"Doubt is not a pleasant position, but certainty is absurd" - Voltaire.
In other countries, when there is a crisis in a sport, the crisis is branded.
Symbolic actions are perpetrated that adjust thresholds, tweak regulations, punish the alleged miscreants as territory is lost and gained via strategic power plays.
Think calciopoli.
In England, we have enough miscreance to sink a battleship but there is no branding of the shenanigans, there is only self-regulation or, even better, no regulation at all; no loopholes are addressed, whistleblowers are beyond the pale and, above all, there is no fear of punishment.
BSkyB.
News Group.
The Murdochracy.
Forces of corporate darkness.
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But we do not expect to get our phones tapped, thank you very much.
And neither did PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor nor Sir Ferguson of Manchester.
The former received a nice £700,000 out of court settlement from News Group in order to keep quiet about it, as the Murdochracy did not wish for a public hearing.
This is serious stuff which makes it all the more strange that Dibble have decided that no criminalities have been undertaken here.
The tapping of phones of industry insiders by a business with betting market operations in-house is potentially the ultimate form of insider trading - being privy to primary level inside knowledge without the source being aware that the information has been leaked.
The advantage is marked - the surveillance results in a market edge on the source itself!
There are so many people within the English game, at all strata, with an active interest in the underground and private betting markets, that the monitoring of such individuals by an organisation such as BSkyB is systemically problematical.
BSkyB, like all other industry core operations, understand where the scallywaggery is taking place.
The proprietary market advantage of such courses of action are significant.
When they are not tapping phones, the Murdochracy spends its time developing a monopoly, with the active involvement of the ScudamoreWorld entity known as the Premier League.
When we posted about the demise of Setanta and the potential salvation offered by Len Blavatnik, we suggested that it was highly likely that the Premier League would put an inappropriate and impossible deadline on the negotiations.
And they did.
Having heard of the proposed takeover on the Monday, ScudamoreWorld gave all parties just four days to undertake the full negotiation process.
This is a squeeze.
Setanta was taken out of the game.
Everything was going to plan.
When BSkyB won the rights to five of the six packages for Premier League tv rights 2010-13, there was only one thorough evaluation of the auction process in the media.
This was to be found in the Financial Times (FT).
The Premier League, after taking into account inflation, actually received less bid money than on the last occasion.
The FT said at the time that BSkyB had still overpaid and that they had effectively thrown money at putting Setanta "in its place... The results of the auction throw into question how Setanta will reach breakeven point on its subscriber model."
It is always easier to spend someone else's money in the future in order to tie up a deal than it is to deal with Reality.
BSkyB were betting the business on demolishing Setanta because of one very key loophole built in to the BSkyB/Premier League self-regulatory concoction.
The Premier League had reserved the right to put the final year of Setanta's 2010-13 deal out to tender if necessary.
This is key.
A Premier League loophole allows for one media company to have exclusive rights to ALL Premier League games from season 2012/2013.
Total monopoly.
Alas for human villainy!
This was beginning to take on all the aspects of a neatly cornered market under absolute systemic control but, then, monopolistic domination was trumped by competitive markets, and regulatory bodies started to take an interest in developments.
It was Our Great Leader's response to the latter that was most revealing.
Scudamore slammed the decision by Ofcom, the regulators, to investigate the way BSkyB buys rights to screen matches in the Premier League.
Our Great Leader moaned that the regulatory body had "ignored the representations of content owners", like the only thing that matters in monopolistic territories is the desires of the monopolists themselves.
But both BSkyB/Premier League have problems here due to the Murdochracy's overpayment for the 2010-13 rights, the spiralling crescendo of the Depression and the full impact of the proposed Ofcom changes.
Which are, namely...
... that BSkyB sell on packages to competitors and that subscription rates are reduced and that the allocation of rights is a more open process with effective monitoring of the procedures.
As the Financial Times stated, BSkyB's status has "come under threat".
The other issue for BSkyB/Premier League is the nature of the 'new' competition, ESPN.
The US media company are a far more dangerous opposition than scanty Setanta and they already possess a huge portfolio of global sports with which to fatten their consumer packages.
ScudamoreWorld have, in Reality, scored a monopolistic own goal here - by antisocially destroying the competitiveness of the sector, they have unwittingly introduced a bigger beast onto the stage.
This has all the potential to be a global battle, as typified by the recent press release from Real Madrid highlighting the need for a European Super League, and the takeover of the Asian Champions League by Murdochracy/Premier League.
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One might think that the combination of bung inquiries, money laundering investigations, rampant match fixing, bribery and coercion of match officials, the advancement of the private betting markets, the unsustainable debt, links to horseracing industry, extensive insider trading and cornering of markets, the creation of a systemic monopoly, the lack of role of government, the repeated takeover of clubs by criminal money, child trafficking, rogue agents fronting betting consortia, that sort of thing, might have resulted in a branded entity akin to calciopoli in Italy.
When does it become Follywood?
Give us our Hyperreal Brand.
Corruption in Follywood.
No more Scudamore clichés and deliberate untruths in the threads of dishonesty emanating from his hacks.
"This is the source of our profound boredom" - Jean Baudrillard.
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