On Loving a Beautiful Game That Doesn’t Love You Back
Why Do You Put Up With This?
Not with the referee. Not with the manager’s selections, the transfer window failures, the VAR decision that cost you three points, the captain who doesn’t look like he cares. Those are the approved complaints. The machine has no objection to those complaints. They are the grievances of someone still inside the system, arguing about the settings.
This is a different question. Harder. Less comfortable.
You know what this industry is. You know how it works, who it serves, and at whose expense it operates. You know the economics, however approximately. You know what Qatar was. You know what the Glazers did to Manchester United and what the Saudi Public Investment Fund is doing with Newcastle. You know that the shirt costs too much, that the ticket costs too much, that the television subscription costs too much, and that none of the excess flows to the community that built the club you love.
You watch anyway. You buy the shirt. You renew the season ticket. On a Tuesday evening in June you will feel something about eleven men you have never met representing a nation state you find conceptually problematic, playing in a tournament whose expansion from 64 to 104 games was driven by broadcast inventory requirements rather than any sporting logic, organised by a governing body whose conduct over the past decade has been the subject of FBI investigations, forty separate indictments, and the kind of governance failures that tend to end careers everywhere except Zurich.
Football is not simply a sport that has been captured by bad capital. It is the most visible, the most global, and the most emotionally penetrating example of what the spectacle economy does when it operates without constraint. Five billion people watched the last World Cup. The Premier League broadcasts to 188 countries. This is not a niche dysfunction. This is the machine at full scale.
So the question is worth asking seriously.
Why do you put up with this?
The Easy Target
Let us start with FIFA and Gianni Infantino, because Infantino is the easy part.
He looks like a clown. He performs like a clown. At a press conference in Qatar in November 2022 — the first World Cup staged in winter, in a country whose summer temperatures made the original scheduling impossible, every European domestic league disrupted, every player’s season fractured, every fan’s calendar upended to accommodate a governance decision made in a room in Zurich in 2010 — Infantino delivered a speech in which he declared himself to be African, a migrant worker, a person of determination, and to have felt as a child, owing to his red hair and freckles, the same discrimination as a gay man. He was speaking in a country where homosexuality is illegal. He was not being satirical. The tail had been wagging the dog for twelve years. Nobody in authority had noticed, or minded.
But Infantino is a very rich clown who has run the most powerful organisation in world sport for nearly a decade, survived every scandal, and expanded his own authority and FIFA’s revenues at every turn. He is not the problem. He is the product. The structure that produced him, protects him, and will produce someone exactly like him the moment he is gone — that is the problem. Focusing on Infantino is the approved response. It changes nothing. It is designed to change nothing.
FIFA is technically a non-profit Swiss association — 211 member associations, each holding one vote regardless of size, history, or footballing significance. Liechtenstein has the same vote as Brazil. The Solomon Islands has the same vote as Germany. This is presented as democracy. It is, in practice, a market. The votes of small, poor federations are mathematically available for purchase at modest cost, which is why the corruption investigation that preceded Infantino’s election required the FBI, the US Department of Justice, and approximately forty separate indictments to begin to map its contours. The corruption was not an aberration in the governance structure. It was the governance structure made explicit.
The financial model is straightforward in the way protection rackets are straightforward. FIFA owns the World Cup — the single most watched sporting event on the planet — and stages it every four years. The 2026 tournament is projected to generate nine billion dollars for FIFA in revenues: $3.9 billion in broadcast rights, $2.8 billion in sponsorship, and for the first time in the tournament’s history, hospitality and ticketing revenues that equal broadcasting as the top revenue source. The host nation bears the construction costs. FIFA takes the profits. This is the standard arrangement.
Qatar 2022 was its extreme expression. Between 2011 and 2020, more than 6,500 migrant workers from South Asia died in Qatar — twelve per week on average — building the infrastructure for a tournament awarded to a country with no football tradition, following a vote of FIFA member associations conducted through processes that lawyers tend to describe using terms like “facilitation payments” and “failures of governance processes.” The head of Qatar’s organising committee, asked about a worker’s death during the tournament, described it as something that happens. He was not being satirical either.
Top tier global partners for the 2026 World Cup include Adidas, Coca-Cola, Visa — and Saudi Aramco. The sportswashing is not incidental to the financial model. It is a revenue line.
In the weeks before the 2026 tournament FIFA quietly reversed a policy banning supporters from bringing their own water into World Cup stadiums — a policy introduced, fans were informed, on safety grounds. The safety grounds turned out to be indistinguishable from the commercial grounds of selling water inside the stadiums at World Cup prices. When the reversal inevitably came there was no apology, no acknowledgement that the original justification had been invented, no apparent awareness that banning people from bringing water to watch football in North American summer heat was the kind of policy that tends to attract attention. Infantino did not comment. He was, presumably, busy being African.
It is the week before the 2026 tournament begins. Omar Abdulkadir Artan arrived at Miami International Airport on a flight from Istanbul. Artan is the finest referee in Africa — named the continent’s top male official in 2025 by the Confederation of African Football, a man who has officiated at the Africa Cup of Nations and international matches across the continent, who had navigated explosions near his local stadium in Mogadishu to pursue his career, and who was selected as one of FIFA’s 52 World Cup referees. He was going to become the first Somali to officiate at a World Cup.
US Customs and Border Protection detained him, determined he was inadmissible due to vetting concerns, and denied him entry. Somalia is one of 39 nations on the Trump administration’s travel ban. No further explanation was offered.
