@mattyhurst
@Arminius
@Bonus
@Bekloppt
@RedWhippet
etc.
Your oponions?
Arsenal really became the club of French Africa for a while under Wenger. Chelsea and City are probably more a function of periods of success as the reach of the PL was extended, but Chelsea has also had a significant number of high profile players who were African or of direct African descent.
Australian fan culture is delightfully weird, lots of lesser clubs with devoted fan bases. Leeds in particular seems to have a healthy supporter base in Oz. But I donât think that generalizes to the rest of the world much.
The debate and subsequent disagreement between Tebas and La Liga on one hand and Madrid and Barcelona on the other, prefaces this issue.
At some point the PL will face this reality.
As a Liverpool fan, while I understand the point about the larger interest of the game, it cannot and should not be at the detriment of LFC.
Why the heck would I be bothered about shithouse teams like SunderlandâŚ
These clubs screw us over any chance they getâŚ
Watching Ian Ayreâs interview on YouTube , pretty good watch.
You sound like a BCCI fan (if you follow cricket remotely , youâll get the idea)
Liverpool has a working class fanbase, but the club has always been a commercial venture. Originally it was set up after a rent dispute with Everton. The original team were Scottish professionals and the intention was to provide Saturday afternoon entertainment for working people.
When I started watching the club, it was owned by the Moores family, who ran a gambling concern and retail outlet. I donât think they were bad employers, but the betting side of it was largely funded by working class people with the promise of riches.
The club has never been a Sportverein, but the fanbase has always had strong collective roots.
The Amazon involvement does worry me, because they have really exploited their own workers. What worries me is a Jim Ratcliffe type operation. Obviously Iâm not a Manchester United fan, but I have a lot more sympathy with working class Mancunians than millionaire footballers or billionaire owners.
The problem is that I donât think the fan groups have ever had much solidarity with the ordinary people who work at Anfield.
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Good post RW. Can you explain the last sentence in a bit more detail?
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I donât know what a BCCI fan is, but if their attitude to teams like Sunderland is âfvck emâ, then sign me upâŚ
was just about to post the same thing about the Littlewoods pool and Liverpool FC connection,
is this not form of exploitation, exploiting peoples dreams of getting rich?
as for Bezos, Iâm undecidedâŚ
need to hear more from him and want he wants from buying in to then club
I do know, Liverpool and any another English clubs are not a original football club, but a commercial venture.
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I want to hear the oponion from the LFC fans. The German football fans are very hysteric.
Iâm undecided on whether its good or badâŚ
need to read more into it and hear from the co ownersâŚ
Do potential part owners of a football club have to go through scrutiny from regulators?
Is the bar set lower as they are only part owners?
How would they even fail the fit and proper persons test.
Bhatia is a UK citizen whoâs run QPR for quite a while.
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âExploited workersâ or created jobs for those who otherwise may not have one.
Itâs done. Get over it. It could have been so much worse.
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Yes and I believe not.
Unless Iâm wrong, FSG reserve the right to decline said option. If thatâs the case, it is up to FSG to determine whether or not any future investments into the club end up as an asset of 1892 Holdings.
a bit long, my apologies:
Liverpool, âworking class,â and a moral compass that only points one way
Everyoneâs furious at Bezos joining the shareholder register, but a moral compass only means something if you swing it at your own side too. Letâs look at a little history here.
Liverpoolâs most âauthentically oursâ era, David Moores as chairman, 1991 to 2007 ran on Littlewoods money, a fortune built on the football pools, a betting operation that pulled weekly stakes out of the same working-class communities the club claims to represent. Nobody boycotted then.
Newcastle is owned by Saudi PIF, Man City by Abu Dhabiâs ruling family, PSG by Qatarâs sovereign fund. Three deals that human rights groups and academics have spent years labeling âsportswashingâ outright, each tied to states with well-documented human-rights violation records, that football authorities never made a condition of sale. All three fanbases still turn up, still sing the songs.
Saudi PIF also bankrolled LIV Golf, turning journeyman pros into instant multi-millionaires overnight, and nobody cried foul the way theyâre crying now; the golfers just cashed the cheque. F1 races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia every year despite repeated calls from Human Rights Watch and UK parliamentarians for it to account for its human rights record there. Every one of these still packs a stadium, a fairway, or a grid. And this isnât just sport laundering itself through money it goes to the very top.
Saudi Arabia had a journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, murdered and dismembered in its own consulate in 2018. Two months later, Putin was high-fiving the crown prince at the G20. A few years after that, an American president fist-bumped him on Saudi soil, and by 2025 another one was giving him a full White House state welcome flyover, black-tie dinner, and the line âthings happenâ when a reporter raised the murder. If heads of state can rehabilitate that fast when it suits the deal on the table, a football fanbase embracing an owner for being merely ruthless, not murderous, is not the scandal of the century.
My own moral compass: I live in the Cayman Islands, and Amazon is where I get many of my kidsâ school supplies and other essentials. Iâm no Bezos fan, but my hands arenât clean of the company Iâm criticizing either, otherwise a compass that never points at your own convenience isnât a compass, itâs a weapon.
The moral compass is a funny thing. During slavery, people who signed anti-slavery petitions and preached against it from the pulpit kept buying sugar, cotton, and tobacco grown by enslaved and mistreated black people. The injustice was a few steps removed by the time it reached their table, so it never touched their daily choices. Same moral compass, just centuries earlier.
Ultimately the moral compass or moral outrage is like any tool that gets picked up when itâs useful and put down when it isnât. We reach for it to condemn the owner we never liked anyway, and we quietly holster it for the one paying our wages, sponsoring our sport, or selling us what we need at 2am. Bezos didnât break Liverpoolâs moral compass. He just became the latest, most convenient place to point it.
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Well, whenever there is talk of price increases, the likes of Spirit Of Shankly protest that fans canât afford it. Fair enough. But they never seem to question whether the matchday costs have increased due to the wages of ground staff, stewards, caterers or any of the other people on very ordinary wages that make up the bulk of the staff.
When Mo Salah signed his last contract, there were lots of fans telling the club to pull out all stops to keep him. I didnât hear them questioning whether Dave the steward or Karen the cleaner had been given a rise to keep up with inflation.
Iâm maybe alone on this. I remember when the club put staff on furlough during the Covid shutdown, I seemed to be the only person who thought it was the correct action. The scheme was intended to protect the employment of those who were unable to work due to government restrictions. Thatâs what they were using it for. I think FSG did protect our staff as a good will gesture, but many ordinary football staff werenâtas lucky. I believe that even the Arsenal mascot operator (Gunnersaurus) got his P45 in the furore.
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