Jean Baudrillard: "Everything seeks its own death including power"
Football is fucked but its impending death could be a liberation.
The perfect storm of mafia control of much of the sport, systemic corruption, insider trading & matchfixing, doping, institutional & media capture and rogue club ownership founded upon a neo-proprietarian template is an unstable vessel in calmer times but, in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic and with climate catastrophe becoming irreversible, football sails in wild and choppy waters.
As the football agent and bookmaker-backed Project Restart desperately lobbied the UK government for special status for the Premier League while tens of thousands were dying in the pandemic, cartels were fragmenting, institutions were in conflict, duopolies were dividing, partnerships divorcing and loyalties splitting in a disaster capitalism free-for-all scrap for a slice of the future of football.
Our temporary and chaotic new normal helps to expose the perfect crime rather than making it pay.
Football's disaster is free market capitalism's too.
By ignoring externalities, butterfly effects chaos into the future through our refusal to properly account for the present.
The football elite enacts a class war based on the already existing inequalities. So, during the pandemic, lower and lesser staff were furloughed while club owners grabbed government handouts; big business was rescued while small and medium enterprises drowned in a Darwinian struggle for survival due to lack of funding; top football clubs rode out the storm via their hotlines to power while lower level clubs were Bury-ed beneath the debris.
British football disintegrated during the coronavirus pandemic - there were no rules for a voided or cancelled Premier League season, player contracts don't mention pandemics, the calendar was too overloaded to allow authentic completion of many tournaments, while in the shadows the broadcasters called the shots as the Premier League's bubble was and is totally dependent on the product being seen worldwide. Football was demolished by covid-19.
Additionally, football has a massive carbon footprint - private jets, away fans, excessive global travel as executives, agents and mafia hopscotch around global hotels. Professional football has existential problems. Football has to change.
Football cannot convince society of any special status in troubled times. Its only strength is its corruption. But football is able to make demands of government due to the muscle afforded the sport based on the bizarre mathematics that determines that the losses to the Treasury due to the corruption in football are far exceeded by the array of revenues and incomes brought into UK PLC by those very same corruptions.
Club versus agents, league versus clubs, cartels of clubs versus the rest of the league, broadcasters versus the Premier League, agents controlling media, all with the menacing market makers and manipulators pulling the strings in the underground. This is unsustainable just like all Ponzi schemes.
The Football is Fixed Network surf the zeitgeist of corruption - that ocean between the reality of the corruption and the fans perception thereof. The 'value' of the Premier League as a brand depends upon the vast expanse between these two states of consciousness. As football fragments into mafia turf wars, the robustness of this infrastructure weakens and security is haphazard.
Zeitgeists change.
The role of the Football is Fixed Network has to be disruptive here.
Terry Steans (former Head of Global Investigations at FIFA): "The [Football is Fixed] brand has taken time, effort, knowledge and expertise to build. Gathering, collating, analysing and interpreting material to provide football fans with insights inside the corruption in the game has come with a cost to you and your family. FIFA and UEFA even the FA should all be interested in the intelligence you have gathered in the quest to counter match fixing and corruption within the game. I say that tongue in cheek knowing that whatever FIFA / UEFA do is superficial and they select the narrative they want to follow along these lines with each scandal that raises it head. The state should be interested as you through your work in this field have done them a great service and they should be protecting the national game from the insidious individuals and groups that have infiltrated it and corrupted it."
Meanwhile, the gap between fan and club expands remorselessly. Private equity operations are asset stripping your beautiful club, sovereign wealth funds are whitewashing the murder of a journalist via the purchase of your local team, global bookmakers are buying your town.
Football is having its soul stolen while the fans face away from the field of play.
And football without fans is nothing. But football as a gambling medium controlled by mafia interests is less than nothing.
Only the fans can save football.
But...
Liquidated former football club Glasgow Rangers liaised with the Scottish Football Association and stole some titles via tax wheezes and abuses relating to UEFA licence anomalies but Glasgow Celtic decided that the best manner in which to expose these shenanigans was to secretly fund an NGO to 'independently' prove malfeasance by the Ibrox club - poor strategy. Stalemate was the result rather than anything resembling justice over Resolution 12 which sought to properly punish Rangers.
We also received excessive grief from Celtic fans when we exposed that their club agent was involved in organised crime and when we demonstrated that the majority shareholder (who is a major bookmaker) insider trades Celtic matches. The duality of wrongs at these two clubs don't make a right but by exposing these hyperrealities, we make enemies at both clubs. Don't blame the messenger.
We exposed Shinawatra's crystal-burying corruptions in his takeover of Manchester City. We also publicised Joe Hart's issues with gambling debts and the City of London police inquiry into matchfixing. Yet we are also the whistleblowers who revealed the existence of the Liverpool cartel of clubs, the apparent control of some of the Professional Game Match Officials Board by Liverpool and the systemic corruptions perpetrated against Manchester City in recent seasons. The issue is the rancid systemic corruption that rules British football through an absence of any institutional oversight or effective media scrutiny or suitable regulation. Don't blame the messenger.
The fake deals in fairy tales. We expose the Leicester City monstrosity of matchfixing and manipulation to steal the EPL title.
We destroy the fairy tale. Don't blame the messenger.
And some reasonably intelligent people object to us pointing out the potential conflicts of interest due to former bookmaker and current professional gambler Tony Bloom owning both Brighton & Hove Albion FC and the Starlizard betting entity (under the stewardship of his cousin). Further objections surface when we point out that Bloom's former employee Matthew Benham owns Brentford and has a trading room set up in the stadium. Both clubs ruthlessly insider trade their own matches to the detriment of their supporters. Don't blame the messenger.
This book is a hybrid of fact and fiction-based-upon-fact and covers the proliferation of systemic corruption in British football from the onset of the Premier League in 1992. The fiction-based-upon-fact sections sometimes incorporate refraction of a reality making it opaque, on other occasions the actors are revealed, while in other instances they are viewed through a prism to a spectrum of multiversal realities. This trilogy will examine corruption in football both systemic and particular and will explore the impending death of football in its current form. Death as liberation. We explore what shapes the future of football might take. This book is also about inequality and putting a dollar figure on human life, the failure of free markets, the avoidance of externalities, the power of plutocratic elites, the roles of disaster capitalism and unsustainable neo-proprietarianism and the not wanting to continue to exist in a world where the 1% become exponentially richer while the rest of us survive at various strata of the precariat hoping that the dice being rolled don't wipe us out in the latest round of the game of life. We reveal much in this book but some content is redacted and many individuals are coded. Names, characters, businesses, states, places, events and incidents may be either the product of a diseased imagination or used in a fictitious manner only linked to the truth via multiversal wormholes. Apparently, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or anywhere in between, or actual events is purely coincidental, a fluke, a freak entanglement.
We eschew full disclosure of the criminalities at play as the issues are general rather than specific. Mafia maneuverings are a constant hustle. It is the bigger picture that needs to change for football to move forward with any semblance of integrity.
We choose constructive engagement but plan for war.
We are whistleblowers who undestand that the best outcome when confronting psychopathic entities is a ceasefire or a score-draw. Although win-win is never on the table of psychopathy, zero-sum leads to mutually assured destruction.
Marginal gains psychopathy underpins neo-liberalism in sport and wider society. The slide towards black market is incremental but unrelenting - doping being an outlier evolving to doping being the norm; a Premier League game that doesn't have matchfixing inputs now being something worthy of comment as the vast majority of events have multiple (often conflicting) corrupt inputs.
Marginal gains is peak strategy for political behavioural scientists and mafia, a nudge here, a nudge there. Grabbing bits of turf left, right and centre, one bit at a time. But marginal gains is how underhand behaviour reveals itself to forensic analysts and psychologists.
Take herd immunity. In the early phases of covid-19, it was obvious, despite denials, that the UK government's policy towards coronavirus was herd immunity. Government strategy sailed as close to the shore of herd immunity as the public zeitgeist would allow at any given time without, at any instance, admitting it.