FIFA’s response was a study in institutional self-exculpation. “FIFA is not involved in host country immigration processes, including visa adjudications,” its statement read, “and has been informed by authorities that Mr Artan’s status will not be changed at present. In line with previous FIFA events, a host government ultimately determines who receives a visa and who is admitted into their country.” The organisation that awarded a World Cup to a country where it could not be played in summer because the heat would kill people is surprised, apparently, that the host country applies its own rules. Infantino did not comment.
Artan, for his part, said he was in a positive mood and focused on the next challenges in his career. The dignity in that statement, in those circumstances, puts everyone else in this story to shame.
Infantino told a FIFA Council meeting that the organisation’s finances were “extremely solid” in a year it posted a $369 million loss. The model, he explained, was to lose money for three years and make it in the fourth, when the World Cup falls. This is arithmetically correct. It is also a description of an organisation structurally dependent on a single quadrennial event, which is why the event keeps expanding — 48 teams now, 104 matches, more broadcast slots, more hospitality inventory, more facilitation payments from federations wanting their nations included — regardless of what expansion does to the quality of the football.
Nobody is running this for the football.
One further item from the FIFA sustainability desk. The 2026 World Cup is projected to generate 7.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent — more than double the reported emissions from Qatar 2022, with 87% of that figure attributable to spectator air travel across a tournament spread across three countries and 5,000 kilometres with no high-speed rail connections between venues. Teams fly. Fans fly. Entourages fly. The media flies. The expanded format — 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 cities — was designed, as we have established, to maximise broadcast inventory. Its carbon consequence was noted and proceeded with regardless.
FIFA’s response to climate scrutiny is a masterclass in the form. Qatar 2022 was declared the first fully carbon-neutral World Cup. In 2023, Switzerland’s advertising regulator ruled that this claim was unsubstantiated — the first formal greenwashing decision against a global sports organisation. FIFA acknowledged this finding and promptly signed a four-year partnership with Saudi Aramco, the largest greenhouse gas emitter on earth, the following year. Saudi Aramco is a top-tier global partner of the 2026 tournament. For the 2026 edition, FIFA’s sustainability strategy covers energy efficiency, waste management, and sustainable construction standards. It does not set a specific emissions cap. It does not address spectator travel — the source of 87% of the projected emissions. Infantino has called on fans to raise FIFA’s “green card for the planet.” He has not explained what this means.
The Universities of Manchester, Loughborough and Bristol published a report this week concluding that football’s carbon footprint is not simply caused by fan travel or stadiums but is politically produced — through decades of commercial expansion, globalisation, and structural ties to fossil fuel companies and petrostates. FIFA noted this finding. Saudi Aramco’s logo will appear on the tournament’s official materials regardless.
Nobody is running this for the planet either.
The Tournament That Wasn’t
The 2026 World Cup features 104 matches across six weeks in three countries. The previous tournament had 64. The expansion — from 32 to 48 teams, from 64 to 104 games — was announced with characteristic FIFA vocabulary: a thorough review, competitive balance, inclusion, fan experience. FIFA said the decision followed careful consideration of “sporting integrity, player welfare, team travel, commercial and sporting attractiveness, as well as team and fan experience.”
The actual mechanism is simpler. More matches means 62.5% more broadcast inventory to sell. More teams means more national federations receiving distributions and therefore more votes in the FIFA Congress when governance questions arise. More games in North American time zones — every match now kicking off between noon and 9pm Eastern — means the difference between a niche audience and a mass market one, reflected dollar for dollar in advertising rates. The sport expanded because expansion was commercially rational. The fans got more games to watch. FIFA got more money. The conflation of these two outcomes is the trick.
Consider what you are actually watching across those 104 games. The seeding system for 2026 was designed — for the first time explicitly stated as such — to guarantee that Spain, Argentina, France and England cannot meet before the semi-finals. FIFA called this competitive balance. The structure appears built to make those matchups more likely in the latter stages. Let us call it what it is: the management of uncertainty in the interests of broadcast value. A Brazil v Argentina quarter-final is worth more in advertising revenue than Morocco v Senegal. The seeding system exists to make the former more probable and to push it as deep into the knockout rounds as possible, where audiences are largest and broadcast rates are highest.
The draw within each pot is random. The structure within which the draw operates is anything but. You are watching a competition whose architecture has been engineered to produce commercially optimal outcomes while preserving the aesthetic of sporting chance. The spectacle of competition with the uncertainty managed out.
Here is the question the resigned fan never asks: why not a completely random draw? No pots, no seedings, no protection of the commercially valuable nations, no confederation restrictions. Iran v Brazil in the group stage. Canada v Argentina. The United States v France from the first whistle. Genuine uncertainty. The possibility of a genuine upset at any stage rather than the managed drama of a giant meeting a minnow in the round of 32 and winning 6-0.
Nobody wants this. Not FIFA. Not the broadcasters who have paid billions for guaranteed marquee fixtures in the knockout rounds. And — here is the uncomfortable part — not most fans. The fan who says they want unpredictability has been so thoroughly integrated into the machine’s commercial logic that they have internalised its preferences as their own. They want their nation to progress. They want the marquee fixtures to arrive on schedule. They want the semi-finals to look roughly as predicted. What they call drama is managed drama. What they call competition is a tournament whose probable shape was largely determined before a ball was kicked, by a seeding committee in a room in Zurich.
The random draw is the dog that never barked. Its absence tells you everything about who the tournament is actually for.
And yet you will watch. And you will feel something when the group stage draw produces a tricky looking second round opponent. And you will call it drama.
