What The Hell Has "Football" Become?
Alex Thomson: "As a lifelong Newcastle United supporter I feel sick this morning. No time for Ashley but he doesn't murder and dismember journalists or chop people's heads off or treat women as third class humans on an industrial scale. What the hell has 'football' become?"
The coronation of state psychopathy on the banks of the Tyne was a highly manicured stage-managed spectacle of a pseudo-celebration which masked English football's very own singular personality disorders as, like entropic gravity in the universe, the English game continues on its voyage to greater and greater disorder.
There sat Ant and Dec, the jolly fucker Geordie lads Siamese-twinned together since birth in a mainstream harmony of laughter neither original nor funny.
But look how well they get on in their banking advertisements. Very moving.
Ant and Dec were at St James's Park to represent the true fan, the long suffering Geordies who were carefully located to rejoice in their precious football club being reclaimed from the Fat Man by the Fat Wallet of Wahabi fundamentalism. Their always cheery-faced availability to tickle the nation's collective funny bone warms the cockles of your heart which, incidentally, might be one of the torture methods utilised by their beloved club's new owners.
Directly behind this fake facade sat the Assassin's Apprentice who is running the Saudi Arabian Private Investment Fund (PIF) on behalf of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al Saud. This sovereign wealth fund has a sovereign who, unfortunately for the integrity of the Premier League, organised the murder of investigative journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018.
Sat next to the Assassin's Apprentice was Cruella de Vil, the British financier who orchestrated the takeover in return for some cash and some shares. Apparently, Ms de Vil once turned down a request for her claw in marriage from Prince Andrew, the Elite Royal Nonce, which provides an example of the circles in which this lady orbits.
This, of course, was a lucky escape although it is debatable whether the luckier party was Cruella or Andrew.
When asked if the Saudi state and its representatives would meddle in the club, de Vil told the BBC: "No, not at all. Absolutely not."
When asked if the British prince, Jeffrey Epstein and his chums would sexually abuse under age girls in far flung private islands while avoiding justice, a spokesperson for the Monarchy told the BBC: "No, not at all. Absolutely not."
Off screen and away from St James's Park sat the hidden people, the puppet masters of the destruction of any semblance of integrity in the English game.
It was Prince Salman who lobbied Prime Minister Johnson in April 2021 to pressure the four year old to pressure Richard Masters, the chief executive of the Premier League, to pressure the people and media under his control to back the approval of the takeover of Newcastle United by a Monster.
These are the only appearances by Johnson and Masters in the whole sorry charade as they each repeatedly demonstrate their sociopathic core by hiding out when the shits hits the fans - Johnson hiding in a property in Marbella held by an opaque offshore structure based in multiple tax havens at the time when British MPs reported that his government's initial response to the covid pandemic was the "worst public health failure ever" while Masters went to ground after facilitating the worst Premier League takeover ever, completely reneging on any effective oversight of the EPL.
Prince Salman chooses the moniker MBS instead of his real title - preferring to sound like a mid-seventies discount furniture store than the Monster Bastard Sociopath, we are assuming.
There was already evidence enough for this takeover to be beyond the limits for English football - the random beheadings; the links between Wahabi fundamentalists and the dictionary of terror groups operating to create a variety of sharia dungeon countries around the Sahel, the Middle East, South Asia, anywhere really; the second (if you are lucky) and third class status of women in Saudi; the repeated and extensive illegal arms deals e.g. the Al Yamamah deal with British Aerospace covered earlier in this book; slavery on a massive scale; 9/11; the illegal war of terror on the civilians of Yemen; the control of OPEC, the oil monopoly that has spent much of the last half century holding the world by its bollocks; the brutal treatment meted out even to elite visiting women who failed to follow nut job fundamentalist rules like being a non-Saudi woman and showing your ankles in a public place - bring out the truncheons and the thugs is the cry...
Which brings us on to Jamal Khashoggi whose fiancee Hatice Cengiz pleaded with Prime Minister Johnson not to allow the takeover to proceed. She's not blonde so she had no chance.
But, of course, Johnson has a slice in the deal.
The Reuben family is a part of the consortium that now controls Newcastle United and Jamie Reuben is a close friend of the Prime Minister and has served as Tory party treasurer - he has donated more than £750,000 since Johnson became PM (the family as a whole has donated £1.9 million).
When HMRC were seeking a new location for offices then, how about Newcastle? How about a property owned by the Reubens? - and ultimately owned by a British Virgin Isles entity.
So.
