Making A Long Nose On The Sly
Slavoj Zizek: “The art of publicly reporting on something is never neutral, it affects the reported content itself”
At just the very time that football was learning to cohabit with mafia, the Professional Game Match Officials Board (pgMOB) - the body representing the referees in England - recognised that having the word 'MOB' in the acronym didn't look too good and, lo and behold, it was immediately made safe.
(Throughout these books, we stick to pgMOB as there is more poetry in the original acronym.)
Referees influence match outcomes in nefarious manners.
Consequently.
All clubs monitor the real Premier League table.
Not the one that decides champions, qualification for European competitions and relegation but the one that shows how the table would appear without the inputs of the pgMOB.
Here is the final Premier League table for 2019/20 season eliminating the inputs of a selective Select Group of pgMOB match officials (the figures in brackets represent the points differential to the EPL table such that a highly positive figure suggests that a team has been targeted in match decisions).
1. Liverpool 88 (-11)
2. Manchester City 83 (+2)
3. Arsenal 69 (+13)
4. Wolverhampton Wanderers 63 (+4)
5. Tottenham Hotspur 61 (+2)
6. Chelsea 57 (-9)
7. Leicester City 56 (-6)
8. Southampton 54 (+2)
9. Sheffield United 52 (-2)
10. Manchester United 51 (-15)
11. West Ham United 49 (+10)
12. Burnley 46 (-8)
13. Newcastle United 45 (+1)
14. Bournemouth 44 (+10)
15. Everton 43 (-6)
16. Brighton And Hove Albion 42 (+1)
17. Watford 38 (+4)
18. Crystal Palace 35 (-8)
19. Aston Villa 29 (-6)
20. Norwich City 26 (+5)
Arsenal and Wolverhampton Wanderers should have been in the Champions League in place of Manchester United and Chelsea; Watford and Bournemouth should have been safe in the EPL while Aston Villa and Crystal Palace were relegated to the Championship.
By some distance, the biggest input to the analytics of sporting events is the referee, the umpire, the judge, the VAR jury.
It has reached the stage in the EPL since the introduction of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) where the actual decision-making process is compromised to the point where there is a huge volume of randomised outcomes. For all but the most blatant extremes, the decision is, in effect, the toss of a coin.
But whose coin?
In our future disclosures we'll address more fully why Villa and Palace had to stay in the EPL and why Man Utd and Chelsea had to get into the Champions League.
And why Liverpool had to win the Premier League.
But, for now...
These are battles between owners, battles between agents, battles between states - the new breeds who are elevated at the very upper tiers of the Ponzi pyramid in football work in mysterious ways.
They coalesce.
They fragment.
They cartel.
They fragment.
They cartel and fragment and coalesce all at the same time.
With the market makers they are the great vampire squid wrapped around the face of football.
The referees are the weakest locus in football's integrity chain.
Once match officials (and their video assistant companions) become problematic the visuals of the sport become increasingly weird.
Just take a look at the key match decision in the first game of the Project Restart money grabbing farce - Sheffield United were denied all three points because, apparently, Hawkeye goalline technology was blocked by players. Hawkeye uses seven cameras. When the Aston Villa goalkeeper Nyland carried the ball over his line and into the net, all 7 of these cameras were allegedly blocked.
Okay. Well, then you would just publish the time-stamped images or the communications between referee and other officials.
Aston Villa, in effect, kept their Premier League place because of this undecision.
AFC Bournemouth had a strong legal case against Hawkeye and the pgMOB as their relegation, already caused by a harsh targeting of the club by referees, was decided on a pgMOB / Hawkeye foul-up / conspiracy.
The most worrying input is that the key betting markets on the game between Aston Villa and Sheffield United were confident that the Yorkshire team would not be winning the game.
This was the onset of the most corrupted block of Premier League matches in the history of the league - the Project Restart 92.
All league table positions were determined before Project Restart began and what we witnessed via the surreal structures placed on our screens was a carving up of the global betting markets by insiders.
And it is the pgMOB referees who have been behind the outrageous bias against Arsenal that goes back deep into the Arsene Wenger era.
In our analytics of global football leagues, referee-based corruption hovers round two poles of activity - the systemic bias and the trading bias. The most integrated match officials utilise both and feature Far East bookmakers on speed dial. Some match referees are owned by cartels of corrupt operators, others are freelance and are known to negotiate a deal on any game where their input has not already been acquired. This obviously helps with the obfuscation of the fake realities - just because a club 'own' a referee in the EPL doesn't mean they possess similar leverage in the FA Cup - the corruption is systemic enough to be able to be broken down into chunk sized bites.
Arsenal have suffered from multiple referee negative impacts for the simple reason that Arsene Wenger is a man of integrity and there was no room for such individuals in the gambler's den of the Premier League.
The targeting was as relentless as it was successful - Arsenal should have won the 2015/16 Premier League title which was gifted to Leicester City by the pgMOB and an array of doping entities. Cup Finals were influenced and stolen. And the English game finally lost its last anti-corruption manager when Wenger was eventually forced out of a managerial role in the game.
That he has returned as Head of Global Football Development at FIFA (with remit to overview IFAB and the laws of the game) is one of the very few optimistic developments in world football in recent times.
Each season we totalise referee bias figures in all leagues.
The EPL is an outlier on any measure but the bias against Arsenal since 2013/14 is still unusual.
Where 1 = most favoured EPL team and 20 = least, Arsenal have been placed 20th, 16th, 6th, 16th, 15th, 19th, 20th, 19th and 16th.
This is not a normal distribution.
The only window in those seven seasons where there was a small positive referee bias in favour of Arsenal was, by fluke, the window where Freddie Ljungberg (represented by CAA / Base agents) was the temporary coach.
Martin Atkinson, Michael Oliver, Mike Dean, Anthony Taylor and Stuart Attwell have all consistently short-changed the Gunners.
The Champions League place stolen this season is the last in a long line of injustices perpetuated against Arsenal.
No sane professional trader will take a market position on a Premier League match without knowing the identities of the referee, 4th official and VAR official. These are the three tiers of referee corruption and all can be relevant individually or in unison.
The referee parameter is one of the four most significant inputs to solving corrupt markets - it is absolutely essential to analyse referees individually, by network, by associates and by parallel betting patterns associated with matches under their charge.
In a legitimate sport in a legitimate league, this would not be the case.
The referees and VAR officials should be neutral arbiters applying the rules of the game to the matches they officiate, instead they have morphed into key corruption agents orchestrating manipulations on behalf of paymasters away from the field of play.
The match officials though are but one input, one locus of systemic corruption.
The covid-19 pandemic was used as a disaster capitalism matrix by powerful entities, gaming the virus for private gain. Big companies integrate well with the big government that was the covid-19 infrastructure; they lobby it more assiduously and make its life easier via integrated solutions that are, in effect, a redistribution of wealth up the pyramid. In football this means that the teams gaming the pgMOB are allowed to undertake Project Restart knowing that their destiny is secured so that a more robust internalised entity is able to carry the corruption banner onto the battlefields of future seasons.