The football industry exists in a regressive hierarchy primed on fake, fraud and matchfixing and is a hyper-inflated bubble waiting to burst. Crises, on this level, lead to a rewriting of the rule books.
Yet the independent regulator which might enable a cleaner sport with less corruption is now not expected to be active for another five years as football insiders decelerate and deactivate all moves towards regulation of the systemic yet fragmented corruption in the game. The holistic nature of the perfect storm in which we currently reside may only be exited with an equally holistic response. This trilogy of books offers you an entirely new blueprint for global football. Because at the moment we are all watching on in horror as our beautiful sport dies and rigor mortis slowly sets in.
Meanwhile, via the pandemic, the permanent recession, austerity, inflationary forces and the omnipresence of organised crime, and in the wake of Max Planck, free markets and systemic corruption advance one funeral at a time.
Thomas Piketty: "... when slavery was abolished in French and British colonies, it was decided that slave owners would have to be compensated, but not slaves" Since the onset of the Premier League, the projected 'normality' of English football has existed as a tightrope walker above an abyss of abnormality. The mafia magic of ScudamoreWorld was to create an illusion that shrouded these depths from prying eyes - focus on the spectacle, not the underworld. Although the rules of the game had little relevance to Premier League (EPL) realities, the resultant theatrical holistic was stable. There was an efficiency to the evolving corruption underpinning the league. The corruptions were specific. For example, on October 29th 2008, a gang of football agents, bookmakers, players and management (with inputs from mainstream media) fixed a Premier League match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic - the match was arranged for Andrew Johnson to score two goals in a home victory (see conclusion of this chapter for content). Everybody gained from this crime apart from those who attended expecting a legitimate football match, some bettors on the wrong end of the fix and the overall integrity of the game - none of which mattered to the fixers. Over the window up to the fairy tale of Leicester City stealing the Premier League title in 2015/16, these specific corruptions (very often hovering around the universe of rogue football agent John Colquhoun) became semi-systemic. And the state was supportive. But since the chaotic changeover of chief executive at the EPL, we have seen the implementation of a systemic template of bias and corruption in the Premier League. This is a bubble waiting to burst. The reality of the systemic matchfixing in the EPL is hidden beyond the fan visibility horizon due to a largely captured mainstream media. The Premier League did not have to become this gambling medium. Choices were made by unlawful insiders to make it so.
Over seasons 2018/19 and 2019/20, our analysts detected that over 70% of Premier League matches were fixed i.e. the outcome existed in the underground betting markets pre-match. The real percentage is no doubt higher as we cannot 'solve' every market.
More disturbingly over these two seasons, there have been an array of templates of matchfixing, insider trading, corruption and systemic biases relating to the Liverpool FC cartel of clubs supported by the accommodating 'elite' of the Professional Game Match Official Board (pgMOB) referees.
Furthermore, the implementation of Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has been disastrous for the integrity of the Premier League - no other global league has abused VAR to the degree of the EPL. It is a matter of serious concern that former rogue referee Neil Swarbrick was appointed Head of VAR (until recently removed from his post for reasons not made public) - Mr Colquhoun owns Mr Swarbrick.
An equivalent referee-based holistic has been used to undermine the Gestifute agency and all who sail in her as an offensive tactic in the turf war between a cartel of UK agents and Jorge Mendes.
And the media stays silent while peddling the integrity line. Luke Heighton: ""UK football journalists prefer (a) not to rock the boat, (b) not to bite the hand that feeds them, and (c) like to make damn sure they are all telling the same story... Like royal reporters they prefer to work as a pack and their aim is to promote the product." When a business or a sector becomes fraudulent, the short-term secretion of these matters is disguised by the real-time flow of capitalism and markets. It is only when the tide goes out that one sees who is wearing no trunks. The combination of a Global Depression due to covid-19 and the necessity to react to climate catastrophe expose football as a naked sport. The Premier League was the last major global football league to postpone due to the coronavirus pandemic. On March 9th 2019, Oliver Dowden of the Department of Culture Media & Sport (DCMS) stated: "There is no reason for people not to go to sporting events." On March 11th, a Champions League match took place between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid even though the Madrid region was the second main locus of covid-19 in Europe (after northern Italy). There were excess deaths on Merseyside due to the decision to play this match. The Cheltenham horseracing festival went ahead in the same week and there have been clusters of covid-19 deaths associated with this event too. Dowden became the government liaison link over the psychopathic attempts to reboot Premier League football in the midst of the pandemic under the bookmaker and agent-backed Project Restart. Football fans and their family members have died due to Dowden's original miscalculation, why was he still involved in the decision-making process?
Throughout the increasingly desperate attempts to take advantage of the disaster capitalism matrix afforded by covid-19, the UK game broke out into a rash of in-fighting. Everybody was gaming the pandemic - the exploitation of disaster is a now a neo-proprietarian norm. The game has split particularly on a hierarchical level - club owners receive government handouts, matchfixing entities develop strategy with government, broadcasters tell clubs and leagues what to do, football agents game the whole reality, while 'lower' staff are made redundant or furloughed and fans are entirely ignored and left completely in the dark by the even darker forces behind Project Restart.
The players are the key pawns in this chess match. Overpaid in the bubble of modern football, many players are under the complete control of their agents and are persuaded or coerced to act accordingly. It was football agents who fought against any co-ordinated percentage cut in player wages due to coronavirus lockdown and it was also football agents who offered a voluntary tax-avoiding fudge of a player-funded charity instead - nothing like turning a national disaster into some positive PR for Jordan Henderson and his veiled third party representatives.
The Premier League instructed players to return. Quite reasonably many players were not keen to risk health or to boost the coffers of some very rich people. BAME players recognised that they are four times as likely as white players to contract the virus. The EPL resorted to coercion.
The upper echelons and power bases of English football are almost exclusively white - you may count the number of black managers, referees, senior administrators, club owners on one hand. According to the EPL and government, if BAME players are at higher risk of coronavirus, then tough - this is, after all, the government that oversaw Grenfell, the Windrush Deportations and told us to take coronavirus "on the chin".
Football faced an on-off future with windows of games followed by lockdown and / or postponement windows. Tournaments backed up with some remaining unfinished, cancelled and, eventually, voided.
The entire infrastructure of global football tournaments needs to change to a sustainable platform.
And, in our inter-connected world, pandemics are becoming more common and not all viruses target the old, the infirm and BAME. In 1918, Spanish flu killed people mainly between 20 and 40 years of age with a particular peak at 28 due to the impact of the Russian flu of 1890. Unless capitalism adapts to externalities and no growth, football's future will be a continuum of crises in parallel with the system that governs it.
And, talking of sustainable, when the climate catastrophe starts limiting air travel and distance travelled, the entire edifice of football will be crumbling. For example, the Euro 2020/ (2021) tournament finals took place across 12 countries - the negative climate footprint was orders of magnitude higher than just playing the competition in one nation.
This is not valid. Football can exist without this destruction... ... it is the moneymen who need the suicidal zero-sum corruption to continue.
Football is a sport for fans, not oligarchs, sovereign wealth funds, matchfixers, dopers, mafia, insider traders, tax evaders and other cartels of corruption.
This book will show how football might be reclaimed from organised crime.
"I never thought matchfixing was possible. But now I have changed my mind, for obvious reasons. Now, I'm convinced it's all over the place" - Marcus Gayle
This is a crime novel, a hybrid of fact and coded fiction based on fact. Not fiction but redacted faction. It intersperses our hyperreality with the fake projections of it to produce insight into a truth. Global mafiosi have stolen the game and murdered the sport. But the crime is not perfect, traces remain to be discovered and hacked and shared. The decline of the sport into a hyperreality is described perfectly by Baudrillard’s ‘Phases of the Image’.
Football was Play. It started out as a sport played to agreed rules (1st Phase). Local businessmen took over clubs for personal gain or vanity while players still played sport. As soon as money hits Play, Play is fucked (2nd Phase). When the money is linked to parallel but otherwise independent betting markets, insider trading and matchfixing govern the sport. Match outcomes are dependent on private agendas. Football no longer exists as a sport (3rd Phase). By the time the corruption is systemic then everything is fake - football becomes "a simulacra bearing no relation to reality whatsoever" (4th Phase).
