According to the Guardian's Paul Kelso, Fifa's head honcho and all-round mad-as-a-box-of-frogs lunatic Sepp Blatter has - brace yourself against something steady, this will come as a shock - said something sensible. I know! Who could have foreseen it?
Taking a break from his busy schedule of offending people, eating big lunches and recommending women play football in sequinned gold lamé hotpants, Blatter has, astonishingly, taken a principled stand against the Premier League's grotesque plan to play a thirty-ninth league game overseas. The soulless, coin-eyed corporate whores of the English game - take a bow, Richard Scudamore, I'm talking about you - thought that what the world needed was Birmingham v Wigan in the Maracana, and good ol' Sepp has told them that this aggression will not stand, man. He has even threatened to derail England's surely-already-doomed 2018 World Cup bid (although really, they should just give it to us. Why not let English skinheads trash English town squares for once?). Give the man a medal, say I.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the plan was nothing more than a cynical, money-grabbing attempt to spin a few more meagre pennies from the vast, bloated cash cow that is English football. Actually, wait - sorry - let me rephrase that. I am suggesting that the plan was nothing more than a cynical, money-grabbing attempt to spin a few more meagre pennies from the vast, bloated cash cow that is English football. Yes, that's it.
Of course, it is possible that there is a genuine demand for Premier League-patented hoof-and-hope football the world over. In fact, it's more than possible - the global appetite for our overpaid, underskilled ball-chasers has, inexplicably, never been greater. But the mere fact that half a planet's worth of credulous halfwits would buy it is not a good enough reason to undermine the entire competitive nature of the League and a century of tradition; as if the game hasn't done its best to alienate itself from its working-class base already (£45 for a poky seat in the Shed End, anyone?), now they're recommending an away-day trip to Tokyo.
But this has already had so many ladles of boiling scorn poured over it by proper football journalists with opinions and things that it would be superfluous for a mere vitriol-spouting keyboard jockey like me to add too much on the subject. Instead I'm going to talk a bit about money in the game in general, the poisonous panacea of modern football.
I think it's safe to say that most of us get swept up in the glitz of Ford Super Sundays (the almost inevitable disappointment of the actual football aside); Sky Sports' slightly irksome WATCH THIS bar (so commanding, Mr Murdoch!) in the top corner doing its best to sex up Cambridge United vs Rushden and Diamonds sometimes suggests that they're over-reaching themselves in what they consider glamorous football, but the sheer unrelenting hype that surrounds the whole thing is quite exciting. Football is popular and football is sexy; going to a Premier League match makes even the most pinstriped of suits feel in touch with the common man, despite the fact that he's watching from a padded leather sofa in the corporate box, clutching a complimentary glass of Krug and possibly being fellated by a PR girl.
And because it's popular, it's profitable. That wasn't always the case; one thinks of chairmen like Jack Walker at Blackburn, pumping money into a leaking club for the sheer love of it. They no longer exist, alas - Middlesbrough's Steve Gibson is probably the nearest surviving example. Instead waves of Americans and Russians have come and bought anything with even a passing acquaintance with the Premier League, from mighty Man Utd to dismal Derby - and these are rich, powerful men, who became rich and powerful by spotting profitable enterprises, not by hunting ragged glory. I don't think I'm telling you anything you don't already know when I say that Randy Lerner (who presumably made his fortune starring in Confessions Of A Driving Instructor) did not grow up dreaming of the Holte End, Thaksin Shinawatra is unlikely to have had boyhood visions of scoring the winner in the Manchester derby, and - yes - Gillett and Hicks probably do not know the words to Fields of Anfield Road.
Now, I'm not a Communist (at least as far as MI5 is concerned - keep it to yourself, right?) and I don't resent people making money, and they are quite entitled to buy in to football clubs if that is what they think is the best thing to do with their cash. Nor do I think that football should be entirely kept separate from the turbulence of market forces. But if we care about the game at all, we should be very wary of a situation in which all the money floats to the top of the game while lower- and non-league clubs struggle to pay ground rent.
The philosopher Garrett Harding (every day's a school day round here, guys and gals - come for the humour, stay for the education) once described something called the "Tragedy of the Commons". He said that if you had an unregulated common resource, like a patch of municipal grazing land, it is everyone's best interest to take slightly more than their fare share, because they get all the extra benefit while the cost is spread between all the resource's users. Of course, if everyone does that, then the land gets over-grazed and eventually becomes useless, so no-one can use it.
There is a danger that something similar is going to happen to English football. If we keep pumping our money into the top of the game, in multi-million-pound transfers and hundred-grand-a-week wages, in vast marketing campaigns and huge cathedrals of Mammon like the Emirates Stadium, while letting the common resource that is grassroots football fall fallow, there will come a time when the supply of young footballers will simply dry up. This might not, actually, sound all that scary to the top Premiership sides, taking as they do most of their best young players from Europe and Africa. But while the Adebayors and Ronaldos of the future will continue to arrive, the Dean Whiteheads, Garry Flitcrofts and the rest of the middle-ranking Premier League pros will become harder to find; and eventually it will have an effect even on the big boys, because while they can get the overseas stars, I would imagine that Spanish youngsters are as a rule more likely to go to the Spanish clubs, and if we don't have a seam of homegrown players to mine then our clubs will eventually fall behind their European rivals.
Of course there's also the issue of the effect it will have on our already-hapless national team, but I've made my feelings on those egomaniacal grotesques clear in an earlier column, so I pretty much couldn't care less. I do care, however, about the league, and if the only way to stop it falling into disrepair is to put up some financial firewalls, forcibly taking money from the top to feed the bottom, then so be it. It is interesting to note that American sport, for all its flaws, has a remarkably unAmerican socialist bent to it, with all TV money shared equally among the teams in a league - perhaps something similar might be useful in Britain.
Scudamore's fatuous thirty-ninth game idea is merely the inevitable consequence of football's slavering devotion to money; the logical conclusion of the Benny Hill-like chasing of the bottom line. But if we entirely ignore the conveyor-belt of youth and grassroots football, the irony may be that, when it does come about that Premier League teams are punting aimless balls forward in Johannesburg and Manila, the players who are doing the punting are in fact all local lads anyway. Coals to Newcastle United, if you like.
