I can go with that, but even so if Abramavich had not wanted to buy a prem club then the likelihood is he wouldn't have bought one, so he's still a bit to blame
If there was no Sky, there would be no Abramovich/Sheikh Mansour. Abramovich and Mansour are the effect, Sky are the cause.
Sky didn't make them want a football club. Sky just facilitated them being able to get one. There are many, many Abramovich-like people in the world who do not own a prem club
I'm of the opinion that Abramovich wanted to associated with a legit, high profile asset to stop The Kremlin coming after him. I do believe he grew to love the club but what better way to do this than buy a Premier League club? There's no way Abramovich would have come to England when it was in the old format. There's no attraction for foreign businessmen buying clubs that charge £5 a ticket, aren't global enterprises & play an unattractive style of football. Pre-Premier League there was only a select few players you would pay to watch.
In my opinion Sky has to take a lot of the blame for making football a business and not a sport. They pumped money in to the PL and created an unequal playing field. It was either arsenal or man u that could win the title with Liverpool challenging. Leeds threw bundles of money at trying to achieve success and look where it got them. To blame the Russian or the sheik is unfair, they done what walker did for blackburn & risdale for Leeds but they had the funds to back it up. At least it gave other clubs a chance. Going to football now is very expensive and compared to other sports is not good value for money An example of this: My season ticket at Spurs cost me £865 for 21 games. My membership for middlesex CCC cost £168 for 42 days of cricket.
Excellent post Leeds went bust trying to play catch up and Chelsea almost followed. Portsmouth weren't as lucky as we were though.
I believe it has been about the money for a long time, in the US since the founding of the National Association in 1871. The difference is that it used to be about far less money, and no one thought it was very important compared to the game itself--except for everyone who had anything to do with playing the game itself. The idea that because people in the beginning played for far less money makes them no nobler in my mind. It makes them less successful business people. Amateurs are different in type from professionals. Low-earning professionals are not. Scratch the surface of late nineteenth century professional sports and you find many if not most of the problems we find disillusioning today, including salary negotiations and stealing players. My home baseball team was called the Pirates because they were the Real Madrid of their day, waving money at other teams' players and pirating them away. So I don't grant there ever was a golden past, and am less apalled by what I admit is the disgusting present. While I prefer in theory the NFL, with its many ways of keeping the playing field remarkably even, in fact I'm following the Prem with much more interest, in spite--or is it because of?--its much greater degree of tooth-and-claw capitalism.
There's definitely something compelling in how football mixes the most elevated kind of sport, which is itself a kind of fantasy world, with very harsh economic reality.