The state tax entity will use taxpayers' money to exist in a property that benefits a family that relies on offshore structures based in tax havens.
Captured state or what?
On October 2nd 2018 (just three years prior to the takeover being given the go ahead), Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents enabling his marriage. He never left that building, well not intact in any case.
13 days later, Turkish and Saudi officials inspected the building and discovered that Khashoggi had been murdered and dismembered with a bone saw before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid.
The Turkish National Intelligence Organisation (Milli Istihbarat Teskilati) had bugged the embassy as part of their geopolitical posturing against the Saudis and, prescient of George Floyd's murder by US police, Jamal's final words were "I can't breathe".
Throughout this horror show, the Saudi state altered their narrative to suit the public evidence in play - firstly, Jamal had left the embassy alive whistling as he clutched his marriage documents; secondly, he was strangled during a fist fight; but thirdly, on October 25th, MBS scored a spectacular own goal when the Saudi attorney general admitted that the murder was premeditated.
In the following month, the CIA concluded that Prince Salman had ordered Khashoggi's assassination.
On October 11th 2018, the Independent reported that, via US communications intercepts, MBS had given direct orders to lure Khashoggi to the embassy with the intention of using illegal extraordinary rendition to drag the journalist back to Saudi Arabia, home of the free.
In March 2019, Interpol released Red Notices for the arrest of twenty people involved in the torture and murder.
On June 19th 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report holding the state of Saudi Arabia responsible for the "premeditated extrajudicial execution" of Khashoggi.
On September 7th 2020, eight people tied to the murder were allegedly imprisoned although their names have never been released and given the above, who knows what went on with unknown people in secret courts away from prying eyes?
In December 2021, it emerged that the murderers of Khashoggi are living lives of luxury in Saudi Arabia under the protection of the Monster.
Thomas Hegghammer: "Saudi Arabia has become a full-blown surveillance state."
Khashoggi is not an outlier.
Many Saudi critics are disappeared and KSA prisons are full of women activists fighting for any semblance of human rights in the petro-cartel state.
Three years, almost to the day, after the Independent announced MBS's role in these gruesome conditions, the Premier League, Prime Minister Johnson and the captured rump of the British media waved through the takeover of Newcastle United by this repugnant state terrorist.
And the media did their job.
Saint Alan Shearer gave his approval while Micah Richards nodded approvingly, Jamie Redknapp morphed into an assassin's apologist, Danny Murphy told us to concentrate on the fans and the 'failures' of manager Steve Bruce who, despite saving Newcastle United from relegation with two successive mid-table finishes was apparently a greater persona non grata than a mass murdering mafia man.
Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International strongly opposed the deal as did 18 of the Premier League clubs but, according to Sky Sports, Jamie is the voice of reason nowadays on issues relating to extreme human rights violations. Harry and his dog Rosie must be proud.
Gary Lineker, to his credit, refused to tow the BBC Match Of The Day line that MBS is what the English game needs (what more tainted money? more mafia?) and missed the programme following the announcement of the takeover claiming to have a cold but we have been very reliably informed that he is horrified by these developments.
The Guardian has particularly tied itself in knots over this takeover.
While vile editor-in-chief Katherine Viner pleads with readers to fund the paper in support of investigative journalism, John Colquhoun masquerading as one Louise Taylor (in a very Guardianesque pronoun development of he / him / her / it /what variety) was extolling the virtues of Saudi ownership despite the murder of an investigative journalist who the paper claimed to support while targeting Bruce rather than the players represented by Colquhoun's own cartel of agents who had been underperforming to undermine the manager and the club.
And, of course, it was Ms Taylor / Mr Colquhoun who took under-the-table payments to promote the Qatar World Cup 2022 bid Not Journalism
This paper is captured media and should fund itself.
Indeed, the football section does just that receiving cash and payment in kind and insider betting knowledge from many sources.
It was the underground betting markets that revealed to our network the impending takeover of Newcastle in late September weeks before the charade became public..
Moreover, while claiming to support investigative journalism, the Guardian has shafted Julian Assange, abandoned Edward Snowden (who only escaped American Injustice via the brilliant strategies of Sarah Harrison of the Courage Foundation), it virtually ignored the murders of Peter de Vries and Jan Kuciak while this alleged newspaper was highly selective in what they published about the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia by the mafia Maltese state - the paper avoided any mention of English football's incredibly close ties to this state via bookmaking, mafia links, the third party ownership of players and the creation of passports-for-cash to enable suitable trafficking of players.
