Illusion
Hannah Arendt: "Truth compels; and it does not coerce"
Jo Marchant: "Like Kandinsky, he [Kazimir Malevich] felt that he was uncovering universal, pre-existing forms and laws. [Aleksandra] Shatskikh calls it intuition, a solo 'leap', but [Linda] Dalrymple Henderson argues that like his peers, Malevich was responding to new ideas about the nature of the universe, and in particular a possible fourth dimension of space. Cubists visualised this by combining different points of view, but another method was sectioning, or slicing. In a popular 1913 book called 'A Primer of Higher Space', the American architect Claude Bragdon published diagrams showing how three-dimensional cubes passing through a flat plane at various angles appear as different two-dimensional shapes. In the same way, he suggested, three-dimensional objects can be imagined as sections or slices through four-dimensional forms. This was about more than just geometry. Many writers at the time, including Bragdon, gave the fourth dimension a philosophical or spiritual aspect, arguing that only by learning to visualise four-dimensional space can we perceive the true nature of reality."
We remain astounded by the parallels between cosmological modelling e.g. N-body simulations and the modelling of closed corruption systems. There are some astronomers like Chandra Wickramasinghe who see our entire galaxy as a single connected biosphere - an idea termed panspermia.
Just as Wickramasinghe sees each planet "selecting its genetic inheritance from a vast cosmic reservoir of genes", Football is Fixed see each corruption node "selecting its market structures from a vast global mafia reservoir of malfeasance".
There are also cosmologists who would extend panspermia not only to the entire universe but also to the array of infinite patch, inflationary and quantum multiverses. But that is another array of arguments for another spacetime.
As far as we are able to judge, to date over 85% of the purchasers of this limited edition collection of emails about the state of football in these troubled times have a professional interest in the matters at hand - academics, bookmakers, football club insiders, professional gamblers, football agents, members of parliament (current and former), media bodies, journalists and writers, and anti-corruption organisations. Some of these entities have utilised proxy accounts for the purchase but we are aware of who is fronting for John Mark Colquhoun and who is savagely providing copyright information to insiders at Manchester City. We doctor output to such clients.
Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die."
Only Fifth Estate direct actions accelerate this process along - stay lean, be alert, watch your environment, move fast.
The system doesn't allow us to disclose what the system actually is, so we protect ourselves in this manner.
Dark Shark: "Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate."
While taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, we have also used a creative plagiarism of coded output for recognition by our network, for as Guy de Bord states: "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it."
On this stage, it is our only role to remain real in front of the fake backdrop.
We replicate the rebetika musicians in Karaiskaki in Piraeus, our relative poverty provides a theme for life - manges, passion, drugs, jail, disease, death...
Surveillance or sousveillance perhaps?
Logical sequences and control versus chaotic systems and emancipation perhaps?
So who is going to be bothered by such dangerous perhapses?
Who is going to be bothered by such dangerous sousveillances?
Let's look at captured media.
In the darkness, a captured mainstream sporting media tell all the stories. The fake reality mimics Roman Polansky's 'The Tenant' offering a theme of paranoia, hallucinations, a football death spiral, a warping hyperreality whose manicured output in reality mocks suicide and mental illness for proprietary gain.
It isn't just the links between certain Guardian journalists and █████ █████...
It isn't just the fake football news or the advertorial content to the benefit of a small grouping of agents...
It isn't even the manipulation of markets to the benefit of insiders and newspaper lackeys (see 'Crime' section in Chapter 15)...
It is rather the suppression of truth and the coercion of individuals and, by association, the sport that defines this grotesque media.
Take the manner in which the corrupt puppeteers controlling the newspaper's football output created the scenario where the chief executive of Guardian Media Group, David Skipwith Pemsel, was installed as the new CEO of the Premier League.
In corrupted infrastructures, so often the truth is in the absence.
The Guardian decided to push the line that Pemsel was "Integrity Man".
After Richard Scudamore scooted off with his £5 million facilitation bonus (paid for by the clubs who profited from his see-no-evil largesse), a systemic corruption and matchfixing template was implanted on the Premier League. First there was an absence of visible leadership of the EPL allowing mafia control of outcomes, then came Integrity Man aiming to orchestrate the sport to the tune of individuals within his orbit who had helped to orchestrate this gross conversion of football into private wealth creation and then, when Pemsel was found entirely lacking in integrity, there returned an absence of leadership for a further period prior to the appointment of the rather accommodating Dick Masters.
During Pemsel's period as CEO of the Guardian, a whole array of illicit linkages were established between rogue matchfixing agents and the broadsheet.
