a long-term relationship with a leading manager or club than with a particular West African player.
The only exceptions to this general rule are the rare geniuses like Didier Drogba.
We know of more than one agent who, while claiming to represent the player, are actually representing the buying or selling club. The desperation that exists across Africa means that families are taking on huge amounts of debt just to get their talented offspring into one of the thousands of soccer schools that offer a remote chance of a career in European football.
The agents game this desperation.
They understand that African players will sign virtually anything to escape the grinding poverty of globalisation.
Via this illegal linkage between club and agent, profits are shared at the expense of the disenfranchised player.
Any sign of any punishment here? Yeah right...
* Ulvaro Uribe - When Uribe managed to release anti-corruption politician Íngrid Betancourt and, less gloriously, several US mercenaries or security contractors or whatever hyperreal term is used to label these agents of illegal wars, he timed the daring raid to coincide with his own bid to overturn the Colombian laws that prevent a leader seeking a third term.
Altruism and Self-Interest.
But not in equal quantities.
By using the Red Cross symbol on military planes during the rescue, Uribe has ensured that huge numbers of innocent and brave individuals globally have had their lives put at significantly greater risk just so he can continue with his psychopathy as a US puppet in a US client state.
And this is prior to considering his illegal cross-border military forays into Ecuador, the biased targeting of FARC left-wing drug barons as opposed to AUC right-wing drug barons, and the role of several of his top lieutenants in this self-same cocaine trade.
No punishment here either.
Noam Chomsky states that: "We have a state-based economic system".
As taxpayers money is utilised on both sides of the Atlantic to save the financial system from implosion, this assertion is clearly proved.
The same Illusory reality exists within English football - we have a state-based economic system.
Some members of our Trading Team have undertaken consultancies for the British government and, in the course of the research and think-tanking, found that there was no interest in the inappropriate and corrupt linkages between Premiership football and the bookmaking industry.
Tessa Jowell was particularly obstructive but, then again, her estranged (and strange) husband is, like Blair, one of Berlusconi's buddies.
'Nuff said.
Honoré de Balzac: "Behind every great fortune lies a forgotten crime".
No punishment.
Jean Baudrillard: "Monopoly structures (and any state is a monopoly, since it claims a monopoly in the political and social spheres) cannot but secrete a para-political society, a mafia of some sort, to control this form of generalised corruption. It is pure hypocrisy on the part of the political authorities to fight this mafia, since it is an emanation of those authorities themselves".
No punishment.
A working class bloke from Liverpool loses the plot big style.
Send him down.
Reduce his wages.
Smash his sponsorship.
Invade his privacy.
Make him a figure of hate increasing the likelihood that someone will take a pop at him again, repeating the hyperreality, selling more newspapers in the process.
Ah! Proper punishment.
Regressive justice.
Just one final question.
Who is most at fault for the rampant corruption in English football?
Joey Barton?
Or the ##################################################################################################################################################################################################################?
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to subscribers only.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