Prior to the PIF coup, Newcastle United had been the most heavily targeted of all the EPL clubs by the pgMOB operatives who blow the whistle on the field of play and abuse VAR hidden away.
Out of 98 teams in the top five European leagues, none have been as heavily targeted by match officials as have Newcastle United in the opening eight games of this season.
There is an holistic manipulative agenda here.
And the same names keep cropping up - of the 24 pgMOB core officials on Newcastle's games to date (at the time of writing), the most problematical keep getting selected and keep making incorrect calls - Gillett (3 games), Dean (2), Marriner (2), Taylor (2), Coote (2), Brooks (2), Pawson (2), Atkinson (2).
Is there a shortage of match officials in the UK?
From MBS to the PM to the EPL to the pgMOB to the BBC to the PIF to NUFC, there is your solution to this very British top down conspiracy. And it is a conspiracy.
Meanwhile, on the day when Taylor / Colquhoun wrote an article celebrating the sacking of Steve Bruce by Cruella and the Assassin's Apprentice, the article achieved 15 Likes on Twitter...
... immediately after the sacking, Newcastle United player Allan Saint-Maximin tweeted: "You are, without a doubt, one of the most gentle people that I have ever met in the world of football. You have been a man of your word, a caring man and a fair man who never hesitated to protect us. I will never forget how you treated me, for that I will be forever grateful... It has been an honour and a privilege to have you as coach, thank you Steve".
On the day of publication, Saint-Maximin's tweet received 242,200 Likes on Twitter.
And there lies the problem for the murderers of the British game.
There is a chasm starting to develop between those like Colquhoun, Murphy, Redknapp, Shearer, Staveley, Masters, Johnson and Ant and Dec who would sell their grandmothers to Hitler for a proprietary gain, and others like Gary Lineker, Allan Saint-Maximin, selected football journalists, Alex Thomson and the non-psychopathic majority who think it is abhorrent that a top English football club is now owned by a Murdering Mafia Monster.
And we are left with that chink of light in the fake arguments fed to us by media - if MBS is not going to have any interest in developments at Newcastle United, why did he lobby the Prime Minister personally to force the takeover through?
After all, altruism is conspicuous by its absence in the personality profile of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al Saud.
The zeitgeist of corruption is narrowing - that gap between the reality of the football corruption and the fans' perception of it - and there are splits in the enemy ranks.
The situation is excellent.
When the Fog on the Tyne is eventually lifted, it will reveal the dismembered body of English football dissolved in a vat of acid purchased from a furniture superstore.
So what happens next?
There will be a split in the Liverpool Cartel as Colquhoun sells out to the Saudis while breaking links with those he climbed upon to reach these heights.
The referees will eventually start aiding Newcastle United.
The media will continue to get high on the spectacle.
There will be a Summer Transfer Window Sale at MBS - buy one, get one free.
More players from Stellar, Wasserman / Key Sports, Unique and CAA / Base will arrive at the club, followed by a Wasserman / Key Sports controlled manager, Eddie Howe.
Perhaps even Prince Andrew will be put on the Newcastle board to enable his alleged sex crimes to be whitewashed away.
The media should be treating Steve Bruce as a hero of the game - 1,000 games of achievement without becoming corrupted.
A proper football man in an improper football world.
And Allan Saint-Maximin deserves to find a decent football club to employ him.
He is a cracking player.
Sportswashing, Paedowashing, Corruptionwashing all to an audience of halfwit fans with tea towels wrapped around their heads and Salafist flags in their hands.
Newcastle United, the first football club to evolve into a laundromat of state assassinations and crime.
Sunderland should change their name to Khashoggi FC in protest.
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Football & Corruption
Misha Glenny: "The KGB officers and networks who had outsourced their services formed the middle belt of a pyramid supporting the opulent oligarchs at the top. The Security Services provided a crucial link with the state. But at the bottom of the pyramid, bolstering the entire structure, was a diverse group of people known as the zashchita, or 'defence'. This included a host of professionals - lawyers, PR companies, journalists (and, in the case of a few oligarchs, entire newspapers or television stations) - and anybody who might contribute to the defence of the oligarch's interests. The core of the zashchita, however, remained the krysha - the protection racket or mob"
Football is felt by the English nation to be a possession as much its own as its countless varieties of corruption and its imperial culture. It is a symbolic sport, corresponding to the corruption of the Russian state or to the wine drunk ceremoniously by the French. We have already provided a substantial psychoanalysis of this sport in the preceding eighteen chapters, and we have demonstrated that football is the product of the markets and the trading, that its basic state is not sporting but financial, and that on this foundation the mythic performance most contrary to it is play.
