There are any number of ways that football agents can kill and feed off the sport onto which they leech.
In recent posts we have highlighted:
* Roy Hodgson's selection for Euro 2012 where 14 out of the 23 player squad were represented by four firms of agents (Base, Stellar, Wassermann Media and Key Sports). Base also represent Hodgson.
* The upcoming Merseyside derby will see up to 14 players - Carragher, Johnson, Kelly, Gerrard, Henderson, Shelvey, Wisdom, Howard, Baines, Hibbert, Jagielka, Distin, Osman and Naismith - represented by just three companies - Base, Stellar and Wassermann Media.
* The Manchester United versus Real Madrid fix where Jorge Mendes and Gestifute represented Ronaldo, Pepe, Di Maria, Coentrão and Jose Mourinho of Real and Nani of Man Utd which, as Nani was the source of the outcome, is highly problematical in itself. Mendes also represented non-playing participants Carvalho and Anderson.
These three cases are deliberately structured to be non-meritocratic and potentially corrupt with the core agents and individuals able to manipulate match outcomes to suit their power bases, transfer activities and insider betting activities.
This is the end of football as these shady groups are legally untouchable and markedly criminalised.
But there are shades of crime - some agents oscillate between white, grey and black markets while others gyrate between grey and black and still others reside comfortably and very profitably in the underground.
The most skilled operators are the former as they attempt to clean up past misdemeanours via reputational consultants and the like.
John Colquhoun - The Anonymous Football Editor of the Guardian
Yesterday in the Guardian, there was a piece of simplistic dross by some sycophantic pseudo be-spectacled slime entitled "Do We Need Wikileaks Anymore?"
The question should surely be whether we need the Guardian newspaper anymore.
The editor, Alan Rusbridger, refuses to communicate over the fact that the Guardian's football output is under the direct control of John Colquhoun of Key Sports agents.
Instead Rusbridger desperately scrambles around to hide any evidence of this reality being so.
But just think of the benefits that this anonymous control of a leading newspaper's output has on the integrity of the game.
Players represented by John Colquhoun/Key Sports and associated agents (see above) receive free and positive exposure for their clients, transfer negotiations might be played out in public (check the Guardian output on the protracted Theo Walcott contract negotiations), corrupted match officials are given support and credence in return for future favours, malicious media gossip can be surreptitiously put into the public domain, betting strategies (for Mr Colquhoun is a professional gambler too) can be value-added by providing disinformation on matches to come which helps link the paper to the bookmaking industry. Colquhoun was even the hidden face behind the Secret Footballer farce which transferred from paper to book leading to more profits for the Guardian Group.
For a national newspaper in a deep financial crisis, adaptive strategies should be created to save the paper.
But these strategies should be sound business projects and not a distortion of truth for proprietary financial gain.
Rusbridger knows the score but is too busy hobnobbing with the great and the good to pay anything other than lip service to the ethics of journalism.
Wikileaks bravely blew the whistle on corrupting powers across the planet while the Guardian newspaper under the tutelage of Mr Rusbridger decided that such bottom up anti-corruption wasn't for the likes of a middle class "left of centre" organ and did the dirty on Wikileaks repeatedly...
... and once again for proprietary financial gain.
The people mentioned in this post are extorting the game that gave them a chance.
Pre-Thatcher, football was about players and fans...
... post-Thatcher, it has become a plaything for corrupt middlemen, underground bookmakers, criminalised referees and institutions, gutter media, rogue players and mafiosi from around the world.
These people distort our realities and then squirrel away their illicit gains in suitable offshore tax havens while the rest of us are told to do the austerity thing.
Thatcher would be proud of them all.
And she would be particularly proud that the only "left of centre" British broadsheet is now what it is.
© Football is Fixed 2006-2013