As Mervyn King, in one of his more self-righteous moments before the Bank of England was exposed as being systemically embroiled in the Libor scandal, stated: “It’s rather like watching two old men playing chess in the sun for a bet of $10, as one can in Washington Square in New York, and then realising that they are watched by a crowd of bankers who are taking bets on the result to the tune of millions of dollars”. Football started to evolve into a betting platform in the mid-nineties when South East Asian triad-structured underground bookmakers dominated the European markets. For a decade or more these ultimate market makers battled with the European layers slicing up the global markets on leading football matches. Disinformation was power. European mafiosi soon developed matrices to gain control of segments of the marketplace via coercion of officials and players. Between 2000 and 2010, the markets existed as a fragmented cartel of matchfixing but then this fracturing morphed into something far more sinister – systemic corruption based on the strategies of various deep states and expansive global mafia and market entities. It has reached a threshold where so many corruptions in the sport have been exposed in recent times that there is no longer any attempt to disguise the corruption – miscreants who are caught out have to be recycled into the bubble. There must be no loose cannons – once you sell your soul to a devil, it is to his tune that one must salsa. There are parallels to the decline of that other great sport, cricket. Most international matches, virtually all matches on the Indian sub-continent, most T20 games and the County Championship in England have been corrupted by the mafia that is the Dawood Company for decades. Originally based in Mumbai they were held responsible for the 1993 bombings and relocated to Dubai and then Pakistan where, alongside cricket, they engage in murder, smuggling, drug trafficking, extortion, racketeering, gunrunning, terrorism, money laundering, counterfeiting and betting. With an inner core of between five and ten thousand members plus a penumbra of operatives, this is evidently not cricket. 'Tis little wonder the cricket grounds of the world have tumble-grasses of desolate narratives blowing through the empty stands. D-Company now operates in India, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates and is provided protection by Lashkar-e-Taiba and al-Qaida - when England cricketers undertake matchfixing, some of the profits are used to fund global terrorism. The impacts of matchfixing are far greater than mere sporting integrity.
The pyramids of Giza serve as a graphic to help describe a simple model of the corruption in football. The Menkaure pyramid represents agents, betting, mafia. The Khafre pyramid represents the ruling bodies, governments, national associations. Khufu (the Giant Pyramid) represents the territory where Menkaure and Khafre mingle – the upper half of Khufu is the white market, the lower half is the grey market and the underground is the underground. Any organisation, cartel, consortia, committee, institution, and any of their tentacles of operation may undertake quantised interactions with any other entity in either Menkaure or Khafre. These temporary equilibria exist at various layers in the Giant Pyramid depending upon their degree of opacity. Clusters frequently develop but swiftly disperse due to a bounty of proprietary antisocial agendas. When we delve into the dire, diabolical, desperate, difficult, dangerous, dodgy world of the underground, one might discover that the same equilibria repeatedly develop. Betting dominates Menkaure. Regulatory capture dominates Khafre. Their collusion is disastrous for football. Nowadays there are very few top flight European matches that don’t possess several competing power bases all believing that they control the event. Total Football has evolved into Total Poker - a number of insiders around a table with dark pool inputs and individual operators in control of their bidding. Player A looks comfortable with an under-performing midfielder and some private injury information while Player B believes that the VAR Official owns the match referee, but Player C owns a whole team and the opposing goalkeeper and is piling on the chips. Only a patsy at the table seeks a balanced book or creative arbitrage in a corrupted market. Brian Tuohy: “Coincidence is really a rare commodity. When profit motive and market share become joined to what appear to be many unlikely outcomes, is the result really coincidental, or something else? Therein lies the fix.” But the one factor that unites all parties in the criminalisation of global football is a complete absence of regulation. Trust us to police ourselves is the cry of the criminal. But self-regulation is no regulation allowing a free playing field for the various tiers of psychopath to exploit the sport for proprietary profit. And the holistic is horrendous.
In late capitalism, financial distortions within a sector define the corruptions available so we are presented with referees on a couple of grand per week officiating on events with global betting volume of up to $10 billion, the market capitalisation of Manchester United being less than the betting turnover on any one of their matches and over 50 heavily indebted poor nation states having a GDP less than the latest Premier League television deal – Richard Masters, the chief executive of the Premier League, runs a small country. A corrupt one.
The most astonishing aspect of matchfixing is that when we have seen that the government, the Bank of England, the BBC, the Murdochracy, the mainstream print media, investment banks, the police, retail banks, the ‘public’ utilities and many other sports are all corrupted, there is this religious belief that, somehow, top level football is not tainted. Football has taken over from religion – everybody is ‘Something FC ‘til I Die’. And we don’t want our New Deity to be killed off just yet.
Juan Christobel Guarello: “Interpol has arrested them [FIFA executives] for doing what they always did without reproach: behaving as a bigwig in the world of professional football. All the allegations that they face (fraud and money laundering) are everyday elements of their activity. That is to say they are an essential part of football for rent.” Global football ‘elites’ act as an oligarchical cartel to solicit proprietary gains alongside the rape of the game. Football is prostituted under the supervision of the governmental, institutional, bookmaking, media and regulatory captures that dominate the systemic structure of the corruption. Agents are the primary lubrication of this corruption as they box far above their weight due to their omnipresence. Players are generally with agents for life while playing for numerous clubs during their career. Where do loyalties lie? Alongside a non-functioning 4th Estate media under output capture, individual stories of corruption and matchfixing are simply opaqued away in the Omerta.
One of the most striking features of football in recent times has been the takeover of European clubs by investors who would not appear, on the surface, to have any real interest in the business of football. In the eyes of this particular new breed of owners, it is no longer necessary to win titles and trophies. The creation of immediate cash is everything. If competitions can be won as well then this is fine and dandy but club performance on the field of play is always secondary to financial achievement off of it.
This puts such owners at odds with fans.
Jack Rasmus: “The [global financial capitalist] elite are deepening their control of non-financial companies and are increasingly directing those companies toward profits growth from financial manipulation as the primary corporate activity… Instead of making profits by making real things that require real investment and employ real people, the focus of global capitalism is increasingly toward more financial asset investment.”
Thus real profit is being surpassed by generating forms of money capital as profit.
It is the global duopoly of the US and China that is behind the majority of this activity.
Taking Manchester United as an example – the leveraged buyout by the Glazers imposed significant annual interest repayments on the club. This outflow of tens of millions of pounds annually prevents suitable investment in other areas of the club. In effect, this is a long term creative type of private equity asset stripping.
The lack of trophies and the failure to succeed on the pitch is anathema to the fans hence the falling attendances and the major drop in pay-per-view television subscriptions but, to the Glazers, Manchester United’s on-field mediocrities are entirely trumped by the £750 million 10 year Adidas deal that produces lots and lots of cash.
A similar financial infrastructure exists with Chinese investors fronting for underground bookmakers to relocate monies outside the bubble that is the Chinese economy before the arrival of the Big Crunch. Instead of solely profiting from the value of the purchased club, these South East Asian investors manipulate match outcomes undermining integrity.
And the profits are colossal. One state-based syndicate behind the corruption underpinning Leicester City's Premier League title triumph pocketed an estimated £24 billion from betting market activities in one year.
Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, has indicated that he sees a benefit in the strengthening of the links between sports authorities and state bodies but this is a solution that can backfire depending upon who represents the state – the syndicate that massively profited from the Fake Football of Leicester City's title included senior state operators in both the House of Commons and Lords.
The takeover of football and the attempted takeover of UEFA and FIFA are linked to the geopolitical hard right agendas emanating from the seats of power in the UK and USA.
Entertainingly for the zeitgeist, income inequalities not only produce fraud, money laundering and tax evasion but also a far greater incentive for whistleblowers to confront and expose the criminalities at play. According to Joseph Stiglitz, in extremis these wealth distortions create revolutionary paradigms partially due to the disconnect between the hyperrealities of the 1% and the ‘real’ realities of the 99%.