Why do you put up with this?
Four Ways to Own a Football Club
But here is the thing about focusing on FIFA, on Qatar, on 2026, on the corruption and the clown president and the migrant worker deaths: it lets everyone else off the hook. The Premier League watches the FIFA circus and presents itself as a different kind of operation. More professional. More commercially sophisticated. More, in the current vocabulary, fit for purpose.
It is not.
Turn to any football media outlet and you will find the owner rankings. Worst to best. Backed by the numbers — transfer spend, league positions, managerial stability, ambition demonstrated or withheld. The Glazers score poorly because they extract rather than invest. Sheikh Mansour scores well because he spent. The analytical framework is consumer feedback on a product: how satisfied are the fans with what the owner has delivered. The structural question — why are these people here, what does their presence reveal, what are their actual motives — does not appear. It has not been commissioned. It would not generate the clicks.
This is what Mark Fisher meant by capitalist realism: not that people are fooled, but that the system has successfully defined the boundaries of legitimate complaint. You can complain about the Glazers. You cannot question whether the Glazers’ presence is the predictable outcome of a governance framework that invited them.
There are, broadly, four models of Premier League ownership currently in operation. Each represents a different form of what the Marxist geographer David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession — the extraction of value from something that previously existed as a social commons, converted into a private asset. The commons being enclosed here is the club itself: the identity, the loyalty, the emotional inheritance of generations of supporters who had no say in the transaction and no share in the proceeds.
There is a word for what happened to those clubs. It is an ugly word, uglier than it appears, and it is worth dwelling on briefly before examining the mechanism in detail.
The word is brand.
In its original sense, to brand is to burn. A mark of ownership applied by fire to an animal that cannot consent to the marking. The livestock does not choose the brand. The brand asserts possession over something living, something that existed before the owner arrived, something whose value derives precisely from its organic vitality rather than from anything the owner contributed. The owner’s mark is burned onto that vitality and the owner’s claim is thereby established.
When a football club’s identity is converted into intellectual property — the crest, the colours, the name, the history, the emotional inheritance of generations — and that intellectual property is registered, licensed, merchandised, and enforced through commercial law, something very like branding has occurred. The community that built the identity over a century did not consent to the conversion. The mark was applied anyway. The vitality that makes the brand valuable — the loyalty, the belonging, the grief and the joy — was there before the owner arrived and will be there, diminished, after the owner leaves.
Harvey calls this accumulation by dispossession. The brand manager calls it asset development. The fan calls it their club.
The fan is the last to understand that the brand belongs to someone else now.
So what are these four models of ownership?
The Leveraged Buyout. The Glazer family acquired Manchester United in 2005 through a mechanism of elegant brutality: they borrowed £580 million against the club in order to buy the club, then placed the debt on the club rather than on themselves. The supporters of Manchester United financed their own dispossession. Since the Glazers arrived, the club has paid them approximately £1.2 billion in interest, dividends and fees. Outstanding debt remains around £1.3 billion. In 2024-25 Manchester United finished fifteenth in the Premier League — their worst top-flight position in 51 years — while generating record revenues of £666 million. Record income. Historic underperformance. Still losing money. This last season, under new football direction from INEOS, they finished third. The fans who had demanded change got partial change — the Glazers remain majority owners — and declared it progress. The machine rewarded their continued participation.
The Sportswash. Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi bought Manchester City for £210 million in 2008. The club is now valued at approximately £4 billion. The Saudi Public Investment Fund — which manages $940 billion in assets and is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — bought Newcastle United for £305 million in 2021. Saudi Arabia has spent more than $6 billion on sport since then. The economic logic here is not return on investment in any conventional sense. It is the purchase of global legitimacy, soft power, and reputational rehabilitation. The football fan’s loyalty is the commodity being acquired. When you renew your Newcastle season ticket you are, among other things, providing the audience that makes the investment in sportswashing rational.
The Private Equity Portfolio. Chelsea was purchased in 2022 by a consortium led by Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital, a private equity firm, for £4.25 billion — at the time the most expensive transaction in the history of professional sport. It is worth noting that Chelsea was available at all only because Roman Abramovich, the oligarch whose nineteen years of ownership had delivered five Premier League titles and two Champions League trophies, was forced to sell under UK government sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The model that replaced him — private equity with a five to seven year exit thesis — has spent approximately £800 million on transfers and produced a club whose owners would currently struggle to exit at the purchase price. Capital is not interchangeable. The oligarch who genuinely wanted trophies has been replaced by a PE firm that genuinely wants a multiple.
The Franchise Empire. Stan Kroenke took full control of Arsenal in 2018. Kroenke Sports and Entertainment also owns the Los Angeles Rams, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, and several other franchises. He is married to a Walmart heiress. Arsenal sit at one end of the Seven Sisters Road. Tottenham Hotspur sit at the other — owned by ENIC International, the vehicle of the Tavistock Group and the Lewis family trust. Joe Lewis, the currency trader who controls ENIC, was indicted in the United States in 2023 on charges of insider trading and agreed to pay $49 million to settle civil charges. Daniel Levy, who ran the club for twenty-four years with considerable commercial acumen and periodic sporting frustration, was shown the door in September 2025 — several months after Tottenham finally ended a seventeen-year trophy drought by winning the Europa League. The fans who had protested against Levy for years got what they wanted. The club escaped the ignominy of relegation on the last day of the season. Qatari interest in a takeover is now being speculated. Be careful what you wish for is not a counsel of resignation. It is a description of how the machine works: the approved complaint — sack the chairman, back the manager, spend the money — leads not to structural change but to the next iteration of the same arrangement, with different names.
