EPL Teams or Corporations: Who Are Football Fans Really Supporting These Days?

Imagine you won the lottery.You could buy anything you wanted. Houses, cars, boats—all those things. No work or bills to worry about. What could be better ?

Yet the world is littered with lottery winners and assorted mega rich people who seem just plain bored and miserable. After all, once you get used to the best cars, living in a big house and eating the finest food, the novelty might well wear off. And then what? 

If the sun shone in England all day every day, would we really enjoy and appreciate it like we do when it appears after a week of cloudy sky? If every single thing you wanted was instantly available, without any effort or dent in your bank balance, might you not just start to take it for granted and enjoy it less?

Let's apply this to football, to the EPL. Suppose the club you supported became so rich that it could buy any player or players it wanted. In fact, it could buy any team, its coaching staff and its manager. No point beating about the bush; let's buy the entire Barcelona squad, hire Guardiola as manager and relocate the lot of them to London or Manchester or wherever your team is.

Hey presto, your team now plays fantastic football, will probably win the Champions League (assuming your team is in it, if not it soon will be) and you will be happy ever after.

But will you really be? While it would certainly be entertaining to see the entire Barcelona team re-branded as, say, Queens Park Rangers (both for QPR fans and others), deep down, would QPR supporters, in all honesty, feel that they were watching their "team," or instead feel that they were actually watching the corporation that now owned their club exerting its financial domination over rival corporations.

After all, large corporations operate on the basis that they get richer and richer and do all they can to weaken and destroy their rivals. They undercut each other on price, try to hire their rivals' best people, compete for every advantage. And when the chance presents itself, no quarter is given- the enemy is taken out.

Increasingly, one senses that this is the way the EPL is headed. The rich clubs appear intent on becoming richer and richer and stockpiling the best players, simply because they can afford to do so and because it weakens opponents. So, if you can't find good enough defenders to stop, for example, Wayne Rooney running amok, then simply buy him. Even if he ended up on your bench (unlikely no doubt) ,you have strengthened your teams position by weakening the opposition.

These are extreme examples used to illustrate a point. However, there is a point to be illustrated,namely that modern football, particularly in the EPL, seems to be headed away from any concept of a club's "spirit" or identity and more towards money being flooded in to pay wages and transfers and creating a spiral that is fast becoming unsustainable.

The logical conclusion of this will be the destruction of all but the very richest clubs, who will simply accumulate all the best players from any lesser club, at will. Manchester City's acquisition of Nasri is an example of this. Professional footballers (and who can blame them) will go where the best wages are, just like 99.99 percent of the fans who pay to watch them play would also do.

Of course, FIFA's Financial Fair Play rules are pending. However, even before they kick in, they are being questioned in terms of their actual impact on the financial meltdown that is approaching.

As with Formula 1, the richest teams were always ahead of the rule makers because they hired the cleverest engineers who were able to stretch the rules beyond the FIA's ability to police them. The veritable army of accountants and lawyers that the mega rich clubs will hire to take on FIFA will surely wear down FIFA's resources, if not its will, when it comes to the finer points of EU law and regulation. 

But,coming back to where I started, will supporters of the clubs being financially doped by hyper rich corporations deep down really appreciate their "success?" Indeed, can it really be called "success" when a club goes out and buys it?

Ultimately, the distinction between sport, with relatively honourable rules of engagement both on and off the pitch, and the soulless corporate merger and acquisition culture, appears to be going seriously missing in the post-Abramovitch era. We are now witnessing corporate displays of wealth and machismo masquerading as sport, which is not only sad for all of us that really love football, but also potentially disastrous for all but the hyper rich at the very apex of the Gordon Gekko food chain.