The nadir of fake journalism was reached when Unique Sports Management coerced entire campaigns of promotional disinformation. In the summer of 2019, the Guardian produced a series of articles attempting to inflate the value of Wilfried Zaha prior to a hopefully successful transfer to Arsenal (the paper had started such tactics over a decade earlier when Colquhoun ran a series of advertorials in the paper attempting to increase the value of his client Theo Walcott also in his negotiations with Arsenal - the targeting of Arsenal takes many forms). Guardian journalists repeatedly priced Zaha at up to £100 million while neutral arbiters were valuing the player at £40 million. The campaign was unsuccessful as internal sabermetrics analysts at the target clubs understood that they were being offered a dud.
However, if the Guardian and Unique Sports Management had been successful with this price inflation, that £60 million extra profit would have been a tidy £9 million bonus for agent, newspaper facilitator with trickledown for 'acquiescent associates'.
Zaha has since changed agents twice, firstly to Pini Zahavi and then to CAA / Base in an attempt once again to reach the career heights that his talent doesn't warrant and Transfermarkt now value the player at £36 million.
Of course, Unique Sports Management remain a blot on the integrity of UK football, very closely linked to bookmakers and █████ █████. It is surprising that the Guardian thought it fit to associate with Unique Sports after Will Salthouse of the agency was exposed as receiving payments from bookmakers in return for introductions to the players who he represents. Salthouse had received £6,000 in 2014 and £4,000 in 2016 and has not declared these earnings to the HMRC. Also, at the Cheltenham Festival in 2016, a group of professional footballers in Salthouse's private box were banned by racecourse bosses after being caught urinating into empty pint glasses and tipping the contents onto racegoers below.
If ever an anecdote described the attitude of corrupted English football to the spectator...
Salthouse's lawyers claimed at the time that he "would never try to encourage a player who does not bet to gamble."
Matchfixing via coercion is the foundation of the systemic corruption in the British game orchestrated by █████ █████ and a cartel of rogue agents (including Unique).
So Salthouse's lawyers are liars.
Under Pemsel, the Guardian also heavily promoted and helped to arrange the takeover of the England Lionesses tying constructed fake realities regarding then Lionesses manager Mark Sampson to the promotion of then Guardian 'journalist' Eni Aluko. Aluko's disclosures were not supported by other players and have since been shown to be largely untrue but the FA found historical unrelated reasons to remove Sampson from his post. The manipulations reached the obvious conclusion when the FA agreed to pay a "significant" financial settlement to Sampson in the week that his claim for unfair dismissal was due to be heard in court.
In their relentless promotion of England Women's football, the Guardian carefully circumvented the unfortunate reality that Dennis Bingham, an agent who was banned in Italy and the UK due to his matchfixing mafia links when he owned AC Monza, still represented four England Women players despite the ban.
Punters pay to keep the Guardian afloat because the paper panders to their identity politics while pretending it is a force for good in the wider world. Once this pretence fails, there is nothing left - just a bubble and a bunch of befuddled Brahmin liberals wondering where their feelgood pseudo-reality has gone.
The Guardian football section has no value because it is nothing. It is a vacuum.
Or, if it is anything, it is a collection of grey market strategies (directly linked to the black) that create profits behind a front of fake media - just like the carpet shops that were the fronts for cocaine importation in the UK before the Albanian Shqiptare mafia took control of 98% of the market.
Create an illusion to create an event.
In the case of Integrity Man the illusion was shattered by an event when he was exposed by the S*n newspaper after sending unsolicited sexual texts to a female employee forcing him to resign as Premier League CEO before he had even started in the job - short-termism and premature ejaculations, all over the place.
This is the modus operandi of mafia.
Only BT Sport sinks to lower depths than the Guardian in UK coverage of football and its orchestrated corruption of which each of these media are a vital part.
We have extensive evidences from a wide variety of sources that the BT Sport platform is corrupt. The initial examples of systemic matchfixing in the Premier League began with the platform's 2018/19 live events covering the takeover of the league by malicious forces following Scudamore's retirement.
BT Sport has had awkward alliances with inappropriate alumni of avaricious insider corruption from its inception under the tutelage of the elevated Baron Livingston of Parkhead (both when he was CEO of BT and in his subsequent role as Minister of State for Trade and Investment) to the season-on-season matchfixing of live events under the averted gaze of the inept, facilitating and accommodating Gavin Patterson to the latest corruption standover man Philip Jansen, with his sociopathic sidekick Adam Crozier (who should never have been employed again after his abusive tenure at Royal Mail)..
Prior to the Pemsel Affair, there were desperate attempts to shoehorn Patterson into Scudamore's role so that BT Sport could control the entire EPL but the inputs of our network undermined and terminated this strategy.
Not Victory Over The Sun but Victory Over BT Sport.
The entire BT Sport hierarchy was created for corruption.
Take the selection of the initial personnel.