Four models. One outcome: the club that existed as a social institution — belonging to everybody in the local hinterland — converted into a vehicle for the accumulation of returns by people with no prior connection to the place, the history, or the community.
The Test That Wasn’t
One might reasonably ask: where were the safeguards? Why did this happen?
After all the Premier League has, since its formation, operated what it calls an Owners’ and Directors’ Test — a fit and proper persons assessment designed to prevent unsuitable individuals from acquiring clubs. For most of its existence the test excluded convicted fraudsters and undischarged bankrupts. It did not exclude war criminals, human rights abusers, or the representatives of authoritarian states using football clubs as geopolitical instruments. Nobody had apparently anticipated that this category of owner would present themselves. Or they had, and preferred not to address it.
When Amnesty International described the test as “hopelessly unsuited” to its stated purpose, the Premier League undertook a review. In 2023 it announced significant changes: human rights abuses would now constitute a disqualifying event. Tracey Crouch, the former Conservative sports minister who had chaired the Fan-Led Review, called the changes “smoke and mirrors” — a reflection of existing UK sanctions regulations rather than any meaningful standard of scrutiny. The new rules would not have stopped the Newcastle sale. They would probably not stop a future Qatari bid. None of those involved are on the government’s sanctions list.
The roll call of those who passed the test includes, but is not limited to, the following. All fit and proper people.
Owen Oyston, convicted rapist, owned Blackpool through their solitary Premier League season in 2010-11 and for years beyond. The Premier League identified him as unfit to own a top-flight club and then failed to enforce the divestment. His son Karl sat on the Football League panel that ruled on other owners’ fitness while his father remained registered as a director. Blackpool are now in the fourth tier.
Massimo Cellino, convicted of tax evasion in Italy on two separate occasions, owned Leeds United across a period of such sustained chaos that he had already dismissed 36 coaches during his time at Cagliari before arriving in England. The Football League banned him twice and cleared him twice. The test worked, then didn’t, then did again, demonstrating principally its own inconsistency.
David Sullivan, who made his fortune in pornographic magazines and sex shops — including a 1982 conviction for living off immoral earnings — co-owned West Ham for sixteen years. In June 2026, ahead of a BBC Panorama investigation into serious historic allegations concerning his personal conduct, Sullivan stepped down as joint-chairman. He categorically denied the allegations. His resignation statement cited love, respect, and responsibility toward a club that deserves unity and focus. West Ham had just been relegated. Fans had spent the season waving banners reading “sold us a dream, we are living the nightmare.” The dream was a 62,000-seat stadium built for an athletics event and Champions League ambitions. The nightmare was the gap between the promise and the reality — which is to say the gap between what salvation sellers offer and what they provide.
Because here is the mechanism the test was never designed to address: the salvation salesman. The owner who arrives not just with capital but with a promise. Oyston with Premier League football for a club that had never seen it. Sullivan with a world-class stadium and European ambitions. The Glazers with the implicit guarantee that United’s commercial juggernaut would continue regardless. The Saudi Public Investment Fund with the prospect of competing with City at the very top.
The fans believed. Not because they were naive. Because the alternative — continued mediocrity, continued irrelevance, continued watching while other clubs accelerated away on the revenues the television deal had made possible — was worse than the risk. The governance failure created the conditions in which salvation salesmen could operate. The fans, faced with a choice between scrutiny and hope, chose hope.
That is not stupidity. It is the entirely rational response of people who have been given no structural alternative and offered something they genuinely want.
It is also how protection rackets work.
Britain’s Butler, and the Direction of Travel
None of this happened in a vacuum.
The United States has an interest somewhere along the line in ten Premier League clubs. There are eleven different nationalities with major stakes across the division. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea. The Glazers bought United. Sheikh Mansour bought City. The Saudi Public Investment Fund bought Newcastle. The pattern is not coincidence. It is a policy outcome.
Britain made a series of deliberate choices across the 1990s and 2000s to attract global capital without asking too many questions about its origins or intentions. The same choices that made London the preferred destination for oligarch money — the legal system, the financial services architecture, the property market, the light-touch regulation that made the City the world’s offshore clearing house — made Premier League clubs available to any sufficiently capitalised buyer who could navigate a test designed, in practice, not to inconvenience them. Londongrad was not an aberration. It was the City of London’s business model applied to postcodes. The Premier League is one node in that network.
These phenomena — FIFA’s protection racket, oligarchic capital washing through SW6, sovereign wealth funds purchasing legitimacy in the North East, pornographers and convicted fraudsters passing fitness tests — are not the same thing. They are travelling in the same direction. The capture of governance structures by private interests. The conversion of social commons into extraction vehicles. The systematic weakening of the regulatory frameworks that would constrain the accumulation. The use of cultural legitimacy — football, community, the beautiful game — as the cover story for what is, in structural terms, a very old arrangement dressed in replica shirts.
Britain, with characteristic pragmatism, built the road.
The fan who asks why their club is owned by people who neither know nor care about the community it represents might reasonably direct that question not only at the owners but at the political economy that invited them in, priced out the alternatives, and called it the free market.
Why do you put up with this?
The Original Sin
The Premier League was created in 1992. This fact is so familiar it has lost its force. It should not have.