The Project Restart scam did not carry the fans' belief mechanisms with it - too many fake refereeing and VAR decisions, too much bias against a backdrop of media manipulation of the truth.
The zeitgeist of corruption is the zone that separates the fan perception of reality and the actual reality - this no-man's land has narrowed appreciably during Project Restart.
Some corruption narratives may no longer be spoken let alone utilised.
That is one of the major structural problems with short-termist cornered markets - they eliminate future opportunity.
Nothing stokes rumour and conspiratorial analytics more than the suspicion that a sport is systemically bent.
After Project Restart, pro football became properly fucked.
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Dostoyevskian Nightmare
Roberto Saviano: “Their [the mafia’s] worst fear is to be under the spotlight… They want to be famous in their own territory, feared for their power, but on a national or international level they want to be anonymous”
2005
“I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my lungs are diseased. Tuberculosis. Pneumonia. The temperature is rising. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult doctors for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely logical, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am narcissistic enough not to be securely logical, but I am logical). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you will probably not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My lungs are bad, well - let them get worse!”
2006“I have been going on like that for a long time – twenty years. Now I am 36. I used to be in government service, but am no longer. I was a spiteful attache. I was rude and took pleasure in being so. I did not undertake corruption, you see, so I was bound to find a recompense in that, at least. (A poor jest, but I will not delete it. I wrote it thinking it would sound very witty; but now that I have seen myself that I only wanted to show off in a despicable way, I will not delete it from spite!)
2007
“When masses used to come for information at the throne on which I sat, I used to grind my teeth at them, and felt intense enjoyment when I succeeded in making anybody unhappy or fearful. For the most part they were all timid people – of course, they were the masses. But of the uppity ones there was one in particular I could not endure. He simply would not be humble, and clanked his sword (which he always carried by his side) in a disgusting way. I carried on a feud with him for over fifteen years over that sword. At last I got the better of him. He left off clanking it. That happened in my youth though.”
2008
But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of acutest anger, I was inwardly conscious with shame at my psychopathy, that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply a psychopathic one scaring sparrows and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a toy to play with, give me a cup of white tea, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth afterwards and lie awake at night in paranoia for months after. That was my way.”
2009
“I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite. I was simply amusing myself with the masses, and in reality I never could become spiteful. I was conscious every moment in myself of many, very many elements absolutely opposite to that. I felt them positively swarming in me, these opposite elements. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life, all the evil, and craving some outlet from me, but I would not let them, would not let them, purposely would not let them come out. They tormented me until I felt shame: they drove me to convulsions of addiction and – sickened me, at last, how they sickened me! Now, are not you fancying gentlemen, that I am expressing remorse for something now, that I am asking your forgiveness for something? I am sure you are fancying that… However, I assure you I do not care if you are…”
2010
“It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything, neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my career in my corner, taunting myself and others with the spiteful and useless consolation that a capitalist man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the twenty-first century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a secret creature lurking in the underground, in the black markets, with fingerprints on far too many brown envelopes, an insider trading football club is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime when it is at the cusp of the wind where one sails, you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years without totally giving into one’s psychopathic disorders is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. In football, who does live beyond forty without encompassing sociopathic style? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old man, all these silver-haired philosophers! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!... Stay, let me take breath…”
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The Exoticism Of We Ourselves
"Why, frankly, isn't Parliament Square on fire?" - Laurie Penny
For the integrity of the system, whistleblowers are essential.
In football, matchfixing is rife - in Europe, almost all associations have experienced scandals in recent times and yet there is no effective sports governance and there are no robust monitoring bodies analysing corruptions as such bodies appear to be genetically predisposed to develop inappropriate relationships to the various black holes of criminality within the game.
Moreover, there is a culture of omerta within the loop where matchfixing is accepted and serves as an illicit currency in the marketplace.
Once again, such abuses may only be addressed by bottom up whistleblowing and hacktivism.
Otherwise the outcome will be a totalitarianism founded on corrupted institutions and a world order devised by and for a global corporate elite.
Globalised markets need globalised regulation.
Whistleblowers should not exist.
Their work should be undertaken by regulators, police, governments and investigative journalists within the Fourth Estate.
But the recent exponential and global growth of whistleblowers across all economic sectors suggests that these 'protecting' entities are a part of the problem rather than part of the cure.
Within some sectors, however, there can be a disappointing scarcity of whistleblowers and others who have the moral courage to expose corruption.
Meanwhile corporate crime flourishes.
There are too many people who make what Catherine Sanderson calls a "subconscious cost-benefit analysis" which typically reinforces codes of silence.
Meanwhile, psychopaths marginally gain their artificial intelligence to self-oblivion.
States should spend more on real-time economic and investigative research produced both by whistleblowers and private firms.
These cutting edge holistic analytics are the future of competitive advantage.
Where are the leaks?
Who's rocking your boat?
Embrace the serpent!
Encourage corporate pirates!
As there can be no dependence on the law, whistleblowers need to develop skills so that they are able to be more effective in bringing about change by taking the issues to a wider audience.
And this needs to be achieved whilst surfing the zeitgeist of corruption (together with the insider and public perceptions of such corruption) so that personal security profiles may be maintained robustly.
And there is very limited support within the system for whistleblowers - indeed there are very lucrative merry-go-rounds involving institutions, market makers, regulators and even some whistleblowing bodies / charities (e.g. Public Concern at Work or the FA's Sports Betting Integrity Unit). These revolving door structures between abusive networks and those, much more poorly paid, individuals at entities supposed to unearth corruptions is omnipresent in late capitalism - pseudo-growth is only achieved by ignoring negative externalities and by running what is, in effect, a highly evolved boiler room scam.
Corruption forensics and sousveillance are at the core of all whistleblowing as whistleblowers oscillate between black, grey and white markets in their detection work. The reality to be modelled is neo-Bayesian, complex and in a constant state of chaotic flux with the resultant holographic entity needing to be updated in real-time forever and ever. There are strategic choices that need to be made in order to achieve optimised outcomes - in some cases direct action and Fifth Estate activism and, in other cases, realpolitik and incrementalism via the Fourth Estate.
It all depends on the maturity and solidity of the corrupt mechanism being addressed.
Protection is paramount all along the continuum from sources to whistleblowers to campaigners, journalists and publishers as any weakness results in a collapse to a lower quantum state.
Creative whistleblowing requires enlightened anonymity with enhanced strategy and protection.
Corruption in football directly mirrors that in the global financial system and much modelling of these infrastructures share similarities.
But there is a time lag.
So, whereas insider trading was allegedly made illegal in financial markets in Britain half a century ago, it is at the very root of the issue of integrity in football.