It was not without irony that Infantino’s first edict on appointment was to sack all whistleblowers who had taken significant risks to expose the Sepp Blatter regime.
It is the End of Play, a Timeline of Decay.
The Leicester City Fake Football Triumph is the biggest sports story of recent times. Although portrayed by the media as a fairy tale, it is in fact an affront to the integrity and validity of British soccer.
Football has become iconoclastic. Modern iconoclasm no longer consists in destroying images but in manufacturing a profusion of images where there is nothing to see – the use of instant replays to rewrite the history of unfortunate occurrences!
It is the End of Play.
Football is Fixed.
Football is Fucked.
Football is Dead.
___________________________________________________________________________ Mafia States "There is great disorder under Heaven, the situation is excellent" - Mao Zedong
From autarky to autarchy.
[Fragmented] cartels, monopolies, duopolies, opaque layered mature markets, gamed regulation or self-regulation or no regulation, dark pool poker tables of corruption, sinister darknet operations, deep states bifurcating between the kleptocratic and the plutocratic, disaster capitalism templates helicoptered in to scenes of desperation, state and self-imposed mainstream media censorship, corporate lobbyists controlling the democratic process and filtering knowledge via their control of press output, the imprisoning and murders of whistleblowers, the omnipresence of shadow banking and dark money matrices, certain investment houses operating as states within states directly influencing world governance via a confiscation of power, global warming our way to a new planetary equilibrium state with irreversible feedback loops, akin to the early phases in the development of the acidic atmosphere of Venus, all of this blended together with the hard right politics of divide and rule and class war.
That’s late capitalism!
Take The Atlantic Bridge (TAB). Established two decades ago as a part of the UK’s dark money network with the aim to transform what was allegedly a transatlantic special relationship into an even more special relationship between political and corporate power, TAB is a blueprint for antisocial corporate totalitarianism in the interests of all the usual sectors – tobacco, big pharma, munitions, oil – combined with the lunacies of the personality disordered far right.
TAB merged into the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation - the anchor on the US side of the Atlantic.
As research by George Monbiot has revealed, the political agendas so created are myopic and psychopathic – funding climate change denial bodies, targeting whistleblowers and hackers, the erosion of employment rights, lowering minimum wage structures, granting corporations and certain states immunity from prosecution and, deeper down thirty years away from any possible public scrutiny, spying on one’s own citizens and neighbouring governments, firewalling the state, undermining democratic processes for proprietary gain while, not content with the impending suicide driven death of their system and our planet, choosing to kill our beautiful game by turning football into poker in a final act of spite.
Where is the separation between the deep state and the government? When spectacular moneyed elites act out their farces for their own entertainment, all the forces of the deep state ensure that chaos reigns when the curtains come down. Chaos is a good thing.
Non-cybernetic virtual private networks of tax evasion in offshore financial centres under the various evolutions of the imperial Anglo-Saxon flags of yore encapsulate the revolving door culture between treasuries, tax collection agencies and the big four accounting firms - a mafia-structured monopoly if ever there was one.
The 1% know how to look after their own interests as power serves only power in their elite system of socialism for the rich and cowboy capitalism for the poor. When their grotesque social experiment went belly up in 2007/8, true colours of governments and even truer depths of states were revealed. The primary architects of the crisis together with hard right think tanks scrambled to create new paradigms of irrational distortion to spin out their game for another role of the dice. Mervyn King’s one good act in his life is the chess playing anecdote mentioned above. His book “The End of Alchemy” is a literary monetarist power grab which attempts to reveal new truths but suitably ignores the roles of systemic corruption, irrational psychology, the fractal misbehaviour of markets analysed by Benoit Mandelbrot, the whole issue of the validity of efficient markets in twisted infrastructures while, tongue firmly in cheek, claiming that it would be a fine thing to give more power to the central banks and the IMF. “We might have fucked up last time but give us power to have another chance at our totalitarianism”.
Looking through the microscope of monetarism and lecturing...
Why should we be expected to give any attention to a man whose failings were an input to the Great Recessionary Depression? The rigging of the Libor for the benefit of UK banks has equivalence with the fixing of football matches for British market participants.
Illegitimate claims of capitalism producing growth when, as Piketty intimated, the only growth is due to an expansion in the global populace – late capitalism is the conclusion of a Ponzi scheme orchestrated in the late Middle Ages but doomed to a disastrous death from day one, as with all pyramid schemes. “Growth is not democracy. Profusion is a function of discrimination”.
It is the worst of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of foolishness.
Capitalism, despite the support of deep states, is a Ponzi scheme collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity.
But All-Under-Heaven suggests that the situation should be observed a level deeper…
… the level of the mafia state.
The Italian mafia state targets Sicilian magistrate Nino di Matteo for exposing the state as mafia, the Heritage/TAB mafia states imprison (directly or otherwise) Snowden, Assange, Hammond, Manning, Love to various loci of solitary confinement for exposing state mafiosi behaviours, the mafia fingerprints of Joseph Muscat and his government cronies were all over the assassination of anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, while a fragmentally cartelised web of geographically scattered mafia states orchestrate the systemic corruption and matchfixing that has destroyed global football. It is suitably ironic in a postmodern way that a game that is played on turf should have become a mafia battle over turf.
___________________________________________________________________________ Inequality And Ponzi Capitalism "Do it. Call things what they are. People will be so mad" - Heather Marsh Thomas Piketty: “… wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future. The consequences for the long-term dynamics of wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale.”
While virtually all advocacy, transparency and tax justice entities focus on offshore financial centres, money laundering and current abuses of capital, the real wealth inequalities exist on the basis of old money and all those forgotten crimes.
The Ponzi scheme in its late capitalism phase is hurtling towards its precipitous conclusion – the collapse of All-Under-Heaven. If we are going to do Armageddon we might as well do it with some panache.
To decelerate if not prevent the self-harming disorders of this neo-con death cult there is only one solution in this first phase of the deconstruction of a pseudo-system – a markedly progressive tax on the largest fortunes worldwide (targeting both capital and income) to prevent inheritance trumping meritocracy and to enforce an efficient use of capital for global rather than proprietary benefit hence ending the austerity-based matrices of social injustice.
With a burdensome progressive tax in place, the psychopathic incentive to amass huge fortunes in the first place would be undermined.
Piketty: “Such a tax would also have another virtue: it would expose wealth to democratic scrutiny, which is a necessary condition for effective regulation of the banking system and international capital flows… The primary purpose of the capital tax is not to finance the social state but to regulate capitalism.”
National wealth has become markedly privatised in the last four decades. In 2016, in the US, incomes were as unequally distributed as had ever been observed anywhere anytime – the top 1% earned 35% of income while the bottom 50% of population earned just 25%. There are only three tools for getting rid of the current levels of debt in the developed nations – taxes on capital, inflation or austerity. Davos Man selected austerity then inflation before more austerity - it wasn't a prerequisite not to tax the rich, it was a choice. As one vice-president of a leading bank stated: “It’s corporate fraud on an industrial scale, sanctioned by the government”.
Jean Baudrillard: “Misfortune, misery – all these things are traded very easily these days. There is a stock exchange of negative values, so to speak.”
Late capitalism yields a plethora of Ponzi bubbles - these are not Kondratieff waves but rather expressions of robust Malthusian ecological limits blended with the conclusion of this viral pyramid scheme. One of our late lawyers viewed our universe as the three-dimensional surface of a four-sphere equivalent to an expanding Ponzi scheme which creates bubbles at the current three-dimensional surface which quantum in and out of existence.
A death spiral.
A system of cascading death spirals.
And it is also the skewed incentives of diabolical wealth accumulation together with short-termist inversion capitalist structures with the supportive networks of tax havens and regulatory capture that have allowed the deconstruction of football as a sport over the last quarter century.
As soon as there is an imbalance in favour of market depth over sporting kudos, corruption is a given.