Actually, like every lively symbolic sport, football supports a varied mythology which is not embarrassed by contradictions. This dynamic game is always considered, for example, the most globalised and effective version of competitive sport - at least entertainment serves as an initial alibi for its observation by spectators ("It's match day today"). In its natural form it mimics, as a very old hypothesis, war, that futile and vicious endeavour. As a matter of fact, its substantive form matters very little; above all, it is a conversion sport, capable of reversing states and situations, of extracting from reality their actual contraries: of making, for instance, a giantkiller strong, a narrative silent; from where its centuries old alchemical heredity, its philosophical meaning to transform or to create out of nothing is formed ("Where did that Panenka come from?").
Being in essence a raison d'etre, whose form can change, football possesses essentially the powers of plastic printing ("This second half could be anything!"): it can serve as an alibi for dreams as well as for reality ("The magic of the cup"), depending on the spectators of the myth. For the worker, football will be a religion, an ingenious facility for giving meaning to life ("If you're telling me football is corrupt then I lose all of my reasons for living"). For the intellectual (pseudo or otherwise), it will have the opposite function: Marina Hyde's "little football analogies linking Prince Andrew's lack of sweat to the offside law" or clubs listed on the stock market whose price will be responsible for separating her from all others into a natural world of corruption and insider trading (the only offers of exchange made in the clique-ridden bubble of journalism); football will deliver her from myths, free her from intellectuality, make her as proletarian as good as the rest; by football the (pseudo) intellectual approaches a gender neutral virility, believing she can thereby escape the curse of two hundred years of fake news which still imposes a pure censorship - one of the favourite myths of the modern intellectual sports writer is the obsession of having inside information ("Straight from the horse's mouth").
But what is special to England is that the power of conversation is never openly given as a goal: other countries watch football for entertainment and, hopefully, victory, a reality the world recognises as competitive; in England entertainment is secondary, never a goal; football is felt as an exposition of pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an enjoyment: football is only accidentally magic being more a conveyor belt of cornered markets and underground trading on the contorted outcomes: the gesture here is that of the spectacle, and football's power is never separated from these modes of existence (contrary to war, for example, performed for its potential victory - "the most strategic outcomes with the least damage incurred," experienced and repeated, and whose administration is reduced to a causal act).
All of which is generally recognised by insiders, rehearsed a thousand times through over the seasons in the amazement at 4-3 victories, the viciousness of chants, the liveliness of banter and banal presentations of literature and even more banal captured journalism. Yet this very universalism involves a sameness, a repetition: to believe football is a collective art when it is rather a coercive act; the Englishman (and increasingly woman) who keeps a distance from the myth exposes himself / herself to minor but specific issues of integration into society, the first of which is the obligation to explain oneself ("How can you not watch England versus Italy at Wembley, the home of football when football is coming home?"). The principle of universality rears its ugly head here in full effect, in the sense that (what remains of) society labels anyone who does not properly support a football team sick ("Kiss the badge"), a billy-no-mates, a weirdo: such an individual is not comprehended (particularly in one-club-towns like Newcastle, Leicester, Brighton or Burnley where, respectively, state terrorism, the stealing of a Premier League title via corruption, glorification of a matchfixing insider trading owner, folksy hillbilly racism is regarded as something that must be celebrated: otherwise you are the Other, the Outlier, people refer to you with capital letters to denote your uniqueness and your traitor profile - for fuck's sake, in Bergamo in Italy, every child born is sent an Atalanta shirt to get into the children's mind before Catholicism: England does the same but without the battle with religion, or at least without spirituality, because the one-club-town folk are always Bradford or Brighton 'Til They Die and their ashes are scattered onto the pitch so that they are Bradford or Brighton for eternity.
Conversely, even the oddest entity is provided with a degree of proper integration by being "of the football club": knowing how to support your team is a local and national technique which serves to qualify the English person (you're Millwall, you must be racist; you're Brighton Hove Albion, you must honour matchfixing if it benefits the shirt; you're Newcastle United, you must celebrate war crimes and a fascist fundamentalism - yet all will believe in a nationalistic "Football's Coming Home").
Football thus provides a collective (im)morality within which everything is redeemed: excesses (MBS), disasters (Heysel), crimes (Leicester City 2015/16) are necessary with a corrupted football, as are wickedness, perfidy and ugliness ("Is there anything so inane as an agreed 0-0 draw? Life is short and you will never get those minutes back"). The 'evil' a corrupted football can engender absences the impacts of fate ("If Wrexham and their Hollywood owners need to reach the 1st Round of the FA Cup because it is a media story then, you know what, Wrexham are going to be reaching the 1st Round of the FA Cup - come what may"). There can be no penalisation of corruption, no acknowledgement of its widespread template - in the mind of the football supporter, it is a theoretical evil, not a temperamental one grounded in reality.
