The title is a reference to the play by Jean Giraudoux "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place" in which the characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows to be inevitable...
... a little like the Football is Fixed Network.
In this essay, a posthumous Jean Baudrillard argues that the 2019/20 Premier League season is not really a football competition but rather corruption masquerading as football.
Using a systemic match manipulation template, ownership of a cartel of EPL teams, a perverted Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) refereeing body, the 'hacking' of Manchester City, plus extensive doping and fixture list biases, Liverpool have been presented with the title by mafia entities.
All the spectators have known about this season has been in the form of propaganda imagery.
The closely watched media presentations makes it impossible for the fan to distinguish between the experience of what is truly happening, and its stylised, selective misrepresentation through simulacra by the content providers.
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From the beginning, we knew that this season wouldn't happen. After sport as sport and sport as terror, here is sport in the morgue - which leaves us to grapple with football's corpse and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing body which nobody from the Premier League has managed to revive.
Liverpool have secured victory over the corpse of English football.
Football has entered into a definitive crisis.
Sport exists through opening up competition but not in the EPL. In the past, competition functioned as a grading between different teams but now competitive edge is a virtual advantage created by illicit means - matchfixing, insider trading, corruption of referees and doping all on a systemic template.
This is why the season has not taken place. In this sense, the gravity of the non-event in the Premier League is greater than the event itself: it corresponds to a highly toxic window which affects a rotting corpse and which can cause nausea and powerless stupor. Here again, our symbolic defences are weak: the mastery of the end of football escapes us and we experience all this in the uniform shameful indifference of the Sky and BT Sport duopoly.
Non-football is characterised by that degenerate form of football which includes mafia (e.g. John Colquhoun), mafia states (e.g. Malta or Gibraltar), the manipulation of outcome in correlation with insider trading in the betting markets, coercion and blackmail. The corrupted match has taken the place of the legitimate game. It has become the principal focus, the simulacral reality, or rather, in its pure non-competiveness, the reality of non-football. The players bury themselves in their agents' offshore embrace leaving corruption alone on the stage, and including all of us as corruption hostages on the football media stage dominated by 4th Estate fake and hidden agendas (e.g. The Guardian, Der Spiegel). The hostage fan is the phantom actor, the extra who observes football powerlessly. The fan only exists commercially for value and liquidity - pay your subscriptions, buy our merchandise, watch the corruption and shut the fuck up - fantastic degradation of that which was the very core of the beauty of football. With the Premier League, the value of football has plummeted. The EPL has made itself the capitalist master of fan hostage value - the vulgar merchant of the fan hostage market. Taking the place of sport, fan hostage has become synonymous with the debility of football. We are all hostages of media intoxification, induced to believe in football just as we were once led to believe in 'Football Leaks' and the blackmailing operative Rui Pinto - a foot-soldier of the mafia juggernaut destroying football across Europe for the financial benefit of certain mafia (states). We are already strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day. In this sense, the grotesque vaudeville played by the Premier League is a diversion, at once a diversion of both football and terror. Its systemic corruption has at least put an end to the particular corruption and spotfixing of the past, thereby showing the EPL to be in this as in many other respects the perfect accomplice of state terrorism. The systemic corruption in UK football features Malta as a catalyst with regard to matchfixing and transfer market abuses while the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia by the mafia state is equivalent to the murderous attempts perpetrated against whistleblowers by mafia entities in the UK, while such bodies all the time promote the fake coerced patsy Rui Pinto and the passwords allegedly hidden in his head (and, as it happens, on one of John Colquhoun's hard-drives).