___________________________________________________________________________ Corruption In The Markets "What the fuck do we know?"
Hayek was bad enough but free markets have been replaced by bureaucratic state monopoly control – markets are a terror of value without equivalence.
Take the efficiency of markets (financial or football).
Eugene Fama was one of three winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2013.
His hypothesis regarding the efficiency of markets is elegant but also entirely wrong (give the man a gong for being wrong). Not particularly impressed with his Fama-French Three-Factor Model either (but more on that later).
If there were no deep state interferences, no psychopathies, no mass behavioural irrationalities, no corruptions, no insider trading and if markets didn’t always evolve towards a cartelised maturity, he would be right. But there are and they do so he’s wrong.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is divided into three levels – strong-form, semi-strong-form and weak-form efficiency. Strong-form suggests that market prices reflect all information, public and private, and it is not possible for anyone to earn excess returns. In semi-strong-form, prices adjust to new information rapidly and rationally. While in weak-form structures, prices simply follow a random walk.
Before we go any further we need to look at the architecture of markets. The public markets are just the tip of an iceberg of submerged dark pool markets – there are hundreds of non-regulated dark pools where deep insiders trade against deep insiders in markets that the public only sees when an excess of over-enthusiasm occurs. It is in these markets where the significant corruption occurs.
All assessments of Fama’s hypothesis require a dichotomous approach then – the public markets and the dark pools.
Markets are rarely efficient, efficiency being a fluke rather than an achievement. Work from the sixties onwards by Daniel Kahnemann, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler had already introduced psychology into the market and, in 1979, Kahnemann and Tversky developed Prospect Theory which represented the final nail in the coffin of Efficient Markets. Investors do not behave in a rational manner for a whole continuum of different reasons that exist both within themselves and in interaction between themselves in complex ways to produce the behaviours we collectively project. Market prices represent human psychology far more than they do unproven economic fundamentals.
"The problem is today, when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping” -Slavoj Zizek.
So, by 1979, Fama’s hypothesis should have been put to bed…
… unfortunately, it took the blinkered Chicago School until 2007 to acknowledge the impact of behaviouralism (individual and mass) in the markets, attempting to convince us in the meantime that an efficient pricing infrastructure underpinned the alleged validity of Friedmanian late capitalism.
Fama also fails because all of the information is not in the market compromising all three levels of Fama’s efficiency hierarchy. Public markets are reactive to deeper forces and are unable to respond instantaneously to the flow of real information. The public markets offer a distilled filtered form of this driving dark pool bazaar. Private dark pool trading strategies convert into proprietary holistic public market strategies as dark pool power and liabilities are exploited or hedged in the public sphere. The information flow in dark pools is, by its very nature, opaque. Proxy trading, algorithmic distortions, hidden players away from the table, quantised consortia, disinformational trading and the sociopathy of cornered markets etc. At any given time, the market tends to inefficiency and as mature markets are able to evolve into anything the primary operators desire, the prices can be anything too - supply and demand don't set prices, billionaires do.
Mature markets are largely under the semi-absolute internal control of a small grouping of operators. These cartelised structures include entities with hidden and private agendas co-operating on shared agendas to mutual benefit. Even when such infrastructure is held in place with extra robustness due to governmental deep state scaffolding around the marketplace, the dominant player(s) is / are still able to gravitate the price to loci more favourable to their returns. In effect, a near monopolistic corruption distorts any semblance of efficiency in the market.
Disaster capitalism thrives on chaos. When a disaster strikes or, as in the case of Chile or Brexit, is created, the Hayekians move in with their shock tactics to further destabilise an already disorientated people. As US security entities enter the vacuum, the markets are utterly chaotic. Although some efficiency improvements are exported via these security entities, the holistic performance of the markets drive efficiencies off the bottom of Fama’s scale.
Private information is introduced to the public market in a variety of strategies that, by their very nature, imply market inefficiencies being created for dark pool gain. Deep insiders possess powerful market information that must be released to the market strategically. Just think of the variety of ways in which, say, Ben Bernanke could have utilised his absolute knowledge of the variables related to quantitative easing. A flawed man, with strategies evolving in real time, could profit without the full reality ever hitting the market by placing trades laterally and peripherally across the time continuum. Only the greedy fully reveal their hands. This is how Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton And Hove Albion, fucks over the sport via the Starlizard syndicate (and associated network) while putting on a charitable public face.
The most evident ways that financial markets are inefficient is by their refusal to accept the cost of negative externalities in the price of an asset. How on earth can a price be efficient in the holistic sense if externalities are not included in the equation? The timing of the eagerly anticipated systemic implosion is an unknowable variable. It is an unknown known. Temporally.
Disaster myopia in a disaster capitalism complex!
Although dark pools are elevated up the efficiency hierarchy due to a reduction in time-lag from information to market and the quality of the knowledge, such improvement is marginal.
Fama’s only other claim to fame is the Fama-French Three-Factor Model. This attempts to replace the old and inadequate Capital Asset Pricing Model. By ignoring psychology and the impacts of corruption, this model also fails. Entertainingly, Foye, Mramor and Pahor (2013) have shown an improvement in the performance of the Fama-French model if one of the terms is replaced by a term which acts as a proxy for accounting manipulation! Benoit Mandelbrot: "Financial economics, as a discipline, is where chemistry was in the 16th century: a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk wisdom, and unexamined assumptions and grandiose speculation." As a former pupil of Mandelbrot, Fama should know better.
Through the provision of a psychopathic regulation-lite template where individuals are rewarded for antisocial public displays of their disorders, elevating themselves up the power hierarchy, it is hardly surprising that the system itself has become psychopathic. Short-termism engenders systemic risk. Refusing to recognise externalities produces super-systemic risk.
Neo-classical economics is pre-Galilean in its simplicity. Multi-disciplinary, it is not! There came the chartists and the technical analysts, believing in their candlesticks and their head-and-shoulder formations, all blinded from the whole to the specific, plotting the same lines on the same charts. Then came the idiot physicists – the econophysicists – to spread disaster far and wide. Holistically challenged, this new breed of trader possessed all of the professional inadequacies of their predecessors but with an extra twist – black boxes. Algorithmic trading has grown exponentially in the last two decades in coincidence with the Permanent Depression which also took root around 1997. Micro-focused high frequency trading incrementally shaving creative arbitrages to improve micro-efficiencies within the macro-chaos counts as strategy, as archaic theorists and unsustainable edifices provide one another with bravos and encores while we approach super-systemic catastrophe scenarios. On October 19th 1987, Wall Street fell by 29.2% in the biggest daily decline in a century. The probability of Wall Street falling this amount is 10 to the power of 50. Mandelbrot: "You can scan the powers of 10 from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the breadth of the measurable universe - and still never meet such a number." Only in an immeasurable multiverse do we surpass such numbers - in the Infinite Patch Multiverse, your nearest doppelganger is 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 29 metres away. Big shout going out...!
Free market capitalism underprices risk. In fact, it frequently excludes risk from the equation entirely. Every single quantum reality impacts on the future market price as butterflies flutter across fractal space.
While all of the free market ideologues and their apologists are shuffling the papers, printing the money, pretending that there is another boom-and-bust possibility in this game yet and extending their pretences to the territory of carbon markets and cap and trade schemes, each fundamentally flawed in their Ponzi capitalism, there are super-systemic fractals that might just be worthy of closer inspection. And not just by climate change scientists either.
Mandelbrot: “The two poles of human experience – deterministic systems of order and planning and the stochastic or random systems of irregularity and unpredictability.” The latter of these two poles dominates the markets today.
Andrew Haldane describes the inability to judge risk as “disaster myopia” – a lack of awareness of the network externalities in combination with misaligned incentives. But this is merely the first level of disaster myopia. The feedback loops, the fractals, the super-systemic risk, the threshold entanglement of different equilibrium states would combine in a second layer – more “catastrophe myopia” really.
