Over the past 5 years, the following have been established as (quote Rafa Benitez) "facts" (end quote):
1) 2015: There is corruption in football, all the way to the very top.
2) 2017: There are narratives at play in football, and officials are both aware of and sometimes actively contributing to them (Mark "look at me everybody" Clattenburg).
3) 2018: The standard of officiating has sunk so pitifully low that there was an overwhelming groundswell of support for the introduction of technology, otherwise known as VAR.
Taken on their own, the above 3 facts are relatively innocuous. You need a combination of the three to create an orchestrated effort almost impossible to trace and even more impossible to derail.
As I said in a post earlier this season: am I certain that there is bias in favour of certain teams? No. Would I be surprised to wake up tomorrow to headlines of 'FA Scandal!" plastered all over the back pages? Equally, no.
What worries me more than any of the above is a closer look at the money-driven links connecting multiple elements of the footballing world which don't necessarily make corruption inevitable but do make it far, far easier to direct and incentivise. In the early days of the TV mega-money era, we sat back and watched as one of the biggest providers of football coverage and news - Sky Sports - launched a gambling wing - Sky Bet - and then slowly as the years ticked by, interlinked the two. So much so that we are now at a ridiculous stage where you can open their website and one tab is reporting x looks likely to move to y, while the other tab is offering bets on x moving to y with odds clearly fixed according to the coverage offered in tab 1. Seems innocent enough but personally I have always found it disturbing to the point of being unethical. In securities fraud terms, it strikes me as a Pump & Dump scheme.
But lately even more disturbing developments have occurred - again, without a peep from Joe Public. I'm sure many of us enjoyed the excellent Amazon Prime coverage over Boxing Day. But isn't it a bit unsettling that the same company have started making documentaries about all and sundry? Is it really all that far fetched to envision a subtle yet intrusive directive from the very top to ensure x,y & z happen in a group of games in order to make 'great TV' from the documentary being filmed at the same time? And is it really all that far-fetched, as football becomes ever more Hollywoodised, to envision the retail giants interlinking its sports coverage department with its merchandise department? Much in the same way as Sky Sports 'uses' its own coverage to 'pump' select stories before 'dumping' the odds on its gambling clientele, could we one day see Amazon use its coverage to 'pump' a certain team's merchandise (also available on Prime, with same day delivery of course) before 'dumping' it on its retail clientele?
It may sound sinister, but there is no question that a great narrative makes great TV. Leicester winning the league, City winning the treble, Liverpool winning the league after 30 years...these are gripping stories. What Amazon are doing is taking niche TV and financing it to go mainstream, turning it into documentaries which (they hope) will compete with the best Netflix series out there. And once that goes mainstream, the capital potential in the game will increase exponentially, thereby also increasing exponentially the chance that someone, anyone at the the very top of the ivory tower will start orchestrating a linkage of the 3 ingredients above: exploiting the corrupt heart of football by driving the 'best TV' narratives and securing both via an unseen technological system answerable to no-one.
Rant over. Tin foil hat back in drawer.