The breakaway was driven by the top clubs — principally the so-called Big Five of the era — who wanted to capture a greater share of the new television revenues that satellite broadcasting was making possible. The Football Association, which should have been the regulatory backstop, the body whose purpose was to govern the sport in the public interest, effectively abdicated its authority in exchange for a cut of the revenues and the preservation of its role in cup competitions. From that moment, the Premier League clubs were commercial entities answerable primarily to their owners and to each other, operating a self-regulatory structure whose central conflict of interest — the clubs voting on the rules that governed the clubs — was visible from the beginning and addressed by nobody.
The Football Association’s de facto abdication of power since 1992 left English football without an effective independent regulator for thirty years. Thirty years in which the leveraged buyout arrived, the sportswash arrived, the private equity portfolio arrived, the franchise empire arrived. Thirty years in which convicted rapists and tax evaders passed fitness tests, in which oligarchs bought clubs under sanctions and forced sales produced private equity replacements, in which sovereign wealth funds purchased legitimacy while their governments committed human rights abuses that the ownership test was redesigned not to address. Thirty years in which ticket prices rose, working class fans were priced out of the grounds their grandfathers built, and the clubs that had existed as social institutions were converted into financial instruments.
None of this was inevitable. It was chosen.
Germany made a different choice in 1998 — fan ownership, democratic governance, the sport protected from the logic of pure extraction. The consequences of that choice will be examined shortly. The consequences of England’s choice are visible now.
The Culture, Media and Sport Committee warned more than a decade ago that over-ambitious or otherwise incompetent or duplicitous owners threatened the sustainability of clubs. Nothing happened. When clubs went into administration, when Bury FC was expelled from the Football League entirely, the response was sympathy and another internal review. The Premier League continued to argue, throughout every subsequent governance debate, that statutory regulation was unnecessary — that the sport could regulate itself.
It had been regulating itself for thirty years. The results were visible.
The Football Governance Act 2025 finally introduced a statutory independent regulator for English football. The Premier League argued throughout the legislative process that the proposals amounted to rigid banking-style regulation that would damage competitiveness and investment. The League that had asked to be treated as a collection of commercial enterprises objected when commercial regulation was proposed. The fans who had been paying for thirty years of regulatory failure were not, in the Premier League’s submissions to parliament, the primary consideration.
The Act arrived thirty years after the governance vacuum was created. The clubs already owned by sovereign wealth funds, leveraged buyout artists, and private equity firms were grandfathered in. The road had already been built. The traffic was already moving.
The fan who watched all of this — who renewed the season ticket through the Glazer years, who celebrated the Saudi takeover at Newcastle, who bought the £200 shirt — is not the victim of a system that arrived without warning. The warnings were audible throughout. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued them. Amnesty International issued them. The Football Supporters Association issued them. The banners at West Ham issued them.
The system continued because the fans continued.
Why do you put up with this?
Feeding the Machine
Here is where the financial engineering gets interesting, and not in a good way. Surprise, surprise.
Capital is, it turns out, a bad owner of football clubs. Not morally — that argument has been made. Structurally. The private equity exit thesis requires demonstrating revenue growth and selling at a multiple within five to seven years. But you cannot rationalise a football club the way you rationalise a manufacturing company. You cannot cut the product, offshore the supply chain, merge the back office, eliminate the underperforming division. The asset is the emotion. And the emotion depends on the thing you are trying to extract value from remaining emotionally credible.
Chelsea cannot find a buyer at the acquisition price despite spending £800 million on players. Manchester United generates record revenue while finishing fifteenth one season and requiring a further £130 million borrowing to plug the cash flow gap. More than 36 clubs across Europe’s five biggest leagues now have private equity, venture capital or private debt participation. PE deal activity in European football went from €66 million in 2018 to €2.2 billion in 2024. The money keeps arriving. The model keeps failing on its own terms. The fans keep paying.
Clubs now borrow against future broadcast revenues — loans secured against television rights that haven’t yet been earned. The fan’s future loyalty is being collateralised today. The season ticket you will renew next year is already pledged to a lender whose name you will never read in a match programme.
The ego dimension makes it worse. Much of this capital is not purely rational capital. It is vanity capital, soft power capital, the capital of men for whom owning a football club is a statement about status, influence, or geopolitical positioning rather than a straightforward investment thesis. Vanity capital does not respond to normal market correctives. It does not exit when the returns disappoint. It just keeps spending, keeps borrowing, keeps loading the debt onto the institution, keeps promising the fans that the next transfer window will be the one that changes everything.
Who captures the value? Not the fans, who pay more for less. Not the communities, which have been systematically priced out of the grounds their grandparents built. Nineteen of twenty Premier League clubs raised ticket prices in 2024-25. Arsenal earns an average of £89 per ticket per fan per match. Liverpool’s ticket income rose 27% in a single year. One hundred and sixteen supporter organisations wrote to the Premier League calling for a price freeze, stating that rising prices were making it harder for working class communities to attend matches. The Premier League noted their concerns. The prices rose.
The wage bill tells its own story — and it is not the one the machine prefers to tell. The average Premier League salary in 2025-26 is around £67,000 per week — roughly £3.5 million a year — which sounds extraordinary until you learn that Erling Haaland earns £525,000 per week, pulling the average dramatically upward. The distribution is the point. The apex captures an extraordinary share. Drop one division and the average League One player earns £4,100 per week. The pyramid that sustains the spectacle at the top is staffed, in its lower reaches, by players whose wages would not embarrass a reasonably successful accountant. But still delight most fans.