There is no such entity as a sustainable Ponzi scheme. Every free market structure is pure Ponzi, a consequence of which is that we now reside in what Sun Tzu called the Worst Variety of Ground. The fractals yet to be unleashed, the toxicity still to surface, the mass delusions and engendered mass psychologies yet to spiral out of perceived rationality, will all come to fruition against the backdrop of a super-systemic lack of stable equilibrium. So, a system that returns negative growth if externalities are included produces this lack of utility on an unstable foundation which spontaneously combusts repeatedly and fractally.
Dark pools and many other forms of ‘shadow market’, utilised for the trading of huge blocks of institutional knowledge, are entirely non-regulated. Investors are able to trade inside information anonymously on the deepest market platforms – the dominant strata in any market. Stock markets and global football betting markets are getting darker.
The whole dark pool edifice exists in a protective bubble. The broker-dealers and exchanges offering dark pool access are in a very privileged position – primary level cloned trading in a mature market sector is a portfolio to die for. Securing crucial temporal edges for a ‘financial elite’ these highly regressive structures are the future of financial markets. Non-regulated private markets offer a Pandora’s box of market abuse away from the prying eyes of oversight. Coordinated market strategies may be orchestrated to corner a particular market to the benefit and demise of suitable entities – fake markets with induced short-term momenta. By taking advantage of private markets to trade their information insiders are severely hampering price transparency.
In chaotic windows and in truncated markets, the temporal edge is most important. Markets are volatile in stormy waters and volatility is easy money. In the most serious state of market paralysis, this temporal edge offers massive advantage – just like the ticker-tape did in the Great Depression.
This is an illusory game of exchange, a giant poker table where our realities are determined.
Speculators are always blamed for the cyclical crises of capitalism but this is too simple a view. Speculators are merely finessing the non-regulated dark pool market inefficiencies, riding the surf rather than generating the wave in the first place. So blame NYFix and Turquoise and Baikal and blame the state-based economic systems that allow this chicanery to take place.
Economists always look to the past for solutions yet no economic hyperreality is replicable and the fractal nature of the crisis inputs renders economic research as quite pointless – systemic and super-systemic risk are the new market yardsticks.
For the ostriches, not only is it a necessity for all market activity be non-regulated but also it must be self-rating. Ratings Agencies that are relied upon by investors yet are paid by those they rate – a systemic enigma built into the fake infrastructure.
Michel Foucault: “There is a battle ‘for truth’… It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of ‘science’ and ‘ideology’, but in terms of ‘truth’ and ‘power’. ‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A ‘regime’ of truth… The problem is not changing people’s consciousnesses – or what’s in their heads – but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth.”
Nomi Prins (from her book ‘Crony Capitalism and Corruption – An Entirely Rigged Political-Financial System): “The notion of free markets in which each participant has access to the same information is a fallacy. Democracy is predicated on the idea that every vote counts equally, and in the utopian perspective, the government adopts policies that benefit or adhere to the majority of those votes. In fact, it is a minority of elite families and private individuals that exercise the most control. What we have is a plutocracy of government and markets.”
Benjamin Franklin: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.”
Taking on a death cult in the end times can only lead to a date with Dignitas…
… or the deep dark net. ___________________________________________________________________________
Whistleblowers Of The World Unite And Take Over
"If we are going to end up being exotics of our own lives (as we all are), we may as well cultivate radical exoticism" - Jean Baudrillard
Ecclesiastes: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
The 4 Phases of the Image, Lacan’s Real, Symbolic, Imaginary, the surreal hyperreal (the neohyperreal) versus the public spectacle. A triptych of fact, fiction, fusion.
Max Hastings: “The 2013-15 revelations of Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who has seen fit to disclose the scale of western eavesdropping... has done important damage to American and British security. He inhabits a new universe, in which old definitions of conflict, and also of patriotism, are no longer universally acknowledged. The balance of tactics and methodology in struggles between nations has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. Secret war, as it was practiced by the nations that fought the conflict of 1939-45, may well prove to be the future war.”
Hacktivist Jeremy Hammond (who was imprisoned for his beliefs): “I had an obligation to use my skills to expose… injustice – and to bring the truth to light.”
Enter the Wu Shu Hackers, infamous before creation - legendary Chinese monkeys whose aim is to defeat the greedy warlords and give football back to the people.
They open markets. Futurescanning. Always futurescanning.
Gabriella Coleman: “In the 1950s a small group of MIT-based computer enthusiasts… adopted the term ‘hacker’ to differentiate their freewheeling attitude from those of their peers… hackers courted contingency, disregarding norms or rules they thought likely to stifle creative invention… hackers repurposed tools in the service of beauty and utility.” Whackers do the same but to an underlying single issue agenda, in our case - to save football from the mafia and, after tracing information, we share and expose via 5th Estate channels. Sometimes the only goal is archiving the content of the hyperreality, at other times we share with the hive mind, but always we are mocking the perpetrators.
Multiple servers, parallel realities in coincident time, robust cellular networks ripping apart markets while, on the square, hacking deep state spies through the maze of espionage, allowing them to believe that it is the Infamous Wu Shu Hackers who have been lost in a maze while traps are set when, in reality, the reverse is true. Sousveillance and hacktivism are the two brigades that bind chaos. The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers are an underground Sun Tzu force for the social media age, chapeau blanc hackers who disturbed the equilibrium too much for their hacks to be made public.
The UK deep state, demanding of evidence which is then provided, sets up the sting to arrest Raj Perumal - a matchfixing mafia man who intended to buy the outcome of a Vauxhall Conference match in the UK.
Perumal was surrounded by military intelligence operatives in a wired hotel room before a call to withdraw arrived from on high - machinations many leagues under the surface determine realities upon it.
Why did the UK state allow a major matchfixer to walk free?
We know somebody who was in the hotel room when this meeting occurred and so I ask again, why did the British state allow a global matchfixer to exit when caught red-handed?
Always ask why the state sponsors corruption.
Coleman: “Hackers and their projects have become routine, authoritative, and public participants in our daily geopolitical goings on. There are no obvious, much less given, explanations as to why a socially and economically privileged group of actors, once primarily defined by obscure tinkering and technical explorations is now so willing to engage in popular media advocacy, traditional policy, law-making, political tool building, and especially forms of direct action and civil disobedience so risky that scores of hackers are currently in jail or exile for their willingness to expose wrongdoing". Direct action is the only action. Gottfried Frank: “… a festival of hatred towards all that can be called human joy. With gigantic strength the perilous hoard emerges, tearing hearts asunder and darkening the divine spark of gods with noisy, monstrous mocking.”
"If any Wikileaks' journalist is under coercion they will recuse themselves and staff in another jurisdiction will ensure full publication" - Wikileaks tweet from April 5th 2017
Football has found a new equilibrium state as an augmented reality where manipulators build an illusion to create an event. Each paradigm develops its own Gestalt but any whole is temporary as, in effect, there is no paradigm, only corruption versus critical consciousness. There are no permanent facts, only interpretations. There are no absolutes. There is no solid ground.
Enter the hacker, the whistleblower, the spectator of the spectacle. Hannah Arendt: “Nothing and nobody exists in this world who’s very being does not presuppose a spectator”. The spectator is a key node in this charade.
But we are not in the arena of rogue individuals and solo bad apples here, we are dealing with a systemic and global stealing of the people’s game. The deep state plus an ever-expanding circle of non-governmental advisers from banking, industry, commerce and sport who were cleared for highly classified information denied to large swathes of the real state have resolved to monetise the game to derivative levels of opacity. Slavoj Zizek: "Of course, the market is a domain of egotistic cheating and lying: however, as Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to present itself and be taken as truth”. By analysing corruption, one “removes the veil” and reveals truth. Others, in Calinescu’s view, blind themselves to nature and become “slaves of a lifeless dogma.” There is a battle for truth with the vast majority of the 4th Estate being stationed on the incorrect side of the frontline. Fake news. Fake football. Glenn Greenwald: "[Snowden's leak] changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements by US officials and transformed relations between countries. It radically altered views about the proper role of journalists in relation to government power."
Jacques Derrida: “Think like the miners who explode the beams that support their shafts.”