Furthermore, the same techniques exist for the hiding of fraudulent behaviour (both with regard to matchfixing and abuses of the transfer market).
Money is laundered via very particular Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs) using a small network of morally illegitimate onshore / offshore legal entities (in Britain, Panama and elsewhere).
The money sloshing around this shadow system does not yield any tax benefits to the remainder of the planet but merely serves as a sociopathic power grab.
And the figures are colossal.
According to the Tax Justice Network $21 trillion to $32 trillion of private financial wealth was held offshore in 2016. $1 trillion is syphoned off from developing countries per annum while the detection rate for tax evasion is just 1% (about the same as the declared instances of matchfixing at 0.7%).
As over 60% of international trade takes place within multinationals, the options for abusive inversion capitalism are considerable as there are no obstacles to the financialisation of the companies nor the creative tax evasion undertaken across different tax environments.
Meanwhile, over 50% of the world's adults lack bank accounts.
The global turnover on football betting markets is estimated at between £1 and £4 trillion per year.
This cashflow is outside any system - third party ownership and suitcases of money with regard to transfer market corruptions and the stealing of monies off other market players and operators with regard to matchfixing.
This is inversion capitalism in extremis, football has merely become a poker table for psychopathic corruptions involving vast amounts of money.
The solutions are not rocket science.
The key changes will be incremental in any future reality but the changes will still have impact - the adjustment of corruption from being a rigged certainty to a probabilistic outcome will peripheralise the gains that might be achieved via matchfixing.
In the wider global economy, we need openness on corporate ownership and all secrecy jurisdictions, unitary taxation, no tax havens, no unpublished accounts or limited tax disclosures, no use of consolidated financial statements to disguise offshore transactions, no nominees, the banning of offshore trusts, an end to banking secrecy and the creation of proper reasons for miscreants to think twice.
When a whistleblower (Jeremy Hammond) was sentenced to a 10 year jail sentence for disclosing the inappropriate behaviours of US geopolitical intelligence giant Stratfor, while Stratfor is immune to prosecution, what message does this send out to future whistleblowers?
And surely it does not help that the husband of the judge who imprisoned Hammond in this case (Loretta Preska) works with Stratfor clients!
In December 2013 at the height of one of the matchfixing crises in the UK, Liberal Democrat MP Sir Bob Russell said that English professional football is "rotten to the core" and that a Royal Commission is required to clean up football with "parasitic agents" being the major problem.
Also in December 2013, UEFA announced that they were drafting an 11-point plan aimed to eradicate match-fixing, labelling it their 'top priority'.
Unfortunately, the pitch put forward by the aptly named then UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino produced minimal peripheral tinkering akin to that achieved by the British government's select committee who reported in the summer of the same year.
And Infantino's very first act on being elected president of FIFA in 2016 was to sack all of the whistleblowers who had fearlessly exposed the systemic corruptions orchestrated by Blatter et al.
Infantino while at UEFA also wanted to strengthen the links between sports authorities and state bodies but this is a structure that can backfire dependent on who represents the state - there are many countries where state interference would only serve to increase the corruption!
The Portuguese have a word for it - satiagraha, holding onto truth, all that is left us in the Premier League world.
Christopher Horrocks: "The objective irony of our era is that the object might be playing with the subject, natural phenomena with science, the masses with the media."
Time to PLAY with them.
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The 2019/20 Premier League Season Did Not Take Place
Jean Baudrillard: "Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already occurred"
"The Gulf War did not take place" (La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas en lieu) was a collection of three essays published by philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in 1991.
The title is a reference to the play by Jean Giraudoux "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place" in which the characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows to be inevitable...
... a little like the Football is Fixed Network.
In this essay, a posthumous Jean Baudrillard argues that the 2019/20 Premier League season is not really a football competition but rather corruption masquerading as football.
Using a systemic match manipulation template, ownership of a cartel of EPL teams, a perverted Professional Game Match Officials Board (pgMOB) refereeing body, the 'hacking' of Manchester City, plus extensive doping and fixture list biases, Liverpool have been presented with the title by mafia entities.
All the spectators have known about this season has been in the form of propaganda imagery.
The closely watched media presentations makes it impossible for the fan to distinguish between the experience of what is truly happening, and its stylised, selective misrepresentation through simulacra by the content providers.
From the beginning, we knew that this season wouldn't happen. After sport as sport and sport as terror, here is sport in the morgue - which leaves us to grapple with football's corpse and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing body which nobody from the Premier League has managed to revive.
Liverpool have secured victory over the corpse of English football.
Football has entered into a definitive crisis.
Sport exists through opening up competition but not in the EPL. In the past, competition functioned as a grading between different teams but now competitive edge is a virtual advantage created by illicit means - matchfixing, insider trading, corruption of referees and doping all on a systemic template.
This is why the season has not taken place. In this sense, the gravity of the non-event in the Premier League is greater than the event itself: it corresponds to a highly toxic window which affects a rotting corpse and which can cause nausea and powerless stupor. Here again, our symbolic defences are weak: the mastery of the end of football escapes us and we experience all this in the uniform shameful indifference of the Sky and BT Sport duopoly.
Non-football is characterised by that degenerate form of football which includes mafia, mafia states, the manipulation of outcome in correlation with insider trading in the betting markets, coercion and blackmail. The corrupted match has taken the place of the legitimate game. It has become the principal focus, the simulacral reality, or rather, in its pure non-competitiveness, the reality of non-football. The players bury themselves in their agents' offshore embrace leaving corruption alone on the stage, and including all of us as corruption hostages on the football media stage dominated by 4th Estate fake and hidden agendas (e.g. The Guardian, Der Spiegel). The hostage fan is the phantom actor, the extra who observes football powerlessly. The fan only exists commercially for value and liquidity - pay your subscriptions, buy our merchandise, watch the corruption and shut the fuck up - fantastic degradation of that which was the very core of the beauty of football. With the Premier League, the legitimate value of football has plummeted. The EPL has made itself the capitalist master of fan hostage value - the vulgar merchant of the fan hostage market. Taking the place of sport, fan hostage has become synonymous with the debility of football. We are all hostages of media intoxification, induced to believe in football just as we were once led to believe in 'Football Leaks' and the blackmailing operative Rui Pinto - a foot-soldier of the mafia juggernaut destroying football across Europe for the financial benefit of certain mafia (states). We are already strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day. In this sense, the grotesque vaudeville played by the Premier League is a diversion, at once a diversion of both football and terror. Its systemic corruption has at least put an end to the particular corruption and spotfixing of the past, thereby showing the EPL to be in this as in many other respects the perfect accomplice of state terrorism. The systemic corruption in UK football features Malta as a catalyst with regard to matchfixing and transfer market abuses.