Michael Owen is a squiggly doodle while Steve McManaman's former business partner was Carson Yeung who was jailed for five charges of money laundering and Gary Lineker's reputation didn't survive the systemic corruption behind Leicester City's fake title.
All three were good footballers but there are many good footballers who don't hover in the black and grey tax-evading markets most of the time.
And you'll find (if you can be bothered to check) that the ex-footballer talking heads and commentators, the pre-match puff pieces, in-play focuses and post-game interviews will always have a significant bias towards the four agency cartel that we are exposing in this book. These agents have control of your media and the corruption that is destroying your sport.
Or take the BT Sport association with the pgMOB.
We have in our possession proofs of illegal links between these two entities in regard to the matchfixing of live games and the utilisation of ex-referees to justify current corruptions as a reward for all of the events that they enabled historically.
pgMOB referees are paid £50,000 hush money on retirement (only the enigmatic Mark Halsey refused) and this agreement enforces media silence for life which is evidently the strategy of a body with nothing to hide. The inappropriately close links between BT Sport and the pgMOB trumps these arrangements as the likes of Webb, Clattenburg and Walton have pepper-sprayed us with fake interpretations.
As the jolly fucker gangly presenter utters: "It's always good to have Howard with us."
We're sure it is, pal.
BT Sport insiders had significant positions at up to 5,000/1 on the Leicester City 2015/16 title theft and Liverpool were heavily backed in both season 18/19 and 19/20.
This is match manipulation for both immediate and seasonal gain.
It's always good to know what "the boys in the studio" are up to.
More holistically, BT Sport showed 42 Premier League matches in 18/19 and on 34 occasions the Football is Fixed Network detected insider trading revealing the outcome pre-match.
Only one of these manipulations failed to land.
The average goals per game bias in favour of these positions by the pgMOB match officials was +0.69 of a goal per game.
A parallel structure was activated throughout the following season whereas a more complex bifurcating route to market was the mode in 20/21. Once again, in only one game in the entire season where insider trading has been detected by us pre-match did the scam fail to pay out - and that was a breakeven position! This corruption template continues at the time of writing with the same small grouping of referees repeatedly selected for BT Sport events.
And there is evolution in referee inputs too which is extremely damaging to any integrity left residing at the pgMOB as the corruptions are not particular. We are not dealing with a bad apple or two. It is worthy of comment that the five officials most featured in 20/21 BT Sport live matches in comparison to their selection for other Premier League games were England, Coote, Scott, Hooper and Jones - these are the new kids on the block.
The immensely problematical Graham Scott is 54 years old. His officiating is positively correlated with things that it shouldn't be.
Referees used to retire at 45 in the EPL. Now corrupt ones like Scott are initiated at 49.
In La Liga, all referees still retire at 45 years of age but we are given Mike Dean at 53 and Jonathan Moss at 51 (neither of whom reached UEFA event status) - when Colquhoun and Moss first conspired as players at Sunderland in 1992/93 they could hardly have predicted where all this would end. It was Colquhoun who was behind Moss being elevated to the Select Group of the pgMOB in 2011/12 alongside the wee Scot's other 'prodigy' Neil Swarbrick (now Head of VAR).
So BT Sport have control of selection of games, work with the Liverpool Cartel of teams, control of decent percentage of pgMOB referees, profit from the coercion of a percentage of players on the pitch and insider trade the betting markets.
Of course, the BT Sport entity is simply being utilised as a platform by individuals and collections of individuals to enhance private wealth away from taxing eyes. The success of these insider manipulations profits those involved in the corruption but not the BT Group itself.
At the time of writing, the BT Group share price is 136.70 having fallen from 491.20 when the Leicester City scandal first broke and having been 1053.25 at the turn of the millennium.
The Baron, Patterson and Jansen have each failed in their role of enhancing shareholder value.
But at least Michael Owen has got a shiny new helicopter.
The latest piece of corruption chicanery has occurred with the crowning of The Rangers Football Club as SPFL Champions in 20/21 (the first title triumph in their history for the tribute act after the initial club was liquidated in 2012). Sources have shown a member of our network evidences of the role of Colquhoun in this process and, as it was a BT Sport triumph, the sociopaths ensured that Sky Sports were denied interviews with these manipulated winners.
Brian Tuohy has shown that media disinformation underpins the corruption in US sports too. Although current eruptions of news cannot be ignored (as they are in the public eye), "... the leagues use their commentators to belittle these incidents while pushing league-mandated ideas, not to dig deeper into such things as the root causes behind them. It happens because those discussions do not produce profit."
The media cannot afford to take an adversarial approach to integrity issues - "They have too much invested in these leagues to turn around and hammer them on their potential improprieties."