___________________________________________________________________________ The Premier League Is Dead. Long Live Football "... when the authorities find it useful to tell the truth, it's because they can't find any better lies. Immediately this truth, coming from an official mouth, becomes a lie corroborated by facts" - Ian Birchall Although ostensibly about corruption taking over football, this book will not be comfortable reading for the fundamentalist football fan. A primary reason that the game has been lost is the schizophrenic nature of the fan – corruption against Arsenal has been virtually ever-present in the Premier League over the last decade and a half and against Glasgow Celtic since time immemorial until the club formerly known as Rangers ceased to be in 2011. Rightly so, the fans of these two clubs express outrage at the refereeing decisions of bias and corruption but most clubs will bend the rules and if one mentioned to Arsenal fans the refereeing performances of Jonathan Moss up to the fixed FA Cup Final versus Aston Villa in 2015 or to Glasgow Celtic fans the close links of the club to bookmaking entities, the tsunami of abuse cascades from the moment of media disclosure. Corruption in the holistic continues due to this self-imposed divide and rule. If fans of all clubs were to unite against the corruption and demand change, there might be a hope of mending football but would Boca bond with River Plate, El Betis with Sevilla, Galatasaray with Fenerbache, Inter with Juve, Arsenal with Spurs? Modelling the holistic is easier than modelling the specific – mass psychology is a plug in for financial market analysts but individual behavioural traits are a science of specificity. Similarly, modelling systemic corruption across a sport is facile in comparison with the minutiae of myriads of corrupt actions within it. It is the cumulative hologram of total corruption that reverses Baudrillard’s phases of the image.
The integrity of UK football died with its biggest fairy tale – the rise of Leicester City to being Premier League champions - the remarkable story of state-backed billionaires backing local lads, bribing referees, doping local lads, buying superstars, doping superstars, buying off opponents, doping the markets, massively successful on the pitch and in the markets via institutional control and corruption. As we show in the book, the goodwill lost out of the Leicester City Affair is colossal – you can fool some of the fans some of the time, you can fool all of the fans some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the fans all of the time. It is always a poor strategy allowing criminals to own a club. But at least now we know that with doping, referee control and state mafia / sovereign wealth fund backing, anybody can win the Premier League.
More money, more greed, more envy - psychopathy of the individual and of the system. It is the systemic nature of the market-led corruption that underpins both neo-liberalism in financial markets and football. The fight to save football, although futile, has been a tragedy of intrigue, mystery and corruption but also of freedom, a passion for justice and struggle against impossible odds.
Nino di Matteo: “We live in a mafia state – a state that, in order to preserve the status quo, has to remove whistleblowers who want justice. We want to know the reason for the silence of mainstream media – why are they frightened to the degree they become accomplices in (and beneficiaries of) the corruption. We must rebel against this system and this mafia method… Since receiving death threats, I have felt fear. My freedom is restricted. It is unlikely I will ever live a normal life again.”
When deep states and sovereign wealth funds combine with mafia and financial markets, whatever entity is leeched upon by the resulting monstrosity is fucked. Well and truly fucked. Leicester City is not a fairy tale it is much grimmer than that. It is a nightmare.
As Brian Tuohy has shown with his books, the same structures exist in the major American sports. It is the global collaboration of corrupt entities that separates football from these effectively insular US sports.
The Wikileaks Theory of Change (2006): “Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes, we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite, not merely for preferment or favour within the regime, but as the primary planning methodology behind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power. Authoritarian regimes create forces which oppose them by pushing against a people’s will to truth, love and self-realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce further resistance. Hence such schemes are concealed by successful authoritarian powers until resistance is futile or outweighed by the efficiencies of naked power. This collaborative secrecy, working to the detriment of a population, is enough to define their behaviour as conspiratorial.” Slavoj Zizek: "Our struggle is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and ideological mystification which sustains it... there is no way - but also no need - to fully abstract ourselves from the "corrupted" order of the State: what we have to do is introduce a supplementary torsion into it, to inscribe into it our fidelity to an Event. In this way we remain within the State, but we make the State function in a neo-statal way... Far from being opposed to crime, law is the universalized crime, crime elevated to the level of an unconditional principle."
Whistleblowing is a risk business. The targeting of other people’s inappropriate powers and wealth engenders psychopathic response. Aside from Wikileaks, the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), the Intercept, Byline Time, Tortoise and the Courage Foundation, there are no support matrices for whistleblowers. The law has to be broken. Blaming entrapment, whistleblowers and hackers for revealing truth about corruption is facile. Failure lies with institutions and government.
Metamorphosis is the aim but mutually assured destruction the outcome – the death of football, the death of whistleblowers, the death of capitalism, the death of the social, the death of the planet.
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers are a dynamic, moving target.
The Football is Fixed Network is also opaque and elastic and geographically spread. The nodes are secure. We have moved the agenda along ahead of the curve for over a quarter of a century. The mainstream media doesn’t function. We by-pass this media to become the media. Some of us are anarchists. Some have spent their adult lives demolishing capitalism and the liberal state via direct action, sousveillance, hacking, whistleblowing, spying on the spies, setting hoax traps, constantly reconfiguring security and advantages. Some are lawyers but most are people within football who are horrified by the corruption.
We are latter day Edelweiss Pirates. We give you our art and our graffiti. We offer you dietrologia – the science of what is behind something and we give you ‘pataphysics – the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, examining the laws governing exceptions and universes parallel to this one. The science of imaginary solutions.
Which brings us to the realms of conspiracy. What is a conspiracy? How do you prove an ever-evolving organism other than in real-time? We can explain your corruption yesterday and today but can only monitor to understand your corruptions of tomorrow (despite all the predictive software). But we can tell you the outcomes of corrupted football matches before they are played. If you have any doubt about whether what follows is based on truth or the delusions of conspiracy theory, keep that in mind. We know the results before kick off.
Coleman: “Craftiness depends on a vigilant criticality, a willingness to scrutinize, always with a mind on identifying inconsistencies or upending convention … a dogged anti-authoritarianism.”
The Mentor from ‘Conscience of a Hacker’ (1986), written shortly after his arrest: “Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something you will never forgive me for.”
Recent inquiries and disclosures show that this is football’s last chance to save itself from oblivion – the triumvirate of matchfixing, doping and mafia is short-termist and, ultimately, suicidal. The game is up. Final whistle. Climate catastrophe and a flow of pandemics add super-systemic risk to this house of cards.
As Baudrillard showed, fighting corruption merely energises it, helping it to evolve into more complex forms - the whistleblower acts as an externalised security consultant to the corrupt edifice pointing out weaknesses, disclosing patterns, defining events – a virtual devil’s advocate, a destabilising stabiliser away from the table. But we retaliate. The assertion of strong truths entails symbolic violence.
Slavoj Zizek: "From a radical emancipatory perspective, violence is always legitimate since our strategy is the result of violence that we are exposed to but, whenever necessary, it will always be a matter of strategy whether to use violence against the enemy".
The Infamous Wu Shu Hackers and the Football Is Fixed Network have the biggest sports story of all time.
Read on.
Death is liberation. ___________________________________________________________________________ W.B. Yeats: "All changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born" ___________________________________________________________________________
Happy Anniversary To Roy Hodgson
Roy Hodgson officially assumed duty as the new English national team manager on May 14th last year despite only having won one trophy in 23 years - the Danish Superliga title with FC Copenhagen.
To celebrate this bizarre choice, we reprint an earlier article that questions the integrity of Our Great Leader.
Originally published in October 2008 _________________________________________________________________________________
A Drama in Four Acts based around a football match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic
CHARACTERS
ROY HODGSON, currently manager of the England National Football Team. At the time of the play, he was manager of Fulham FC.Represented by Base Soccer Agents.
ANDY JOHNSON,currently a striker at Queens Park Rangers FC. At the time of the action, he was a forward at Fulham FC. A client of Base Soccer Agents.
BOBBY ZAMORA, now employed at Queens Park Rangers FC. When the play is set, he was a striker at Fulham FC. A client of Base Soccer Agents.
