See this is part of my realisation on football. We are praying for Saudis to invest, conveniently forgetting they DO have abhorrent human rights in the hope of seeing a Toon trophy. My personal realisation is that success shouldn't come at any cost - but the juxtaposition is that you can't have success without selling your soul to some appalling regime or another.
Even the money at Villa and Wolves is heavily caveated behind dodgy practices. Roman Abramovic has more than enough blood on his hands - look up early articles from Matthew Syed about it (he was banned from Sky because he spoke out about Roman's association to Putin - he was effectively a 'heavy' - and the land-theft that took place).
So is that what football has become? Bankroll or be steamrollered? All the while the gleeful smiles of Sky and BT tell us on-repeat and ad infinitum that it's the "best league in the world" and the football on show - purely from the big 4/6 - is astonishing/amazing/breathtaking. I don't get it - football for me was tribal and it used to be that it didn't matter what anyone else did. as it was ingrained to ****ing hate with a passion anybody better than you. Yet we're now all supposed to stand in mutual admiration of Man City spending billions, or Liverpool's £300m wage bill, as if they're somehow doing something incredible? I just don't ****ing get it. I hate Man City - a bland, soul-less club cheating and getting away with it (ergo further cheating). I hate Liverpool, smug and all this "years of hurt" ****, with a wage bill that would make the NHS blush. I hate Man Utd for all its arrogance and 'biggest club' garbage. I hate Chelsea for their oligarch bankrolling the club with blood money.
And so on to us. If we did get Saudi money and spent £250m on players, there'd be something unpleasant about it. Would be nice to see Allegri's Toon smash the **** out of Man City in the "Abu Derby", but it wouldn't fill me with the excitement I felt when Shearer signed, or when Cole/Beardsley terrorised teams, or when Sir Les was the number 9, and so on. Basically, this waffling post is just to say that football is a shell and the romance in it is dead. I've also realised that the final bit of romance, the FA Cup, was killed when the prize became Europa League - it now means too much to big clubs, with the gulf so vast nobody is going to ever cause an upset for the biggest 4-6 clubs ever again. So what's the point of any of it? You can't win trophies, you can't get to Europe. The prize is 17th, which is no prize at all. So whatever football has become, I've just outgrown it.