Tuohy: "... the major sports leagues are masters of their own realities. They create the sport you see, they package and sell that as a product, and then control everything that is said or written about it. It is their game. This realisation makes one wonder what sports are anymore. Are 'sports' something played in backyards and on little league fields? Have professional sports been transformed into something unidentifiable?"
When legendary quarterback Joe Namath was in conversation with the New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin and his wife, the following interaction occurred:
Mrs Werblin: "Joseph, it's show business."
Namath: "No, it's not! It's football! This is football! This is not show business!"
Mrs Werblin: "Joe, it's show business."
Tuohy: "Perhaps no truer statement has ever been made about the NFL or any other professional sports league."
A functioning mainstream media would address the issues corrupting football via Socratic questioning and investigative journalism.
St. Thomas Aquinas: "... first the questions are raised in the most abstract but non-speculative manner, then the points of enquiry for each question are sorted out, followed by the objections that can be raised for every possible answer and when this whole ground has been laid, the conclusion is created with specific replies to the objections."
Or you can sell out to Unique, Stellar, CAA / Base and Wasserman / Key Sports and turn your print into a comic book of corrupted collusion.
As Dennis The Menace might have said: "The idea of free information is extremely dangerous to inappropriate power structures".
It is the rampant short-termism of these mafia-led strategies that will ultimately be their downfall.
The spectator is losing trust in fakeball.
Azby Brown: "Trust is not a renewable resource. Once you lose it, that's it."
___________________________________________________________________________________
Scam
Angel Heredia: "Track and field, swimming, cross-country skiing and cycling can no longer be saved. Golf? Not clean either. Soccer? Soccer players come to me and say they have to be able to run up and down the touchline without becoming tired, and they have to play every three days. Basketball players take fat burners, amphetamines, ephedrine. Baseball? Ha ha. Steroids in pre-season, amphetamines during the games. Even archers take downers so that their aim remains steady. Everyone dopes"
Integrity in football is undermined at four strata - state / institutional; club / refereeing; matchfixing / doping; insider trading / market manipulation. Each of these illicit inputs has evolved to its own particular stage of development, some corruptions can be addressed by regulation but some have passed the threshold of no return (which, incidentally, is just outside Preston, where Neil Swarbrick was born).
Doping has become so ubiquitous in football that we cannot see any manner in resolving the unfairness that Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) bring to the sport other than entirely legalising the doping process to level the playing field of corruption and to undermine the anti-competitive strategies of the sociopathic win-at-all-costs elite.
Full legalisation would have detrimental impacts on player health of course (particularly in later life) but via legalisation it would be possible to more thoroughly police the negative impacts of PESs and it would eradicate the impacts of the use of masking substances that secrete doping from the likes of UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Additionally, as we demonstrate below, the policing by UKAD and WADA is elitist, hierarchical and beset by political considerations while also targeting individual indiscretions far more assertively than systemic abuses.
UKAD is pro-doping...
... or, rather, pro-looking the other way while doping occurs.
And, as fragmentation is the norm in corrupt infrastructures, we have recently seen the inappropriate WADA place the inappropriate UKAD under investigation for letting British Cycling conduct a doping probe into British cycling.
Insiders like doping because it rigs outcomes and markets to the detriment of non-insiders.
Football clubs like doping for the competitive advantage it bestows.
Media like doping as it enhances the action if players are running around like headless chickens.
And Big Pharma likes doping because it creates markets for their illicit products.
But selective doping is resulting in inappropriate champions and in teams progressing far further in competitions than the quality of the players should allow.
As we wrote on the Football Is Fixed blog in October 2019: "But doping is anti-sporting. In the last round of Champions League group games, Slavia Prague (by no means a young side) covered 128 kilometres in their game while Paris St Germain ran just 105 kilometres in their match - that is equivalent to every one of the outfield Slavia players covering 22 metres more every minute than the Parisian giants. How? Perhaps CITIC or Sonobo (Slavia's owners) could provide a viable answer?"
Doping is rampant in the Premier League too and is accepted by the powers-that-be because doping is highly regressive.
Former chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) Gordon Taylor responded to suggestions that UK Sport could undertake random testing of players as follows: "We feel that to invade the privacy of a player's home would be a step too far. If we complain about anything to do with drug-testing then people think we might have something to hide, but football's record is extremely good and there has been a virtual absence of any performance-enhancing drugs, and that goes back decades."
How pre-modern.
The overpaid ostrich is right on one point though - the "absence" is most certainly "virtual".
PESs are very very widely used in football and we are able to back up this statement via both evidences and through the application of statistical analysis of match data over many years. As ever in analytical research, contorted formats demonstrate new data and the post-Covid window has revealed intriguing new aspects of systemic doping (particularly within the Liverpool Cartel). Peculiar trails of evidence lead from Liverpool and Manchester United to Aston Villa and Brighton And Hove Albion to FC Liefering and the Red Bull franchise that dopes RB Salzburg and RB Leipzig (the latter covering the most yards in the 2020/21 Champions League while Brighton's highly manipulative result template is built around cycles of doping).