Below the players entirely, the club operates on a different economy. The stewards checking your ticket, the groundstaff maintaining the pitch, the catering workers selling the £6 pie — mostly on minimum wage or close to it, in stadiums generating hundreds of millions in annual revenue. The matchday experience the fan pays premium prices to access is delivered by workers for whom the premium flows entirely elsewhere. This is the political economy of a Premier League matchday stated as a transaction: the fan is the consumer, the player is the product, the owner is the beneficiary, and the person who shows you to your seat is on £11.44 an hour.
Not even the celebrated labour at the very top is exempt from the machine’s logic. Cristiano Ronaldo is not a footballer who became famous. He is a global commercial entity — CR7, the brand, the fragrance, the hotel chain, the Saudi content strategy — for whom playing football is one component of a diversified personal revenue model. Neymar’s move to Al-Hilal on reported wages of £320,000 a week was not a football decision. It was a financial restructuring. The most celebrated labour in the most financialised sport has been captured by the same logic as the ownership: extract maximum value, deploy the asset for maximum return, optimise the brand. The sport is the vehicle.
And then there is the price behind the price. When a club signs a player for £100 million the fan celebrates. The number is real. It is not the cost. Add the agent’s fee — typically 5 to 10% of the transfer value, running into tens of millions on any significant deal. Add the signing-on bonus, the image rights arrangement, the wage bill across five years, the amortisation charge that hits the accounts annually for the contract’s duration. The £100 million headline becomes something closer to £200 million in total commitment, much of it flowing to intermediaries — agents, lawyers, financial advisers — who have no loyalty to the club, the player, or the sport, and who exist because the system created them and the system rewards them handsomely for navigating its complexity.
The fan who demands their club spend big in the transfer window is demanding, without knowing it, that their club funnel a significant portion of the spending to people whose names they will never read in a match programme. The transfer market is not the sport. It is the financial infrastructure that has grown around the sport, extracting value at every transaction point, built by the same governance choices that permitted the leveraged buyout and the sportswash, benefiting the same class of people.
The machine is grotesque. The machine is also, in the most literal sense, meeting a genuine human need that nothing else is meeting as effectively. That is the trap. That is why it keeps running. That is why the fan who can see it clearly still watches, still cares, still feels something on a Tuesday evening in June about eleven men they have never met.
The emotion is real. The machine that produces it is not.
Why do you put up with this?
What Goes Up
The machine promises glory. It is worth examining, briefly, what happens when the promise fails — not at the top, where the Glazers and the Bohlys absorb their losses and move on, but in the middle and the bottom, where the communities bear the consequences.
Blackburn Rovers. Premier League champions in 1994-95, fuelled by the fortune of local steel magnate Jack Walker and the goals of Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton — a genuine fairy tale, a provincial club briefly at the summit of English football. In November 2010, Venky’s, an Indian poultry company based in Pune, bought the club for £43 million. They sacked Sam Allardyce within a month and replaced him with Steve Kean. They attempted to sign Ronaldinho, David Beckham and Raul. They failed each time. They attended approximately one match between them. In May 2012, Blackburn were relegated from the Premier League after 11 consecutive seasons in the top flight. Average attendance fell from 22,551 to 14,997 in a single year. The club posted a pre-tax loss of £36.5 million the following year against a wages-to-turnover ratio of 136%. Venky’s remain the owners. Current average attendance: 16,161 — the sixth lowest in the Championship. The Premier League’s fit and proper persons test passed them without difficulty.
Coventry City. Thirty-four consecutive years in the top flight, ending in relegation in 2001. The decline that followed was not swift but it was comprehensive. Financial problems led the club to sell its share of the stadium to a local charity to settle debt. They became renters in their own ground, were subsequently evicted, and spent years playing home matches in Birmingham — forty miles away — because no suitable venue existed in their own city. They dropped to the fourth tier. Two decades of homelessness and humiliation followed before new ownership finally repurchased the stadium in 2025 and won promotion back to the Premier League. A redemption story, just about. Twenty years of suffering first. The communities and fans who lived through it were not compensated for their patience.
Oldham Athletic. Founding members of the Premier League in 1992. In the inaugural season they avoided relegation on goal difference. In the 1993-94 FA Cup, a last-minute Mark Hughes equaliser was the only thing that kept them from a Wembley final. They were relegated the same season. What followed was three decades of slow, steady, inexorable decline — League One, League Two, ownership chaos, financial instability, fan protests, pitch invasions, a boycott that failed to shift an owner who simply declined to engage. In 2022, Oldham became the first former Premier League club to be relegated to non-league football. The machine that had elevated them to the top flight in 1992 had no further use for them.
Sheffield Wednesday. The most recent and the most instructive case, because the governance failure is visible in real time. Hillsborough is a 35,000-capacity stadium. Wednesday have a genuine history, a genuine fanbase, genuine community roots. In September 2025 alone the club was placed under five separate EFL embargoes — for amounts owed to HMRC, to football creditors, to other clubs. Senior players and staff were told not to expect wages on payday. This was the fifth time that calendar year. The club went 39 league matches without a win — the longest winless run in the Championship’s history. Their lowest home attendance in 2025-26 was 7,081 in a ground that holds 35,000.
The EFL’s response to each escalating financial failure was to impose further sanctions — embargoes, points deductions, transfer restrictions. The regulatory mechanism punishes the club for the owner’s failures, which means punishing the fans for the owner’s failures, which means accelerating the collapse the regulation was supposedly designed to prevent. A functioning independent regulator would have intervened before the wage failures, before the embargoes, before the 39-game winless run. The Football Governance Act 2025 may prevent the next Sheffield Wednesday. It arrived thirty years too late to prevent this one.