This impossibility of proceeding to the act, this utter absence of legitimacy, implies the triumph of blackmail as strategy (in the case of the Premier League, there is still a challenge; with Rui Pinto and Football Leaks, there is only blackmail). The Premier League's abjection lies in it having vulgarised everything: club competition has become a fake entertainment spectacle, the fan a commercial hostage, the violent corruption of the league a scam based on a religious support for one's team and football an impossible comedy featuring a VAR orchestrated by mafia, for mafia, combined with an ignorance of the rules of the game and any interest in the integrity of the sport. Although the media points out VAR as the culprit, the grouping of pgMOB match officials who have worked with the Liverpool Cartel of teams should really be in the dock. But the state has helped the EPL become this monstrosity. By allowing the league to monetise small criminalities, the government drove the Premier League towards the mirage of sustainable systemic corruption (like the arms trade or aspects of the City of London).
This evolution of this mercenary league is indeed the only ironic and pleasing trait of this whole story.
We are in neither a sport of war nor a gamble of poker but in a reality of betting markets controlling match events which has wound its way inexorably through 30 years of the Premier League to a denouement in our current events; a sport of fake matches, to which belong those in the Champions League as well as the EPL (the Champions League under Ceferin has been taken over by the same mafia operators behind 'Football Leaks' and the criminalisation of the Premier League). Peripeteias of an anorexic history or an anorexic sport which can no longer be taken as real because it is incapable of conceiving sporting integrity - and God knows the EPL has no integrity - and thus devours itself. It is corrupted football, that of the right to corruption under the green light of the Premier League and UEFA with no precautionary regulation - free market matchfixing must not have obstacles to performativity. On the Richter scale, the 2019/20 Premier League season would not even reach two or three. The history and pre-season were unreal, as though the fiction of an earthquake were created by a manipulation of the match officials, of mainstream media, of the masses. The EPL is neither the strong form nor the degree zero of football, but the weak or phthisical degree, the asymptotic form which allows a pretence of competitive football but no real encounter, the transparent degree which prevents football being seen from the depths of the darkroom where the fan resides.
We should have been suspicious about the insider trading from BT Sport operatives pre-season as they actively contorted the betting markets to their corruption matrix in the same manner as they perpetrated the systemic corruption behind the mafia entity Leicester City stealing the 2015/16 version of the EPL title from Arsenal. The 2019/20 season never began. It had ended prior to its onset. It had already been won and the headlines and war strategies had already been written. As there is no competition, there are no matches. Just markets and a distinction between the prescribed winners and losers.
But these systemic corruptions do not occur in a vacuum.
We expose Liverpool's links with pgMOB match officials, we expose doping at the club, we expose the manner in which proprietary information was stolen from Manchester City, we expose Liverpool FC's links to bookmakers and how such associations energise insider trading and matchfixing, we expose the fixture list manipulations and all other marginal gains supportive of this project.
In the end, the distinction between the winners (Liverpool and their cartel of teams) and losers (Manchester City and other Gestifute-linked clubs) becomes indecipherable as the winners readily become the hostage of the losers; a Stockholm Syndrome that quantums into existence as the 'winners' evolve as hostages of the mafia themselves.
Since this season never began, this season is therefore interminable.
Indeed, Covid-19 nearly made it literally so.
By dint of dreaming of pure corruption, of an orbital corruption purged of all local and political infusions, the matchfixers have fallen into the arms of the mafia, into the virtual impossibility of football which translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in matches of agreed outcome, as though the irruption of the event of football had become obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse.
The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual (in the manner of a doped up Jamie Vardy) and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to real action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.
In this process, the football clubs are once again revealing. Extracted like molecules in an experimental process, then distilled one by one in the exchange of mafia fake, it is their virtual death that is at issue, not their real death. Moreover, they never die: at best they disappear to reappear as gambling outfits, at worst they enter receivership only to be reformed and renamed in a new virtual unreality. There will never be monuments to current footballers in the manner in which Best or Greaves or Brady or Charles or McNeill are commemorated as everybody will be too ashamed of the modern player, kissing the badge of their agents offshore financial centres while perfecting the persona of a post-career in media disinformation: the collective shame which attaches to the club reflects the absolute degradation of football into fixed fan-boy fake-fun.
The passage to systemic corruption suffers widespread infamy: it supposedly corresponds to a criminally creative elevation of sporting prowess, thus to a psychotic process. It seems that this obsession with the passage to corruption today governs all of our behaviour: obsession with every real, with every real event, with every real corruption, with every associated pleasure which is too real. In fact, so real that it is unreal. Against this obsession with the real we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation which allows to pass the act "in vitro". We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real.
So the media chooses to applaud the array of unbeaten records and stellar performances by Liverpool while ignoring the rancid underbelly of underground mafia corruption that is the very definition of this supposed real.
The holistic of football has not escaped this virtualisation which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted sport, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge (as we see in the corrupted players of yesteryear obfuscating current corruptions on Sky, BT Sport and Match of the Day). Even players have lost the privilege of use value, the privilege of real football. Corruption has passed by that way and it spares nobody.
No more than the politicians, footballers do not know what to make of their real function, their function of corruption and matchfixing. They are pledged to the decoy of football as others are to the decoy of power.
Football has become pure (in the fascist sense) and speculative (in an insider trading sense) to the extent that we do not see the real event that it could be or that it would signify.
Since the 2019/20 (and 2015/16) Premier League titles were won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like if the league title races had actually existed. We will never know what Manchester City taking part with a chance of winning would have been like. We will never know what Liverpool taking part with a probability of being beaten would have been like. We have seen what a state-based systemic corruption is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of a fake sport away from the field of play with no possibility of reaction. But this is not football, any more than $100 million bets on a game is sufficient to make it football. Any more than the direct transmission by BBC / BT Sport / Sky of real time information is sufficient to authenticate the sport. One is reminded of Capricorn One in which the flight of a manned rocket to Mars, which only took place in a desert studio, was relayed live to all the television stations in the world.
While one fraction of the media and political class, specialists in the substitute bench of mental contortions, are whole-heartedly in favour of the systemic corruption (the corruption earns more for UK PLC than legitimacy), and another fraction are against it from the bottom of their hearts - but for reasons no less disturbing, all are agreed on one point: this systemic corruption exists, we have seen it. There is no interrogation into the sport itself or its reality; or into the fraudulence of this corruption, the programmed and always delayed illusion of competitive sport; or into the machination of this matchfixing and its amplification by disinformation, not to mention the improbable orgy of fake media, the systematic manipulation of data, the artificial dramatisation ("surely the most amazing comeback ever!")...
If you do not have practical intelligence, hacks and insider knowledge about the systemic corruption in the Premier League (and few among us do), at least develop a sceptical intelligence towards it, without renouncing the pathetic experience of its absurdity.
But there is more than one kind of absurdity: that of the assassination and that of being caught up in the illusion of assassination. It is just as in La Fontaine's fable: the day there is a real football match in the Premier League you will not even be able to tell the difference.