BASE SOCCER AGENTS, representing Paul Konchesky of Fulham and Emerson Boyce of Wigan Athletic from the match in addition to the three individuals above.
JOHN COLQUHOUN, Fulham FC club agent at the time of the play and responsible for numerous signings involved in the match. Co-owner of Key Sports Management.
CHRIS KIRKLAND, currently goalkeeper at Sheffield Wednesday. Represented by John Colquhoun/ Key SportsManagement and Wigan Athletic goalkeeper at the time the play is set.
WASSERMANMEDIA GROUP, representing Fulham/Wigan Athletic players from the match - Danny Murphy, Emile Heskey and Simon Davies.
STELLAR FOOTBALL LTD, agents representing Lee Cattermole (Wigan at time of the action) and Aaron Hughes of Fulham FC.
ENGLAND FOOTBALL SQUAD FOR EURO 2012, 23 members featuring 6 players from Stellar Football Ltd, 2 from Key Sports Management, 4 individuals from Wasserman Media Group and 2 from Base Soccer Agents. Managed by Roy Hodgson (from Base Soccer Agents).
MICHEL PLATINI, President of UEFA, a man who has identified match-fixing as the biggest danger to the future of football.
ROB WAINWRIGHT, Director of Europol.
The action takes place at Craven Cottage, London on or around Wednesday 29th October 2008 and features an English Premier League football match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic, and at Wembley in May and June 2012.
ACT ONE
Craven Cottage in late October 2008.
Andy Johnson has been signed by Roy Hodgson / John Colquhounfor £10 million but hasn't scored a goal in over 6 months since joining Fulham.
Together with fellow striker Bobby Zamora, also signed by Roy Hodgson/ John Colquhoun, the two forwards had only scored one goal between them in 15 matches in the 2008/09 season.
Questions were being asked in the media about the poor returns for the financial outlay.
Roy Hodgson and at least 10 of the players on the pitch at the start of the match were represented by either Base Soccer Agents, Wasserman Media Partners, Key Sports Management or Stellar Football Ltd.
In the hour leading up to the kick off, we registered suspicious insider betting patterns on the match between Fulham and Wigan Athletic. The outcome was in the market prior to the match.
ACT TWO
Craven Cottage on the evening of Wednesday 29th October 2008.
Seven Months Since His Last Goal But Andy Johnson Knew That He Was Going To Score Against Wigan Athletic. How?
Fulham won the match 2-0. Andy Johnson scored both goals. Fulham only had two shots on target.
Comments on the performance of Wigan goalkeeper Chris Kirkland by an analyst: "Made no attempt with first goal scored from 1 metre - foolishly committed himself before displaying revealing body language in his remonstrations with the assistant referee. Looks like a startled rabbit caught in the headlights. Stood claiming for a goalkick while an attack continued with a goal only prevented by the intervention of Figueroa. Looks wired. Mis-timed run from goal to address through ball; defender has to clear putting Fulham on the attack. In the Second Half, poor clearances, seemingly deliberate uncertainty whenever the ball was in the area, a clearance straight to the opposition, before once again committing himself to allow the second goal, after failing to give a call to his defenders. Appeared to make his body area as small as possible for the second goal."
After Johnson scored his first goal, he lifted his shirt to reveal a '100 League Goals' vest-top, as, despite not having registered since March, this was his 100th career goal.
Being a midweek match, the affair ended only 40 minutes before the BBC Match of the Day programme featuring all of the midweek games.
After the highlights of the Fulham match, Johnson was interviewed.
When asked about the vest-top, he gushed words to the effect that: "Some lads at the club told me to get it done this week when they knew I was going to score tonight."
On returning to the studio, Alan Hansen had a look of horror on his face. For fully two minutes, he and Gary Lineker attempted to explain how a forward was prescient enough to be so certain of scoring in the match that a '100 League Goals' top was created when he hadn't scored a goal in nearly 7 months.
ACT THREE
Wembley on 16th May 2012.
The England squad for the Euro 2012 Finals in Poland/ Ukraine announced by the new England manager, Roy Hodgson.
Alongside the obvious key selections, there are a number of surprising/ very surprising players in the squad: Jack Butland (Stellar Football Ltd), Martin Kelly (Stellar Football Ltd), Phil Jones (Key Sports Management), Jordan Henderson (Wasserman Media Group- although he seemingly oscillates between WMG and Key Sports), Phil Jagielka (Stellar Football Ltd), Ashley Young (Base Soccer Agents), Scott Parker (Wasserman Media Group), Theo Walcott (Key Sports Management), Joleon Lescott (Wasserman Media Group).
In total, 14 players out of the 23 member squad are represented by just four firms of football agents and Steven Gerrard (Wassermann Media Group) and Jordan Henderson are respectively the England team and Under-21 captains. John Colquhoun/ Key Sports Management only have four English players of any note on their books - Walcott and Jones are in the full squad while Ryan Bertrand and Josh McEachran are in the Under-21's.
English players in the EPL are represented by over 30 firms of agents (ignoring the family linkage ones). It is statisticallyhighly unlikely that the England Euro 2012 squad was so unbalanced by accident.
Roy Hodgson: "I have chosen players... on what I have seen in the Premier League over the last couple of years."
ACT FOUR
The Epilogue.
We would like to put forward a number of questions regarding the above.
Is it conceivable that Roy Hodgson/ John Colquhoun knew nothing about the fixing of the match between Fulham and Wigan in the 2008/09 season (Colquhoun bets professionally on football matches)?
They need not have gained financially by betting on the event to be outside the law - Antonio Conte (the Juventus manager) was banned for 10 months (later reduced to four) for simply being aware of two fixed matches when he was manager of Siena in Serie B. Conte was accused of not passing on knowledge of the match fixing in these games. Burkino Faso manager Paul Put is banned for life from Belgian football for match-fixing in 2007 at Lierse.
Is it conceivable that Roy Hodgson chose his Euro 2012 squad on a meritocratic basis when ALL the questionable selections AND over 60% of the squad AND the captain were represented by Base, Wasserman, Key Sports or Stellar?
Does Roy Hodgson receive any 'rewards' for the inflation in player value created through these obtuse selections? Birmingham City turned down a Southampton bid of £6 million for Jack Butland earlier in the season - prior to his inclusion in the Euro 2012 squad, he was valued at £200,000.
Do Key Sports Management, Wasserman Media Group, Stellar Football Ltd and the Base Soccer Agents operate as a form of inner circle or fragmented cartel?
If so, shouldn't the Premier League be taking a forensic interest in events where such agencies have potentially match-controlling influences like the match above...
... or, say, the Merseyside derby - Carragher, Johnson, Kelly, Gerrard, Henderson, Shelvey, Wisdom, Howard, Baines, Hibbert, Jagielka, Distin, Osman and Naismith are all represented by Base, Wasserman or Stellar. No potential confusions of focus for these 14 players then! And players are with an agent for life while, in general, playing for numerous clubs.
So, who gains most from these structures? Who has the most value-added? What on earth does it mean for the future of the beautiful game in England? What about the players who are out of the cartel?
If the selection of players for the England national team is not a meritocratic process then many talented players are unable to break through and gain proper recognition and remuneration due to potentially cartelised behaviour.
Non-meritocratic structures mean England continue to fail in tournaments so that some individuals might enhance their bank balances. If games are fixed then fans, bettors, television companies, peripheral bookmakers and relegated teams are suffering from fraudulent events and might seek recompense in a court of law.
If bookmakers don't expose the insider trading and choose to trade this knowledge elsewhere for financial gain, what is left of integrity at the top of the English game?
And if Roy Hodgson/ John Colquhoun had any inkling that the Fulham/ Wigan Athletic match (or indeed any other match) was fixed, should they not be banned for non-disclosure?
Rob Wainwright: "Given the scale of corruption involved, it would be naive and complacent to think that the criminal conspiracy does not affect the English game."
Michel Platini: "If tomorrow, we go watch a game already knowing the outcome, football is dead." _________________________________________________________________________________
