As usual, the above headline isn’t exactly what the Guardian’s Steven Wells had to say. But in hailing the NFL draft (“part of a system designed to make sure that all the assets don’t end up in the hands of a greedy few”), Wells suggests “the nationalisation of the Premier League (and the stupidly named leagues below it) would face almost no serious ideological opposition, and would probably prove massively popular with the vast majority of football fans, particularly those who are fans of clubs that ” under the present system ” have no realistic chance of ever again winning anything meaningful.”
“At the moment the Premier League resembles a video game where four posh boys got their daddies to buy them the cheat code,” protests Wells, no doubt aware any future threats to the relative dominance of Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal are likely to come from whoever has the deepest pockets.
The benefits of nationalisation are manifold and obvious, including:
¢ The elimination and reversal of dumb-ass anti-fan cultural practices (generally but erroneously knows as Americanisation).
¢ The reintroduction of genuinely competitive leagues and a genuinely competitive league system.
¢ The regrassrootisation of football.
¢ The enforced and equitable sharing of TV moneys.
¢ The self-proclaimed socialist Sir Alex Ferguson no longer having to live under a perpetual cloud of self-loathing and embarrassment.
¢ The immediate execution by firing squad of anybody who refers to fans as customers.
The alternative of course, is an ever cheaper and tackier continuation of the current drearily predictable circus ” the strip-malling of soccer. Every league in every country essentially the same, season after season after season, while the ‘small’ clubs gradually wither away and football, as a vibrant cultural institution, rots at the roots and dies.