Corruption has become football.
The real victory of football's simulators of fake is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation of the real.
A real where match outcomes are in the underground betting markets before the game even starts.
A real where matches are corrupted months ahead.
A real where the utilisation of doping is accepted as a competitive advantage.
A real where players pay managers to play and agents pay national managers for client selection.
A real where a significant percentage of players represented by certain agents are involved in matchfixing.
A real where the UK sports media is entirely captured and performative to the corruption.
A real where only the American-owned Manchester United and Liverpool have a veto on the choice of Premier League chief executive allowing them to later introduce the US power grab, Project Big Picture.
A real where some EPL clubs are merely gambling stables.
A real where Match of the Day commentary is added post-game under corrupted editorial inputs.
And a real where Liverpool FC are champions, were champions before a ball was kicked and will be champions again so long as that is the preferred strategy of state and mafia.
The Premier League no longer takes place.
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A Tribute To Arsene Wenger
Arsene Wenger on April 16th 2018 - 4 days later he resigned as manager of Arsenal after 22 years at the club: "The referee is the referee. What you want is to help the referee. Unfortunately, the Premier League has decided not to go for VAR. I think that is a very bad decision. I believe, with that decision, we are behind the rest of the world"
If Leicester City hadn't teamed up with Team Sky medics, Dr Mark Bonar and MAPEI...
If Leicester hadn't been unreasonably aided by pgMOB match officials...
Then in 2015/16, Arsene Wenger would have won the Premier League title which, with 3 FA Cups in 4 years, would have made him a timeless legend.
Instead corruption tried to tarnish Wenger's time at Arsenal.
Plus ça change, plus c'est pas la même chose.
There are few islets of integrity left in the ocean of omerta that is the Premier League and one of these rocky outcrops disappeared beneath the tsunami of corruption at the conclusion of the 2017/18 season when Arsene Wenger left Arsenal.
Historically.
Arsenal have not orchestrated any of the wide range of matchfixing matrices utilised by many other EPL teams to enhance earnings away from taxing eyes.
Arsenal have avoided overly close ties with the bookmaking industry and have not allowed criminalised football agents to take control of the club.
Arsenal instead employed marginal gains years before the Team Sky cycling team pushed such nudge edge beyond legal boundaries and when other EPL teams were medieval in their strategic sophistication.
As Arsenal were a talented and largely legitimate team and because Wenger refused to allow betting markets to influence match outcomes, the club and the manager were ostracised by the murkier areas of the industry sector.
The mainstream media systemically slaughtered Wenger at any opportunity.
And not just some mainstream media but all.
And meanwhile, in parallel, the manual of modern coaching has increased its focus on betting markets and their illegitimate impacts.
An interesting comparison to Wenger is the creation of a legacy for that serial failure Roy Hodgson.
When Hodgson succeeded in keeping Crystal Palace in the Premier League in season 2019/20, there was a coordinated mainstream media campaign about his three successful relegation fights at Fulham, West Bromwich Albion and Palace and how these successes obliterate memories of his less stellar performances at Liverpool and England.
Hodgson only managed to keep Fulham in the Premier League via a matchfixing event at Portsmouth on the last day of the season...
Prior to Hodgson taking over WBA they had benefitted from 0 red cards / penalties while having 7 against. After Hodgson's appointment, there were 4 red cards/penalties in favour and 1 against...
And Crystal Palace should have been relegated in two consecutive years.
And yet the mainstream media turned Hodgson The Failure into Hodgson The Fake Hero and Wenger The Hero into The Inappropriate Failure.
UK mainstream media football journalists are an inept bunch of acquiescent lackeys refracting truths through the lens of corruption.
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"Why, frankly, isn't Parliament Square on fire?" - Laurie Penny
For the integrity of the system, whistleblowers are essential.
In football, matchfixing is rife - in Europe, almost all associations have experienced scandals in recent times and yet there is no effective sports governance and there are no robust monitoring bodies analysing corruptions as such bodies appear to be genetically predisposed to develop inappropriate relationships to the various black holes of criminality within the game.
Moreover, there is a culture of omerta within the loop where matchfixing is accepted and serves as an illicit currency in the marketplace.
Once again, such abuses may only be addressed by bottom up whistleblowing and hacktivism.
Otherwise the outcome will be a totalitarianism founded on corrupted institutions and a world order devised by and for a global corporate elite.
Globalised markets need globalised regulation.
Whistleblowers should not exist.
Their work should be undertaken by regulators, police, governments and investigative journalists within the Fourth Estate.
But the recent exponential and global growth of whistleblowers across all economic sectors suggests that these 'protecting' entities are a part of the problem rather than part of the cure.
Within some sectors, however, there can be a disappointing scarcity of whistleblowers and others who have the moral courage to expose corruption.
Meanwhile corporate crime flourishes.
There are too many people who make what Catherine Sanderson calls a "subconscious cost-benefit analysis" which typically reinforces codes of silence.
Meanwhile, psychopaths marginally gain their artificial intelligence to self-oblivion.
States should spend more on real-time economic and investigative research produced both by whistleblowers and private firms.
These cutting edge holistic analytics are the future of competitive advantage.
Where are the leaks?
Who's rocking your boat?
Embrace the serpent!
Encourage corporate pirates!
As there can be no dependence on the law, whistleblowers need to develop skills so that they are able to be more effective in bringing about change by taking the issues to a wider audience.
And this needs to be achieved whilst surfing the zeitgeist of corruption (together with the insider and public perceptions of such corruption) so that personal security profiles may be maintained robustly.
And there is very limited support within the system for whistleblowers - indeed there are very lucrative merry-go-rounds involving institutions, market makers, regulators and even some whistleblowing bodies / charities (e.g. Public Concern at Work or the FA's Sports Betting Integrity Unit). These revolving door structures between abusive networks and those, much more poorly paid, individuals at entities supposed to unearth corruptions is omnipresent in late capitalism - pseudo-growth is only achieved by ignoring negative externalities and by running what is, in effect, a highly evolved boiler room scam.
Corruption forensics and sousveillance are at the core of all whistleblowing as whistleblowers oscillate between black, grey and white markets in their detection work. The reality to be modelled is neo-Bayesian, complex and in a constant state of chaotic flux with the resultant holographic entity needing to be updated in real-time forever and ever. There are strategic choices that need to be made in order to achieve optimised outcomes - in some cases direct action and Fifth Estate activism and, in other cases, realpolitik and incrementalism via the Fourth Estate.
It all depends on the maturity and solidity of the corrupt mechanism being addressed.
Protection is paramount all along the continuum from sources to whistleblowers to campaigners, journalists and publishers as any weakness results in a collapse to a lower quantum state.
Creative whistleblowing requires enlightened anonymity with enhanced strategy and protection.
