RIP European Super League (2021-2021) ft. Musa Okwonga
This week, we're joined by author and podcaster Musa Okwonga (@Okwonga) to discuss the aborted attempt to create a European Super League of football, a deep dive into why football clubs have such abysmal finances, why there are so many Russian gangsters "investing" in the beautiful game, and much more.
Comments (18)
Love that The Line just seems bored now and is doodling dicks in its ledger
Great Episode, still hoping we get a Britainology on the Old Firm at some point because that's a fun little intersection of (kind of) big business, ancient hatreds and weird types of guys that exist in their own little bubble
Great idea would like to hear Alice opinion of Glasgow haha
the Big Lewandowski = sus
Brilliant episode, but the oversight of the plight of Gunnersauras was a big miss
I can't believe Riley talked about Stan Kroenke without bringing up Screaming Eagle or Jonata
We have a "football index" here in the United States but we call them baseball cards and you actually get a physical good you can look at at display
Are the excessive transfer fees just another mechanism for restricting competition on the field.. would the super league clubs be hoping they鈥檇 have a non competitive league that has no competition for the signatures of top players from the poorer leagues they abandoned.. which means the super league would only have to pay wages just above that of the richest non super league teams. I have no doubt these billionaires owners would have the whole thing rigged and fixed to extract the maximum profit from the whole league than the individual clubs?
We never found out why Riley knows all the Bayern Munich players.. what was that all about?
Great episode, that was fantastic and there were loads of different tangents you could go off with. Football, tax havens and use of clubs as a revenue stream to hide other money were great. The point Mousa made around the clubs being untethered and the way this inevitably leads to a disaster was excellent. Plus I reckon Riley is a fan of The Spurs. Could hear the ire in his voice when Milo mocked Teddy.
best way to avoid having so much of a fanbase not be local is to support a team like burnley since we're so shit nobody would support them for any other reason other than bein local
Really interesting what Musa said about the Bayern ultras doing anti racist activism. I lived in Munich for a while and I always assumed they were definitely not anti racist, based on the stickers I saw everywhere. Goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover I guess (especially when you don't speak German lol)
It really depends on how deep you wanna dive into it. Schickeria, Bayern's prime ultra group, is pretty renowned for their efforts against anti-semitism, in memory of former Jewish Bayern president Kurt Landauer (who survived the Holocaust in Switzerland, ironically enough). That doesn't diminish the fact that Bavarians are altogether still a preposterously redneck people. German Kentucky, really. However, the habit is to leave your everyday racism at home when you go to the football game. Or at least, don't take it into the stadium. Yes, it gets uglier after the game, once the guys are drunk. But at least with the Bundesliga clubs, whenever someone tries to be openly racist within the stadium, they get at the very least cancelled, if not the living shit beaten out of them.
The scousers in Anfield have like three main places they hang out but it is expensive as fuck. They've actually done walk outs in the past decade against ticket price increases which makes it all the more bonkers that Liverpool got involved in this shite, like Liverpool fans drove their original shit corrupt American owners out of the club in 2010, it was like the Iranian revolution but Scouse.
MUSA!!?!??馃憖馃憖馃憖
JP Morgan is the IMF of the European Super League...forcing these indebted clubs to play this postcapitalist shell game.
Yeah - the thing is anyone or any institution in debt is turned into a neoliberal subject!
GAME: GONE SIMPLE: AS THE DOOR: THERE