The key area pharmaceutically is the development of masking substances to disguise the PESs being taken. If any warning of testing or likelihood of testing is in the air then the masks come out of the closet.
And why should individual footballers have to submit to such an arbitrary and selective testing regime? The focus should be on the core of the issue rather than at the periphery. Numerous Italian footballers, for example, took the pills or injections that the Old Lady insisted upon as it was the only way to compete at the highest levels to protect your career. There was a systemic and peer group pressure to perform to one's maximum. If WADA and UKAD wish to target PESs abuse, target the abusers and not the abused. Remember cortisone?
So WADA dey do?
Vincent Geraerts: "The current World Anti-Doping Code can be characterised as a tough approach to doping... To this end, WADA advances two justificatory arguments. It maintains, first, that protection of the spirit of sport warrants tough measures and, second, that athletes have voluntarily consented to the Code... neither of these arguments can withstand scrutiny... we go on to show that these arguments are in fact ideological in nature. The specific aim of these arguments is not to be correct, but rather to distort social reality, because in this way they can be used to ward off any critical discussion of the Code. We conclude that WADA's interest is to create a facade of justice, not in serving justice itself."
Dick Pound: "Too many people involved in sport do not want the anti-doping system to work."
Paul Dimeo: "One of the greatest challenges faced by anti-doping agencies, and indeed by sports organisations in a broader sense, is in persuading athletes, coaches, doctors, even parents, that sport is indeed about honesty and integrity... elite athletes have a way of thinking about the world which is focused primarily on their own success."
As soon as doping reached systemic levels in football (which we would argue was with Bayer Leverkusen in season 2001/02 - see below), the only valid solution was legalisation of PESs. If dopers win and systemic doping wins, the integrity of the game can only be balanced by equivalent access for all.
Canadian cross-country skier and Olympic athlete Becky Scott: "... [in] the world of sport and particularly Olympic sport, doping is very much a criminal offence. You're defiling the sponsors, you're defiling your fellow athletes and you're defiling the public."
No Shit!
Mara Yamauchi states that doping is equivalent to stealing money by deception which "is a criminal offence in many situations and it should be in sport. It's clear that the current system of punishments is not sufficient. It is totally unacceptable that people can steal money and face no punishment."
Or, a surprise quote from Jamie Vardy's arm bandage: "Do you know what I am covering up?"
And doping (like other crimes) pays.
Lance Armstrong earned more than $218 million in his career by being a drug cheat - you know what, fuck the Tour de France titles stripped from the man, his bank balance stays robust whatever.
Paul Dimeo: "Hence, in the current situation it is the athletes who have most likely used doping who get the lion's share of the money, while those who most likely have not doped must feed on crumbs. That is, the professional sports system is established in such a way that it bestows glamour, prestige and wealth on athletes who use the very drugs which the same sport system apparently finds unacceptable."
Doping for the rich, disaster capitalism for the poor.
If doping is not made legal, athletes who compete at elite international level should be forbidden from choosing their own doctors by being forced to have doctors approved by WADA instead - as we show below it is the Dr Mark Bonar's and Dr Richard Freeman's of the world that are the problems to integrity.
There are certain stages of the season where the illegal usage of PESs becomes more prevalent. It is evident that the late season is a key period to develop competitive advantage and, sure enough, PESs have always been more prevalent from February onwards in football. Historically, the key PESs is undoubtedly Erythropoietin (EPO). Having been utilised in cycling for years, the pharmaceutical companies have developed a whole range of masking substances to prevent detection. EPO is particularly sought after as it can improve the performance of a team over a considerable time window. We have developed extensive modelling to determine when a club (or an individual player) is on EPO but the market-makers are on top of this potential edge nowadays and such information is in the price. The authorities throughout Europe are aware of this issue - my favourite response remains that of La Liga authorities who tested for EPO in urine when it may only be detected via blood samples! Various types of amphetamine provide a shorter term buzz. Benzedrine, Methedrine and Dexedrine are typical of this class and some teams use amphetamines at half-time which can be particularly rewarding on a trading level if you are ahead of the market. Other substances e.g. narcotic analgesics allow athletes to play on through an injury (frequently creating further damage).