Corruption in football directly mirrors that in the global financial system and much modelling of these infrastructures share similarities.
But there is a time lag.
So, whereas insider trading was allegedly made illegal in financial markets in Britain half a century ago, it is at the very root of the issue of integrity in football.
Furthermore, the same techniques exist for the hiding of fraudulent behaviour (both with regard to matchfixing and abuses of the transfer market).
Money is laundered via very particular Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs) using a small network of morally illegitimate onshore / offshore legal entities (in Britain, Panama and elsewhere).
The money sloshing around this shadow system does not yield any tax benefits to the remainder of the planet but merely serves as a sociopathic power grab.
And the figures are colossal.
According to the Tax Justice Network $21 trillion to $32 trillion of private financial wealth was held offshore in 2016. $1 trillion is syphoned off from developing countries per annum while the detection rate for tax evasion is just 1% (about the same as the declared instances of matchfixing at 0.7%).
As over 60% of international trade takes place within multinationals, the options for abusive inversion capitalism are considerable as there are no obstacles to the financialisation of the companies nor the creative tax evasion undertaken across different tax environments.
Meanwhile, over 50% of the world's adults lack bank accounts.
The global turnover on football betting markets is estimated at between £1 and £4 trillion per year.
This cashflow is outside any system - third party ownership and suitcases of money with regard to transfer market corruptions and the stealing of monies off other market players and operators with regard to matchfixing.
This is inversion capitalism in extremis, football has merely become a poker table for psychopathic corruptions involving vast amounts of money.
The solutions are not rocket science.
The key changes will be incremental in any future reality but the changes will still have impact - the adjustment of corruption from being a rigged certainty to a probabilistic outcome will peripheralise the gains that might be achieved via matchfixing.
In the wider global economy, we need openness on corporate ownership and all secrecy jurisdictions, unitary taxation, no tax havens, no unpublished accounts or limited tax disclosures, no use of consolidated financial statements to disguise offshore transactions, no nominees, the banning of offshore trusts, an end to banking secrecy and the creation of proper reasons for miscreants to think twice.
When a whistleblower (Jeremy Hammond) was sentenced to a 10 year jail sentence for disclosing the inappropriate behaviours of US geopolitical intelligence giant Stratfor, while Stratfor is immune to prosecution, what message does this send out to future whistleblowers?
And surely it does not help that the husband of the judge who imprisoned Hammond in this case (Loretta Preska) works with Stratfor clients!
In December 2013 at the height of one of the matchfixing crises in the UK, Liberal Democrat MP Sir Bob Russell said that English professional football is "rotten to the core" and that a Royal Commission is required to clean up football with "parasitic agents" being the major problem.
Also in December 2013, UEFA announced that they were drafting an 11-point plan aimed to eradicate match-fixing, labelling it their 'top priority'.
Unfortunately, the pitch put forward by the aptly named then UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino produced minimal peripheral tinkering akin to that achieved by the British government's select committee who reported in the summer of the same year.
And Infantino's very first act on being elected president of FIFA in 2016 was to sack all of the whistleblowers who had fearlessly exposed the systemic corruptions orchestrated by Blatter et al.
Infantino while at UEFA also wanted to strengthen the links between sports authorities and state bodies but this is a structure that can backfire dependent on who represents the state - there are many countries where state interference would only serve to increase the corruption!
The Portuguese have a word for it - satiagraha, holding onto truth, all that is left us in the Premier League world.
Christopher Horrocks: "The objective irony of our era is that the object might be playing with the subject, natural phenomena with science, the masses with the media."
Time to PLAY with them.
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The 2019/20 Premier League Season Did Not Take Place
Jean Baudrillard: "Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already occurred"
"The Gulf War did not take place" (La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas en lieu) was a collection of three essays published by philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in 1991.
The title is a reference to the play by Jean Giraudoux "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place" in which the characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows to be inevitable...
... a little like the Football is Fixed Network.
In this essay, a posthumous Jean Baudrillard argues that the 2019/20 Premier League season is not really a football competition but rather corruption masquerading as football.
Using a systemic match manipulation template, ownership of a cartel of EPL teams, a perverted Professional Game Match Officials Board (pgMOB) refereeing body, the 'hacking' of Manchester City, plus extensive doping and fixture list biases, Liverpool have been presented with the title by mafia entities.
All the spectators have known about this season has been in the form of propaganda imagery.
The closely watched media presentations makes it impossible for the fan to distinguish between the experience of what is truly happening, and its stylised, selective misrepresentation through simulacra by the content providers.
From the beginning, we knew that this season wouldn't happen. After sport as sport and sport as terror, here is sport in the morgue - which leaves us to grapple with football's corpse and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing body which nobody from the Premier League has managed to revive.
Liverpool have secured victory over the corpse of English football.
Football has entered into a definitive crisis.
Sport exists through opening up competition but not in the EPL. In the past, competition functioned as a grading between different teams but now competitive edge is a virtual advantage created by illicit means - matchfixing, insider trading, corruption of referees and doping all on a systemic template.
This is why the season has not taken place. In this sense, the gravity of the non-event in the Premier League is greater than the event itself: it corresponds to a highly toxic window which affects a rotting corpse and which can cause nausea and powerless stupor. Here again, our symbolic defences are weak: the mastery of the end of football escapes us and we experience all this in the uniform shameful indifference of the Sky and BT Sport duopoly.
Non-football is characterised by that degenerate form of football which includes mafia, mafia states, the manipulation of outcome in correlation with insider trading in the betting markets, coercion and blackmail. The corrupted match has taken the place of the legitimate game. It has become the principal focus, the simulacral reality, or rather, in its pure non-competitiveness, the reality of non-football. The players bury themselves in their agents' offshore embrace leaving corruption alone on the stage, and including all of us as corruption hostages on the football media stage dominated by 4th Estate fake and hidden agendas (e.g. The Guardian, Der Spiegel). The hostage fan is the phantom actor, the extra who observes football powerlessly. The fan only exists commercially for value and liquidity - pay your subscriptions, buy our merchandise, watch the corruption and shut the fuck up - fantastic degradation of that which was the very core of the beauty of football. With the Premier League, the legitimate value of football has plummeted. The EPL has made itself the capitalist master of fan hostage value - the vulgar merchant of the fan hostage market. Taking the place of sport, fan hostage has become synonymous with the debility of football. We are all hostages of media intoxification, induced to believe in football just as we were once led to believe in 'Football Leaks' and the blackmailing operative Rui Pinto - a foot-soldier of the mafia juggernaut destroying football across Europe for the financial benefit of certain mafia (states). We are already strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day. In this sense, the grotesque vaudeville played by the Premier League is a diversion, at once a diversion of both football and terror. Its systemic corruption has at least put an end to the particular corruption and spotfixing of the past, thereby showing the EPL to be in this as in many other respects the perfect accomplice of state terrorism. The systemic corruption in UK football features Malta as a catalyst with regard to matchfixing and transfer market abuses.