Dejphon Chansiri sold the club to Arise Capital Partners in May 2026. Wednesday were relegated to League One. The fans who had stayed through it all — who had renewed their season tickets in hope, who had watched the embargoes accumulate and the wages go unpaid and the winless run extend week after week — were not consulted about the sale. They were not compensated for their loyalty. They were not, in any formal sense, considered.
They never are.
The dark side of wishing for success is not that you might not get it. It is that someone might sell you the promise of it, extract everything of value from the attempt, and leave you in League One with the debt.
Why do you put up with this?
The Alternative That Exists
Before the piece ends on another question without an answer, one genuine alternative deserves naming. Not a utopia. Not a thought experiment. Something that exists, has existed for nearly thirty years, and works.
Go to Germany.
The Bundesliga made a deliberate governance choice in 1998. Before that year all German clubs were exclusively member-owned, not-for-profit organisations. The 50+1 rule introduced that year permitted commercial investment while requiring that club members — the fans — retain 51% of voting rights. Outside investors can suggest. They cannot decide. The choice was explicit: football clubs are social institutions before they are commercial ones, and the governance structure should reflect that priority rather than override it.
The results are not complicated.
Borussia Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park holds 81,000 people and regularly fills it — the highest average attendance of any club in world football. A match ticket in the standing section costs around €10. The club made a pre-tax profit of €49 million last year on revenues of €520 million, with net interest receivable rather than payable — meaning the club holds net cash rather than net debt. No leveraged buyout. No sovereign wealth fund. No private equity exit thesis. A football club, owned by its members, generating a profit, filling its stadium, selling cheap tickets.
Bayern Munich has not reported a financial loss in thirty consecutive years. This season the club crossed the one billion euro revenue threshold for the first time. They compete consistently at the highest level of European football without a sovereign wealth fund and without debt-loading the institution. The argument that you need Glazer-style ownership to compete at the top is not supported by the evidence.
Now — the standard objection, delivered with the reliability of a Bundesliga substitute in the 70th minute: Bayern Munich always win it. What is the point of fan ownership and €10 standing tickets if the title race is over by February?
It is a fair observation. It is not a fair argument.
Consider what it concedes. It concedes that the only measure of a football league’s success is whether its champion can win the Champions League. Which is precisely the value system the financialisation model installed. Before the television revolution transformed the economics of the game, winning the league was the thing. The Champions League as the supreme arbiter of footballing worth is not a law of nature. It is a product of the broadcast rights structure — it became the thing that matters because it generates the most revenue, and it generates the most revenue because it was relentlessly marketed as the thing that matters. The fan who deploys Bayern Munich’s European record to dismiss fan ownership has internalised the machine’s values so completely they are defending the machine’s interests against their own.
The Premier League’s famous competitive variety deserves scrutiny on the same terms. Seven different champions in thirty-three years — Manchester United, Blackburn Rovers, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool, Leicester City. The variety is real. The mechanism is less reassuring. Chelsea’s first titles came on Roman Abramovich’s money. City’s dynasty came on Abu Dhabi’s. Liverpool’s Klopp era was delivered by American franchise capital that took years to show returns. Leicester, rightly celebrated, required a documentary, a book, and several philosophical investigations into the nature of statistical improbability. You do not make documentaries about things that happen in well-functioning competitive systems. You make them about miracles. The Premier League’s competitive balance is substantially a story of successive waves of external capital arriving to disrupt whoever was dominant. Each disruption was an injection. The variety is the symptom not the cure.
And then there is the question of what the Premier League actually is. Its players are Brazilian, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Egyptian — a global labour market assembled under English club names. The fan in Kuala Lumpur following Arsenal at three in the morning is not following a North London institution. They are following a global entertainment brand that happens to be headquartered in North London. The Bundesliga, with its fan ownership and its full stadiums and its €10 standing tickets, has retained a different relationship with its communities. The people in those stands largely live near the ground. The connection to place that football claims as its founding myth is more real in Dortmund than in almost anywhere in the Premier League. The myth is what the Premier League sells globally. The reality is what Germany preserved locally.
Bayern Munich do usually win the Bundesliga. Dortmund’s 81,000-capacity ground is regularly full regardless. The fans still watch. Apparently football can be worth watching even when the outcome is not always in doubt. Which raises a question the Premier League’s defenders prefer not to ask: if the football is the thing, why does it require a Champions League winner to validate it?
The 50+1 model is not perfect. It has limitations. The financial gap between Bundesliga clubs and the wealthiest Premier League sides is real and growing. But it demonstrates, with thirty years of evidence, that a different governance choice produces a different outcome. Full stadiums. Low ticket prices. Financially stable clubs. Accountable ownership. The sport functioning as a sport.
England chose differently in 1992. The choice had consequences. The consequences are what you are watching.
Why Do You Still Put Up With This?
You have read this far. You know the machine now, if you did not before. You know the governance failure was deliberate. You know the ownership structures were invited in. You know the tournament was expanded for broadcast inventory and the draw was seeded to protect commercial outcomes. You know the ticket prices rose while the debt loaded onto the clubs you love paid dividends to people who have never watched a match from the away end in the rain.
And you will still turn up next season, in person, through your Sky subscription, or probably both. And, even if you purport to detest MAGA and FIFA, you will still watch England on the 17th of June. You will feel something. Not despite knowing all of this. Alongside it.