Football is socialised because it provides a matrix not only for a hidden corruption but also for the spectacle; it embellishes the most minor ceremonial realities of British daily life ("Joe Hart has opened a new restaurant - yes but he's still a matchfixer"); from the sectarian (Commonwealth games athletes from Africa being questioned on the bus "are you Cellic or 'Gers?" to the celebration of disasters that have befallen your local opponents, from a conversation at a bar to a speech in parliament. A corrupted football is, literally, everything.
Football exalts every possible atmosphere ("Nobody fancies coming to Stoke on a cold February evening; when the wind whips in from the North Sea, those southern softies won't have the stomach for the fight on the Prom"). There is no reality, no imprisonment, no limitation, no location, no communication, no media which fails to inspire dreams of football. Combined as the basic sport with other peripheral sports sewn on, it can cover all of an English person's spaces and all times. Once you reach a certain detailed awareness of society, absence of football is shocking, like some exotic Black Swan reality, an obtuse outlier of psychiatric disorder. If one chooses to go for a long cycle ride because the roads are deserted while England are playing Germany ("Two World Wars and one World Cup"), your entire social circle is upset. You may even be ejected, excommunicated, ritually mocked as a disbeliever - it is as intolerable as not being anything 'til you die. Football here is part of the basis of the state, of the nationalism.
We believe that play is the opposite of football - historically, this was not the case but sociologically, at least today, it is true; economic and market circumstances have given a catalytic role to corruption, which is now the true anti-football not only because we have chief executives of leagues and clubs who focus on corruption exclusively at the cost of play (optimising corruption at such elevated heights is the foundation of Nudge, the political and business incrementalism of our times) but also because, in the grand scheme of things, corruption is contrary to legitimacy in its entire constitution, via the insidious and therefore carcinogenic nature of its inflating surface, corruption is mutating, evolving to new forms, becoming a cosmetic surgery of the natural universe of play; it leeches, coerces, covers up, undertakes fake restoration. We watch the Delta Variant of the Pandemic of Corruption where the only unknown is what the Epsilon Variant will be like. Play, in its purity, associated with the innocence of childhood is a sign of optimism, strength, more than equal to reality but corruption is the absolute template of our sport - the bet, the hedge, the arbitrage, the systemic corruption shared conspiratorially among a few of your own. That is football's beauty in England (Tony Bloom standing with his minders in amongst the Brighton fans and celebrating the 90th minute goal that gives victory over Brentford to one bookmaker-owned team over another bookmaker-owned team, landing the three points and the insider trading portfolio of bets that were arranged pre-match between two bookies, one of whom used to employ the other and, to some twisted extent, still does).
How is that football?
How is that play?
How is that valid?
Corruption has become an exotic spectacle while everybody pretends that it is football, not corruption, that is the national game.
Let's get funky.
The myth around football helps us understand the morphology of our daily lives. Though it is true that play is beautiful, it is no less true that when mixed in a cocktail shaker with capitalism, football becomes corrupt. The market controls the outcome. The mafia controls the market. The state controls the mafia (sometimes). Where the Newcastle United takeover differs from our colloquial homebred corruption is that now the Saudi Arabian Private Investment Fund controls the state. Monster controls Johnson because Johnson blinked first. And don't come to us with your "Johnson's trying his best" - he's supposed to be judged as the Prime Minister of this country not as a four year old child at kindergarten, too much of a funk to govern.
We are witnessing the creation of very engaging myths which are nonetheless anything but innocent. And the truth of our current alienation is precisely that football cannot be play, nor indeed sport unless we wrongfully forget that it is, in England at least, now the product of a journalist chopped up with a bone saw and dissolved in a vat of acid.
We thank you for your attention.
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The Last Poets
When the revolution comes
When the revolution comes
(When the revolution comes)
I hope pearly white teeth fall out of the mouths that speak of
revolution without reverence
The cost of revolution is 360 degrees
Understand the cycle that never ends
Understand the beginning to be the end and nothing is in
between but space and time that I make, or you make, to relate,
or not to relate, to the world outside my mind, your mind. Speak
not of revolution until you are willing to eat rats to survive
When the revolution comes
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© 2023 Football is Fixed
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