Another point that is worthy of note. Illegal drug programmes tend to move with management teams from club to club - think Claudio Ranieri. We incorporate all of the above into our trading analysis but, occasionally, there is substance abuse that falls outside published science. In season 2001/02, Bayer Leverkusen were a team possessed. They reached the final of the Champions League where they narrowly lost to Real Madrid and the beautiful Zinedine Zidane; they had lost the final of the DFB-Pokal (German Cup) four days earlier putting out a reserve XI. Bayer were also pipped to the Bundesliga title by just one point. A pretty successful season all in all for a team the size of Blackburn Rovers. The following year, Bayer escaped relegation only in a fixed game on the last day of the campaign and finished bottom of their Champions League second-phase group with zero points. Analytically, we have never seen such a reversal from one season to the next.
Leverkusen are owned by Bayer pharmaceutical company which is of no relevance whatsoever... obviously.
The Olympics have always been an interesting arena in exposing PESs and plotting the graph of medals won versus the size of the country's pharmaceutical sector is evidential in an approximate way.
Our network are not big fans of Big Pharma. Our late lawyer David McNeight once represented █████ █████ after Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis had undertaken rampant intellectual property theft against the client. The assumption was that the little entity from Manchester would crumble in the face of the multinational. But they didn't and Novartis had to pay out considerable damages. The reason that this anecdote is plucked from the hat is that the entire board of Novartis at the time were lawyers! This situation is now being mimicked in football with Gianni Infantino at FIFA and Aleksander Ceferin at UEFA all the way down to the Tony Bloom-backed alleged money laundering rogue Maheta Molango who is the new chief executive at the PFA.
How on earth can the 'independent panel' (sic) that elected Molango ignore the manner in which he was ousted as CEO of RCD Mallorca for refusing to hand over control of the club transfers to the manager? In February 2020, Molango was questioned by Spanish police in a money laundering investigation involving the Albanian football agent Fali Ramadani.
Really, what the fuck is going on in English football?
It's becoming equivalent to analysing the 'Ndrangheta.
Anyway, that aside aside.
Dick Pound: "The primary reason for the apparent lack of success of the testing programmes does not lie with the science involved... The real problems are the human and political factors. There is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense of a successful effort to deliver a doping-free sport... It is reflected in low standards of compliance measurement (often postponed), unwillingness to undertake critical analysis of the necessary requirements, unwillingness to follow-up on suspicions and information, unwillingness to share available information and unwillingness to commit the necessary informed intelligence, effective actions and other resources to the fight against doping in sport."
A Coalition of the Unwilling.
UKAD has an annual budget which is markedly less than 50% of the amount Jack Grealish is paid annually by Manchester City.
There is no institutional incentive.
UKAD are to doping what Sportradar are to matchfixing.
Brian Tuohy on the situation in the US: "There is a monstrous 'catch-22' in each league's drug testing policies: the leagues oversee their own tests, results and punishments. They have complete control without any oversight. The players don't want to be caught, the unions don't want players to be caught, and the leagues don't want to see their players test positive. Yet the idea behind testing is to ensure the integrity of the game."
In 2016, the Fancy Bears' Hacking Team released WADA documents exposing USA and UK Olympic athletes' doping strategies including the usage of Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) by Team Sky / INEOS.
More recently, former Team Sky Cycling medic Dr Richard Freeman has been found guilty of ordering banned testosterone for an unnamed rider.
The banned Testogel was delivered to Manchester in June 2011 just prior to Bradley Wiggins gaining the biggest victory in his career (to that date) in the Criterium du Dauphin (also in June 2011) and Chris Froome evolving from "donkey" to winning his first Grand Tour in August / September in the same year. Team Sky / INEOS went on to win 7 out of the next eight Tour de France races and the team boss David Brailsford was elevated to knighthood (like Wiggins).
The England football team under the management of Roy Hodgson had very close links to Brailsford and employed Team Sky's Dr Steve Peters as team psychiatrist in the immensely successful World Cup campaign in 2014 when the Three Lions were eliminated after just two games.
Martin Samuel: "As we now know, Peters helped England's footballers to be the most serenely well-adjusted squad in the departure lounge after two weeks... So, thank you British Cycling... the footballers are so without fear they were eliminated in their next tournament by the hurricane force that is Iceland. That went well."
As we shared in an earlier chapter, Team Sky doctors also worked hand-in-glove, syringe-in-arm with Leicester City in 2015/16 monstrosity and TUEs are always on the menu for the remarkable number of Liverpool footballers who allegedly suffer from asthma.
The Anfield Asthma Epidemic is a Thing.
It is also a danger to the players.
Brailsford also introduced himself to Thomas Tuchel once the German took over as manager of Chelsea and I hardly need to share that we have detected doping at the club since game one of his reign.
Former Team Sky rider Jonathan Tiernan-Locke has disclosed that Team Sky's premise and implementation of a zero tolerance policy towards working with previous dopers were "bullshit" and a "total joke".