This impossibility of proceeding to the act, this utter absence of legitimacy, implies the triumph of blackmail as strategy (in the case of the Premier League, there is still a challenge; with Rui Pinto & John Colquhoun there is only blackmail). The Premier League's abjection lies in it having vulgarised everything: club competition has become a fake entertainment spectacle, the fan a commercial hostage, the violent corruption of the league a scam based on a religious support for one's team and football an impossible comedy featuring a VAR orchestrated by mafia, for mafia, combined with an ignorance of the rules of the game and any interest in the integrity of the sport. Although the media points out VAR as the culprit, the grouping of PGMOB match officials working with the Liverpool cartel of teams should really be in the dock. But the state has helped the EPL become this monstrosity. By allowing the league to monetise small criminalities, the government drove the Premier League towards the mirage of sustainable systemic corruption (like the arms trade or aspects of the City of London).
This evolution of this mercenary league is indeed the only ironic and pleasing trait of this whole story.
We are in neither a sport of war nor a gamble of poker but in a reality of betting markets controlling match events which has wound its way inexorably through 28 years of the Premier League to a denouement in our current events; a sport of fake matches, to which belong those in the Champions League as well as the EPL (the Champions League under Ceferin has been taken over by the same mafia operators behind 'Football Leaks' and the criminalisation of the Premier League). Peripeteias of an anorexic history or an anorexic sport which can no longer be taken as real because it is incapable of conceiving sporting integrity - and God knows the EPL has no integrity - and thus devours itself. It is corrupted football, that of the right to corruption under the green light of the Premier League and UEFA with no precautionary regulation - free market matchfixing must not have obstacles to performativity. On the Richter scale, the 2019/20 Premier League season would not even reach two or three. The history and pre-season were unreal, as though the fiction of an earthquake were created by a manipulation of the match officials, of mainstream media, of the masses. The EPL is neither the strong form nor the degree zero of football, but the weak or phthisical degree, the asymptotic form which allows a pretence of competitive football but no real encounter, the transparent degree which prevents football being seen from the depths of the darkroom where the fan resides.
We should have been suspicious about the insider trading from BT Sport operatives pre-season as they actively contorted the betting markets to their corruption matrix in the same manner as they perpetrated the systemic corruption behind the mafia entity Leicester City stealing the 2015/16 version of the EPL title from Arsenal. The 2019/20 season never began. It had ended prior to its onset. It had already been won and the headlines and war strategies had already been written. As there is no competition, there are no matches. Just markets and a distinction between the prescribed winners and losers.
But these systemic corruptions do not occur in a vacuum.
We expose Liverpool's links with PGMOB match officials, we expose doping at the club, we expose the manner in which proprietary information was stolen from Manchester City, we expose Liverpool FC's links to bookmakers and how such associations energise insider trading and matchfixing, we expose the fixture list manipulations and all other marginal gains supportive of this project.
In the end, the distinction between the winners (Liverpool and their cartel of teams) and losers (Manchester City and other Gestifute-linked clubs) becomes indecipherable as the winners readily become the hostage of the losers; a Stockholm Syndrome that quantums into existence as the 'winners' evolve as hostages of the mafia themselves.
Since this season never began, this season is therefore interminable.
Indeed, Covid-19 might make it literally so.
By dint of dreaming of pure corruption, of an orbital corruption purged of all local and political infusions, the matchfixers have fallen into the arms of the mafia, into the virtual impossibility of football which translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in matches of agreed outcome, as though the irruption of the event of football had become obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse.
The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual (in the manner of a doped up Jamie Vardy) and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to real action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.
In this process, the football clubs are once again revealing. Extracted like molecules in an experimental process, then distilled one by one in the exchange of mafia fake, it is their virtual death that is at issue, not their real death. Moreover, they never die: at best they disappear to reappear as gambling outfits, at worst they enter receivership only to be reformed and renamed in a new virtual unreality. There will never be monuments to current footballers in the manner in which Best or Greaves or Brady or Charles or McNeill are commemorated as everybody will be too ashamed of the modern player, kissing the badge of their agents offshore financial centres while perfecting the persona of a post-career in media disinformation: the collective shame which attaches to the club reflects the absolute degradation of football into fixed fan-boy fake-fun.