This is not the place for condescension. The emotion is real. The need that football meets — for belonging, for collective experience, for narrative, for the specific neurological charge of caring about an outcome alongside millions of other people you will never meet — is genuine and largely unmet by anything else contemporary life currently offers. The machine is grotesque and it is filling a real gap. The structural loneliness of a society that has systematically dismantled the institutions through which people used to belong to things larger than themselves — the union, the church, the working men’s club, the political party with actual members who actually met — left a space. Football filled it. The machine occupied the space and then enclosed it, the way capital always does.
That is not stupidity. That is not false consciousness. That is the entirely rational response of people who have been given no structural alternative and whose genuine emotional needs have been successfully recruited as the machine’s fuel.
But.
The fan who directs their anger at individual owners rather than at the governance structures that permitted those owners is performing exactly the function the system requires. Owner-directed anger is manageable. Owners can be sold, replaced, bought out, publicly shamed into marginal concessions. Governance-directed anger is dangerous. It challenges the structure itself. The fan advisory boards, the supporters trusts, the campaign groups that pushed for and eventually achieved the Football Governance Act — they did the harder, less satisfying work of directing their energy at the structure rather than the symptom. They were right. They were also, for most of thirty years, largely ignored.
The broader fan culture — the one that renews the season ticket while complaining about the Glazers, watches the World Cup knowing what Qatar was, buys the £200 replica shirt at three in the morning in Kuala Lumpur — is not a passive victim of forces beyond its control. The attendance figures, the broadcast numbers, the shirt sales: these are not incidental to the machine’s functioning. They are what the machine runs on. The fan is not just the consumer of the spectacle. The fan is the spectacle’s condition of possibility.
There is another way to watch football.
Not your Premier League club. Your local team. The one three miles away in the division you have never followed because it felt like settling for less. AFC Wimbledon, rebuilt from scratch by supporters after the original club was moved to Milton Keynes against their will. FC United of Manchester, founded in 2005 by supporters who had had enough of the Glazers and built a fan-owned club from nothing. Exeter City, owned by a supporters trust. Lewes FC, the first club in the world to pay its men’s and women’s teams equally. Brentford before the hedge fund arrived — before success made the machine interested.
A brief note on Exeter City, since we have cited them as a model of fan ownership and community governance. All of the above is true. Exeter City is owned by a supporters trust, genuinely embedded in its community, a functioning example of what football clubs can be when the machine doesn’t get to them.
It is also the club that Uri Geller, the Israeli spoon-bender and self-described psychic, became co-chairman of in 2002 after placing energy-infused crystals behind the goals at St James Park to help them win a crucial match. They lost 5-1. Geller’s solution was to invite Michael Jackson — at the time the most famous person on earth — to Exeter on a fundraising visit, conveying him from London on a hired Royal Train. Jackson, who delivered a seven-minute speech to the Exeter faithful in which he said he knew nothing about sports but believed they were going to win and could see Israel, Spain and countries all over the world in the stadium, was made an honorary director. The club finished the season relegated out of the Football League for the first time in their history. Geller subsequently severed ties. Two of the club’s directors were later charged with fraudulent trading. The fans saved the club from extinction and rebuilt it as the supporter-owned institution it is today.
The point is not that fan ownership guarantees competence. It does not. The point is that when it goes wrong under fan ownership, the fans fix it themselves. Nobody extracts the value and leaves. Nobody loads the debt onto the institution and boards a flight to Florida. The crystals fail, the King of Pop goes home, and the supporters pick up the pieces because it is their club and there is nobody else.
That, in the end, is the difference.
These clubs exist in the communities they claim to represent. The ground smells like a ground. The ticket costs less than a round of drinks. The drama is real because nothing is managed. The connection to place is not a brand attribute — it is the actual thing. The steward who shows you to your seat probably grew up in the same postcode as the club. The player on the pitch might do the same job as you next season if the contract isn’t renewed.
The objection writes itself: but I want to watch the best football. I want the Champions League. I want to know whether England can do it this time. And this is true, and human, and the machine has spent thirty years making it feel like the only acceptable answer. The craving for glory, for the marquee fixture, for the winner’s medal — these are not purely natural instincts. They are substantially cultivated ones. The machine cultivated them because they are the machine’s fuel. The fan who asks why the local game isn’t enough has been given the answer by the same people who benefit from the question.
Some will object that this is a false binary — that they already watch their local club, coach kids on Saturday mornings, care about the grassroots game. This is true and admirable and entirely compatible with the argument. The question is not whether you attend Lewes or Exeter City or AFC Wimbledon. The question is where the real emotion lives. The near miss in the quarter final. The title race going to the last day. The moment that keeps you up at night. For most fans who also love the local game, that moment belongs to the big club. The machine does not need your exclusive loyalty. It only needs to remain the primary source of the feeling that matters most. The grassroots game gets your Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon gets your money. The machine gets your soul.
The minimum wage steward in the £800 million stadium does not watch his local team either. He can’t afford the ticket.
There are no clean conclusions here. The machine keeps running because the need is real and the alternative requires effort and the effort feels like loss. The fan knows this. The machine knows the fan knows this. The governance structures that permitted the machine were built by people who understood that the fan’s love for the game was the one thing that would never be withdrawn regardless of what was done with it.
That is the answer to the question this piece began with.
You put up with it because you love it.
The question is whether the love you feel for it is being used to prevent you from demanding that it be governed in your interest rather than against it.
The machine keeps running because you keep feeding it.
The World Cup starts on the 11th of June.
You will watch.
At Home He Feels Like A Tourist 
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