This impossibility of proceeding to the act, this utter absence of legitimacy, implies the triumph of blackmail as strategy (in the case of the Premier League, there is still a challenge; with Rui Pinto and Football Leaks, there is only blackmail). The Premier League's abjection lies in it having vulgarised everything: club competition has become a fake entertainment spectacle, the fan a commercial hostage, the violent corruption of the league a scam based on a religious support for one's team and football an impossible comedy featuring a VAR orchestrated by mafia, for mafia, combined with an ignorance of the rules of the game and any interest in the integrity of the sport. Although the media points out VAR as the culprit, the grouping of pgMOB match officials who have worked with the Liverpool Cartel of teams should really be in the dock. But the state has helped the EPL become this monstrosity. By allowing the league to monetise small criminalities, the government drove the Premier League towards the mirage of sustainable systemic corruption (like the arms trade or aspects of the City of London).
This evolution of this mercenary league is indeed the only ironic and pleasing trait of this whole story.
We are in neither a sport of war nor a gamble of poker but in a reality of betting markets controlling match events which has wound its way inexorably through 30 years of the Premier League to a denouement in our current events; a sport of fake matches, to which belong those in the Champions League as well as the EPL (the Champions League under Ceferin has been taken over by the same mafia operators behind 'Football Leaks' and the criminalisation of the Premier League). Peripeteias of an anorexic history or an anorexic sport which can no longer be taken as real because it is incapable of conceiving sporting integrity - and God knows the EPL has no integrity - and thus devours itself. It is corrupted football, that of the right to corruption under the green light of the Premier League and UEFA with no precautionary regulation - free market matchfixing must not have obstacles to performativity. On the Richter scale, the 2019/20 Premier League season would not even reach two or three. The history and pre-season were unreal, as though the fiction of an earthquake were created by a manipulation of the match officials, of mainstream media, of the masses. The EPL is neither the strong form nor the degree zero of football, but the weak or phthisical degree, the asymptotic form which allows a pretence of competitive football but no real encounter, the transparent degree which prevents football being seen from the depths of the darkroom where the fan resides.
We should have been suspicious about the insider trading from BT Sport operatives pre-season as they actively contorted the betting markets to their corruption matrix in the same manner as they perpetrated the systemic corruption behind the mafia entity Leicester City stealing the 2015/16 version of the EPL title from Arsenal. The 2019/20 season never began. It had ended prior to its onset. It had already been won and the headlines and war strategies had already been written. As there is no competition, there are no matches. Just markets and a distinction between the prescribed winners and losers.
But these systemic corruptions do not occur in a vacuum.
We expose Liverpool's links with pgMOB match officials, we expose doping at the club, we expose the manner in which proprietary information was stolen from Manchester City, we expose Liverpool FC's links to bookmakers and how such associations energise insider trading and matchfixing, we expose the fixture list manipulations and all other marginal gains supportive of this project.
In the end, the distinction between the winners (Liverpool and their cartel of teams) and losers (Manchester City and other Gestifute-linked clubs) becomes indecipherable as the winners readily become the hostage of the losers; a Stockholm Syndrome that quantums into existence as the 'winners' evolve as hostages of the mafia themselves.
Since this season never began, this season is therefore interminable.
Indeed, Covid-19 nearly made it literally so.
By dint of dreaming of pure corruption, of an orbital corruption purged of all local and political infusions, the matchfixers have fallen into the arms of the mafia, into the virtual impossibility of football which translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in matches of agreed outcome, as though the irruption of the event of football had become obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse.
The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual (in the manner of a doped up Jamie Vardy) and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to real action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.
In this process, the football clubs are once again revealing. Extracted like molecules in an experimental process, then distilled one by one in the exchange of mafia fake, it is their virtual death that is at issue, not their real death. Moreover, they never die: at best they disappear to reappear as gambling outfits, at worst they enter receivership only to be reformed and renamed in a new virtual unreality. There will never be monuments to current footballers in the manner in which Best or Greaves or Brady or Charles or McNeill are commemorated as everybody will be too ashamed of the modern player, kissing the badge of their agents offshore financial centres while perfecting the persona of a post-career in media disinformation: the collective shame which attaches to the club reflects the absolute degradation of football into fixed fan-boy fake-fun.
The passage to systemic corruption suffers widespread infamy: it supposedly corresponds to a criminally creative elevation of sporting prowess, thus to a psychotic process. It seems that this obsession with the passage to corruption today governs all of our behaviour: obsession with every real, with every real event, with every real corruption, with every associated pleasure which is too real. In fact, so real that it is unreal. Against this obsession with the real we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation which allows to pass the act "in vitro". We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real.
So the media chooses to applaud the array of unbeaten records and stellar performances by Liverpool while ignoring the rancid underbelly of underground mafia corruption that is the very definition of this supposed real.
The holistic of football has not escaped this virtualisation which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted sport, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge (as we see in the corrupted players of yesteryear obfuscating current corruptions on Sky, BT Sport and Match of the Day). Even players have lost the privilege of use value, the privilege of real football. Corruption has passed by that way and it spares nobody.
No more than the politicians, footballers do not know what to make of their real function, their function of corruption and matchfixing. They are pledged to the decoy of football as others are to the decoy of power.
Football has become pure (in the fascist sense) and speculative (in an insider trading sense) to the extent that we do not see the real event that it could be or that it would signify.
Since the 2019/20 (and 2015/16) Premier League titles were won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like if the league title races had actually existed. We will never know what Manchester City taking part with a chance of winning would have been like. We will never know what Liverpool taking part with a probability of being beaten would have been like. We have seen what a state-based systemic corruption is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of a fake sport away from the field of play with no possibility of reaction. But this is not football, any more than $100 million bets on a game is sufficient to make it football. Any more than the direct transmission by BBC / BT Sport / Sky of real time information is sufficient to authenticate the sport. One is reminded of Capricorn One in which the flight of a manned rocket to Mars, which only took place in a desert studio, was relayed live to all the television stations in the world.
While one fraction of the media and political class, specialists in the substitute bench of mental contortions, are whole-heartedly in favour of the systemic corruption (the corruption earns more for UK PLC than legitimacy), and another fraction are against it from the bottom of their hearts - but for reasons no less disturbing, all are agreed on one point: this systemic corruption exists, we have seen it. There is no interrogation into the sport itself or its reality; or into the fraudulence of this corruption, the programmed and always delayed illusion of competitive sport; or into the machination of this matchfixing and its amplification by disinformation, not to mention the improbable orgy of fake media, the systematic manipulation of data, the artificial dramatisation ("surely the most amazing comeback ever!")...
If you do not have practical intelligence, hacks and insider knowledge about the systemic corruption in the Premier League (and few among us do), at least develop a sceptical intelligence towards it, without renouncing the pathetic experience of its absurdity.