The passage to systemic corruption suffers widespread infamy: it supposedly corresponds to a criminally creative elevation of sporting prowess, thus to a psychotic process. It seems that this obsession with the passage to corruption today governs all of our behaviour: obsession with every real, with every real event, with every real corruption, with every associated pleasure which is too real. In fact, so real that it is unreal. Against this obsession with the real we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation which allows to pass the act "in vitro". We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real.
So the media chooses to applaud the array of unbeaten records and stellar performances by Liverpool while ignoring the rancid underbelly of underground mafia corruption that is the very definition of this supposed real.
The holistic of football has not escaped this virtualisation which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted sport, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge (as we see in the corrupted players of yesteryear obfuscating current corruptions on Sky, BT Sport and Match of the Day). Even players have lost the privilege of use value, the privilege of real football. Corruption has passed by that way and it spares nobody.
No more than the politicians, footballers do not know what to make of their real function, their function of corruption and matchfixing. They are pledged to the decoy of football as others are to the decoy of power.
Football has become pure (in the fascist sense) and speculative (in an insider trading sense) to the extent that we do not see the real event that it could be or that it would signify.
Since the 2019/20 (and 2015/16) Premier League titles were won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like if the league title races had actually existed. We will never know what Manchester City taking part with a chance of winning would have been like. We will never know what Liverpool taking part with a probability of being beaten would have been like. We have seen what a state-based systemic corruption is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of a fake sport away from the field of play with no possibility of reaction. But this is not football, any more than $100 million bets on a game is sufficient to make it football. Any more than the direct transmission by BBC/BT Sport/Sky of real time information is sufficient to authenticate the sport. One is reminded of Capricorn One in which the flight of a manned rocket to Mars, which only took place in a desert studio, was relayed live to all the television stations in the world.
While one fraction of the media and political class, specialists in the substitute bench of mental contortions, are whole-heartedly in favour of the systemic corruption (the corruption earns more for UK PLC than legitimacy), and another fraction are against it from the bottom of their hearts - but for reasons no less disturbing, all are agreed on one point: this systemic corruption exists, we have seen it. There is no interrogation into the sport itself or its reality; or into the fraudulence of this corruption, the programmed and always delayed illusion of competitive sport; or into the machination of this matchfixing and its amplification by disinformation, not to mention the improbable orgy of fake media, the systematic manipulation of data, the artificial dramatisation ("surely the most amazing comeback ever!")...
If you do not have practical intelligence, hacks and insider knowledge about the systemic corruption in the Premier League (and few among us do), at least develop a sceptical intelligence towards it, without renouncing the pathetic experience of its absurdity.
But there is more than one kind of absurdity: that of the assassination and that of being caught up in the illusion of assassination. It is just as in La Fontaine's fable: the day there is a real football match in the Premier League you will not even be able to tell the difference.
The mafia of John Colquhoun has become football.
The real victory of the simulators of corruption in football is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation of the real.
A real where match outcomes are in the underground betting markets before the game even starts.
A real where matches are corrupted months ahead.
A real where the utilisation of doping is accepted as a competitive advantage.
A real where players pay managers to play and agents pay national managers for client selection.
A real where a significant percentage of players represented by certain agents are involved in matchfixing.
A real where the UK sports media is entirely captured and performative to the corruption.
A real where only the American-owned Manchester United and Liverpool have a veto on the choice of Premier League chief executive.
A real where some EPL clubs are merely gambling stables e.g. Tony Bloom at Brighton & Hove Albion who sacks employees if their legitimate professionalism interferes with his proprietary matchfixing and market plays - Bloom is paying money out left, right and centre in a desperate attempt to bury his historical crimes.
A real where Match of the Day commentary is added post-game under corrupted editorial inputs.
A real where Manchester United should be 4th from bottom of the league and Crystal Palace bottom sees United instead challenging for a Champions League place and Hodgson being given a legacy based on doping and matchfixing.
And a real where Liverpool FC are champions, were champions before a ball was kicked and will be champions again so long as that is the preferred strategy of state and mafia.
The Premier League no longer takes place.
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