I think today was a turning point for me. OK, various Premiership football clubs have been bought out by foreign investors in recent years and this might have led to the occasional ripple of unease but - nothing to get too worried about. After all we live in a globalised, multi-cultural, melting-pot kind of world and, hey, who cares where the owners come from as long as they understand football and pile in the cash. Sports fans might look at Chelsea. In come large amounts of Russian oil money and the next thing you know a club with a previously indifferent performance suddenly threatens to rule the roost. Later down the line, with their new Middle Eastern owners, and £520 billion behind them, Manchester City has mind-boggling fifty times the buying power of Chelsea.

English Football’s Foreign Playing Fields

We know that Newcastle United have overseas buyers lined up and today I hear Everton are three weeks away from a foreign buy-out deal. Er . . . hang on here, that’s eleven clubs now out of English hands. Three more and the required majority of fourteen, the number required to change the rules and the constitution of the Premiership, will have been reached!

That means that, for example, game 39 can be voted in by investors whose interest lies, not in the future well-being of English football, but in the maximisation of profit from whatever source. This might be just the start. Perhaps it might be deemed, in ten years, that the Premier League teams would earn more money for their clubs if they played half of their games in China and India.

The Day The Premiership Eats Itself

Who will resist this? Not the managers or the players who might see a tenfold increase in income, and, if you think I’m mad, then take a look at the Indian Premier League and the way cricket is going. The Premiership is a marketable product which is rapidly falling into the hands of global capitalists whose instinct is to use that product to maximise profit, period! There will soon be nothing at all to stop our Premier League from being gently removed from the ground, re-potted and taken to wherever it can realise the greatest return. What then, pray tell, for English football?