But there is more than one kind of absurdity: that of the assassination and that of being caught up in the illusion of assassination. It is just as in La Fontaine's fable: the day there is a real football match in the Premier League you will not even be able to tell the difference.
Corruption has become football.
The real victory of football's simulators of fake is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation of the real.
A real where match outcomes are in the underground betting markets before the game even starts.
A real where matches are corrupted months ahead.
A real where the utilisation of doping is accepted as a competitive advantage.
A real where players pay managers to play and agents pay national managers for client selection.
A real where a significant percentage of players represented by certain agents are involved in matchfixing.
A real where the UK sports media is entirely captured and performative to the corruption.
A real where only the American-owned Manchester United and Liverpool have a veto on the choice of Premier League chief executive allowing them to later introduce the US power grab, Project Big Picture.
A real where some EPL clubs are merely gambling stables.
A real where Match of the Day commentary is added post-game under corrupted editorial inputs.
And a real where Liverpool FC are champions, were champions before a ball was kicked and will be champions again so long as that is the preferred strategy of state and mafia.
The Premier League no longer takes place.
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A Tribute To Arsene Wenger
Arsene Wenger on April 16th 2018 - 4 days later he resigned as manager of Arsenal after 22 years at the club: "The referee is the referee. What you want is to help the referee. Unfortunately, the Premier League has decided not to go for VAR. I think that is a very bad decision. I believe, with that decision, we are behind the rest of the world"
If Leicester City hadn't teamed up with Team Sky medics, Dr Mark Bonar and MAPEI...
If Leicester hadn't been unreasonably aided by pgMOB match officials...
Then in 2015/16, Arsene Wenger would have won the Premier League title which, with 3 FA Cups in 4 years, would have made him a timeless legend.
Instead corruption tried to tarnish Wenger's time at Arsenal.
Plus ça change, plus c'est pas la même chose.
There are few islets of integrity left in the ocean of omerta that is the Premier League and one of these rocky outcrops disappeared beneath the tsunami of corruption at the conclusion of the 2017/18 season when Arsene Wenger left Arsenal.
Historically.
Arsenal have not orchestrated any of the wide range of matchfixing matrices utilised by many other EPL teams to enhance earnings away from taxing eyes.
Arsenal have avoided overly close ties with the bookmaking industry and have not allowed criminalised football agents to take control of the club.
Arsenal instead employed marginal gains years before the Team Sky cycling team pushed such nudge edge beyond legal boundaries and when other EPL teams were medieval in their strategic sophistication.
As Arsenal were a talented and largely legitimate team and because Wenger refused to allow betting markets to influence match outcomes, the club and the manager were ostracised by the murkier areas of the industry sector.
The mainstream media systemically slaughtered Wenger at any opportunity.
And not just some mainstream media but all.
And meanwhile, in parallel, the manual of modern coaching has increased its focus on betting markets and their illegitimate impacts.
We don't expect reality from the 4th Estate so this message that football journalists are merely PR merchants is hardly surprising.
But we do expect integrity in the officiating of Premier League matches...
... and Arsenal have suffered immensely from the systemic and particular corruptions against their interests under Wenger.
The issue of Mike Dean has been aired on the Football Is Fixed blog since 2006:
2005 - banned for supplying info to Arbitros - a tipping firm
2006 - removed from FA Cup Final over concerns of bias towards Liverpool
2006 - extreme bias against Arsenal and Wenger initiated
2008 - officiated most fixed final of recent years with Harry Redknapp victorious
2015 - Arsenal fans try to petition parliament over Dean
2016 - moved house so he could referee Liverpool and Everton games
2017 - suspicious betting patterns on Liverpool and Everton matches under Dean (as both referee and 4th official)
2018 - SE Asian bookmaker links exposed and pgMOB exclude Dean from future matches involving Merseyside teams for a year following revelations by Football is Fixed
When power is based on appearances, it can disappear suddenly.
But the abuse spreads further.
But the abuse spreads further.
An interesting comparison to Wenger is the creation of a legacy for that serial failure Roy Hodgson.
When Hodgson succeeded in keeping Crystal Palace in the Premier League in season 2019/20, there was a coordinated mainstream media campaign about his three successful relegation fights at Fulham, West Bromwich Albion and Palace and how these successes obliterate memories of his less stellar performances at Liverpool and England.
Hodgson only managed to keep Fulham in the Premier League via a matchfixing event at Portsmouth on the last day of the season...
Prior to Hodgson taking over WBA they had benefitted from 0 red cards / penalties while having 7 against. After Hodgson's appointment, there were 4 red cards/penalties in favour and 1 against...
And Crystal Palace should have been relegated in two consecutive years.
And yet the mainstream media turned Hodgson The Failure into Hodgson The Fake Hero and Wenger The Hero into The Inappropriate Failure.
UK mainstream media football journalists are an inept bunch of acquiescent lackeys refracting truths through the lens of corruption.
This mainstream media were alarmed by the timing of the Arsene Wenger announcement that he was to stand down at the end of the 2017/18 Premier League season.
Wenger's statement was delivered less than a week after the Premier League announced that VAR wasn't to be implemented in the following season.
Furthermore, because of the voting method employed by the Premier League, corrupt entities linked to mafia groups were able to block the future implementation of VAR ad nauseum unless it evolved into a form under their control (which, of course, it did).
Furthermore, because of the voting method employed by the Premier League, corrupt entities linked to mafia groups were able to block the future implementation of VAR ad nauseum unless it evolved into a form under their control (which, of course, it did).
The captured mainstream media needed to spin a narrative that didn't link Wenger's resignation to referee corruption.
Prior to Wenger leaving Arsenal, we wrote on the Football is Fixed blog:
If referees hadn't been biased against Arsenal in the first place...
If referees hadn't been biased against Arsenal in the first place...
If there had been a structure in place for Wenger to complain about corrupted refereeing...
If Arsenal had won cups and titles wrongfully stolen from them by Dean and the pgMOB....
If the mainstream media wasn't peopled by drongos umbilically tied to mafia entities undertaking matchfixing...
If the Premier League was a football league as opposed to the world's biggest matchfixing betting medium...
Then Wenger wouldn't be going, he would be being lauded for everything he has brought and would have continued to bring to the English game.
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Cathal O Searcaigh:
Over beyond the cliff
I can see enclosed fields
head over heels.
Were it not for the sheep
ensconced there, pressing down
like paper weights,
they would be as leaves
swept away
into nothingness
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© 2023 Football is Fixed
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Cathal O Searcaigh:
Over beyond the cliff
I can see enclosed fields
head over heels.
Were it not for the sheep
ensconced there, pressing down
like paper weights,
they would be as leaves
swept away
into nothingness
_________________________________________________________________________________
© 2023 Football is Fixed
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