Brailsford was elevated to the FA Steering Committee despite the fact that a parliamentary committee had concluded that TUEs were one of the marginal gains propelling Sir Bradley Wiggins so rapidly up the side of a mountain.
And despite Clive Efford of the Department of Culture Media & Sport Select Committee calling for Brailsford to be suspended after the Freeman conviction, he and the media that is supposed to be reporting on him have gone to ground.
This strategy of absenting oneself from scrutiny by going into hiding is probably preferable for the crooked man as the mainstream sporting media doesn't function in the UK. So hiding works. In a previous attempt to bury reality, Brailsford defended the doping of Wiggins in an interview with the BBC's Dan Roan. One knight of the realm defending another knight of the realm (and both of their legacies) in an arranged communication with the television company that had made Wiggins Sports Personality Of The Year and who were closely linked to the corruption at Leicester City via Match Of The Day's Gary Lineker.
What's not to like?
Previously, just one day after the Fancy Bears' releasing their evidence, Jamie Vardy stopped wearing his magic bandage for the first time in 21 months. Vardy only scored in one game for Leicester City in the next five-and-a-half months.
Of course, Team Sky / INEOS, Leicester City, Liverpool, England and Chelsea are not the only doping entities. The Spanish blood doping clinic run by Dr Eufemiano Fuentes was raided by police in 2006. There is still no outcome resolution and still nobody knows which leading Spanish tennis player or which major capital city football club benefited from Operacion Puerta.
Nada.
Get Real.
Enrique Bastida of the Spanish Anti-Doping Agency: "The sentence emitted from a Madrid lower criminal court on April 29th 2013 considered to have found proof that since the year 2002, there was a pattern of blood extractions and the administration of drugs such as EPO, IGF-1, testosterone, insulin, etc to athletes at a price, and with risks for their own health. But these proven facts were then taken to the Madrid Provincial Court, whose ruling went the opposite way and acquitted all of those who had been found guilty in the first case."
And TUEs have now become omnipresent in football.
Paul Dimeo: "... cortisone is one of the drugs often administered to athletes on the basis of a TUE, but has potential side effects including joint degradation and weakened tendons which could lead to higher risk of ruptures. So, if anti-doping took health protection seriously it would not allow injured athletes such potentially damaging shortcuts back to competition."
Jonna Toft: "Sports medicine has now become an eternal search to win and set new records... at the same time, it now appears that today's doctors are not particularly affected by ethical considerations."
Toft was writing in 2002!
So.
Obviously.
Legalising doping is not without its issues but at least these issues would be in the open.
And masking would be eliminated.
However, the primary reason why doping should be legalised is the development of gene doping.
PESs are yesterday's ting.
Here is what we wrote about the Olympics in 2008:
Nietzsche's Superman - the modern marketed paradigm of hyperreal humanity.
The Scene... Nothing less than the leadership of the Free World (sic) is at stake. Winning is Everything. When the skewed incentives create such a competitive and nationalistic template, one may only be certain of one thing. Cheating... The cumulative impact of the incentives - personal, cultural, economic, political and national - are marked.
Herbert Marcuse: "...play is precisely a breaking off from labour and a recuperation for labour".
The Circularity of Play in the Political Economy is equivalent to the Circularity of Cheating in Sport. When the prize is so great on so many levels, Cheating will define the games. This Cheating will, literally, exist on two different strata - PESs and Gene Doping. PESs are now commonplace in all sports - the information is "in the price", so to speak. Originally, the monitoring regimes were so lax that maskers weren't necessary. Indeed, a cynic might argue that the global regulation covering the illegal utilisation of PESs is suitably time-lagged to allow the next wave of 'innovation' to be initiated prior to more cumbersome regulations being developed for earlier forms of Creative Cheating. But, in spite of this, PESs are secondary in impact to the Next Big Thing.
Gene Doping will distort future outcomes.
Do you need to know the science? Okay, here's a bit...
This physiological advancement (sic) is based on introducing extra copies of particular genes into the body (transgenes). EPO is the prime transgene target. It was the biotechnology industry that introduced EPO in the late-eighties and an EPO transgene would not be detectable using any technique.
The Perfect Crime.
Repoxygen is already freely available in the sorts of locations where you can purchase guns and things. Other Big Pharma advances include IGF-1 (which is muscle specific - think javelin or tennis), vascular endothelial, Switching Genes that act as an on / off device, advanced endorphins for pain control etc etc. The specificity of these designer doping genes allows particular products to be aimed at particular sports. One can even game the detection regime via the use of Switching Genes. Now, when the leadership of the Free World is at stake, surely the unknown health risks to a few athletes are not worth worrying about? Cortisone? Who cares? And, in a parallel pharma-verse, notice how quickly Vioxx has disappeared from the hyperreality? As The Economist correctly states, the decision on Gene Doping should be based on safety and fairness. However, the right wing libertarians then proceed by totally ignoring the former (profit over people) while producing illogical, unscientific and selective arguments in support of the latter. The Economist think that Gene Doping is a Good Thing. Over their column inches, even the name changes. Gene Doping, with its nightmare-state images of Frankenstein-athletes... ...becomes Gene Therapy, with an altogether more comfortable-couch-with-caring-counsellor sort of image. If we are going to be objecting to the hunger merchants of the next millennium imposing genetically modified foods on us, we must be equally assertive in our objection to genetically modified athletes.
The Economist uses the case of Eero Mantyranta to promote their case. This Finnish athlete was fortunate. His body produced large amounts of EPO entirely naturally. He won a couple of Olympic Golds in those bizarre sports that involve snow and rifles and forests and things. So what? Sport is about natural ability. That is the point. Fairness - no corruption or advantage through PESs, Gene Doping, control of match officials or whatever.
The list of negatives to The Economists' arguments are extensive, too extensive for my working day. But here are a few points worthy of input (in random order):
* If natural ability is to be artificially equalised using Gene Doping then some of the most beautiful things that we have ever witnessed will never happen again. Maradona, Tiger Woods, Don Bradman, Evonne Goolagong would all have just merged into the crowd of heightened mediocrity. The incentives would make it imperative that all athletes partake in Gene Doping - what chance in outrunning or outjumping an android without becoming one yourself?
* In the end, it will still probably be natural ability that provides some edge but not before Big Pharma has made extensive profits out of gullible and desperate athletes equalising their gene intake. The profits of the pharmaceutical industry are one of the foundational bases of this ruse.
* Big Pharma will also game the sector. Generic Gene Doping will be available off-the-shelf, in a manner of speaking, for the poorer participants. The elite will have proprietary Gene Doping established with particular pharmaceutical giants - Team Pfizer USA. This will help maintain the most psychopathic nations at the top of the Olympic Medal Table and the most psychopathic football clubs at the top of the Champions League.
* Longer-term health risk is the biggest issue. Corners will be cut in pursuit of glory. The real impacts may only become evident in future decades when the athletes are well away from the lens of the spectacle. And the athletes take on the Total Risk i.e. Life. The profiteers simply count the cash...
* Numerous unnecessary industries will benefit from the introduction of Gene Doping - advertisers, sponsors, the media, merchandisers, sportswear firms, bookmakers etc etc etc.
For example, lets look at bookmaking. Natural ability is very annoying to bookmakers. Bookmakers do not appreciate competitions where the incentive to win is considerably greater than the incentive to Cheat.
Gene Doping and Switching Genes will solve this. And then some...
As only the leading nations will be able to take advantage of bespoke Gene Doping, and as the leading nations have very mature betting industries, the inevitable linking of the Dopers and the Layers will produce internally controlled betting markets on currently dangerous spectacles such as the Olympic Games. In a world where the bookmaking and pharmaceutical industries cosied up to one another for mutual advantage, and oodles of insider trading opportunites - all industries love those off-balance sheet little grey and black market earners - the possibilities of gaming the 100 metres outcome for proprietary trading advantage is obvious. For example, inside knowledge of the use of Switching Genes would be valuable both with respect to historical 'form' and real-time hyperrealities in the race. The worst two industries, apart from all the others, are pharmaceuticals and bookmaking, and their collusion is not an edifying sight. The Economist dresses up the whole argument regarding Gene Doping on the basis of fairness. Apparently, it is unfair that the likes of Eero Mantyranta have natural ability providing natural advantage. It would be much fairer, claim a tongue-in-cheeked Economist leader, if rich countries could develop an unnatural advantage for themselves through drugs and doping. "Why should others be denied the chance to remedy ...[their] deficiency?" argues The Economist. Aside from all the above (and more), the winners of the prizes should be the individuals who have natural talents, have selected the correct sports in which to demonstrate those talents, have trained while their peers partied and who avoid the competitive advantages bestowed by PESs, Gene Doping or linking to the bookmaking industry. Exactly the sort of individuals who will not be winning Gold Medals in the future, in fact...
Gene Doping represents the end of competitive integrity in sport.
And remember, Gene Doping is not a Country and Western singer.
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Sean and Frank O'Meara:
As we gather in the chapel here
In old Kilmainham Gaol
I think about these past few weeks
Oh, will they say we failed?
From our school days, they have told us
We must yearn for liberty
Yet, all I want in this dark place
Is to have you here with me
Oh Grace just hold me in your arms and let this moment linger
They'll take me out at dawn and I will die
With all my love I place this wedding ring upon your finger
There won't be time to share our love for we must say goodbye
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© 2023 Football is Fixed
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