RED REBELS: The Glazers and the FC Revolution by JOHN-PAUL O'NEILL

RED REBELS: The Glazers and the FC Revolution

John-Paul O’Neill
Yellow Jersey Press/Vintage, 2017, 270 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Sir Alex Ferguson was deeply affronted by the Manchester United Football Club supporters who got stroppy about the proposed takeover of the club by the US corporate raider, Malcolm Glazer, in 2004 - ‘they carried on to the degree where they actually thought they should have a say in the running of the football club’, exclaimed the outraged coach.

Ferguson had, however, gotten to the core of things by starkly asking just whose club it is.  Did it belong to moneyed managers like Ferguson?  To capitalist owners like Glazer or his profiteering predecessors (ever since 1902 when local brewers bought out and renamed the distinctly proletarian but near-bankrupt railwaymen’s team of Newton Heath as a vehicle to sell beer)?  To the foreign mercenaries (the players) who, without a drop of Mancunian blood in them, simply follow the transfer money?  Or, as John-Paul O’Neill, former passionate MU supporter and author of Red Rebels, believes, the fans who give their club its true local heart?

O’Neill saw MU as a football club not a business, a community not a commercial brand – unlike the view of the corporate pirate, Glazer, who eyed off MU for pecuniary reasons and bought a majority shareholding in the world’s richest club through a massive, debt-fuelled loan which was to be repaid by more profit-chasing corporate boxes, expensive seated areas, higher ticket prices and in-your-face sponsorship.

Whilst hoovering millions of pounds out of the club to keep its new owner in dividend heaven, and to keep pace with large interest repayments, Glazer has made the club itself the ultimate collateral against the loans, threatening the 126 year old institution with death from crippling debt should interest rates rise.

Fan resistance to the Glazer takeover looked doomed, however.  Glazer’s grip on MU was not to be prised loose by protests, pitch invasions, match disruption by tossing beach balls onto the field, boycotts of MU’s corporate sponsors, pulling the plug (literally) on TV coverage to sabotage the broadcasting revenue stream, the wearing of mourning black instead of MU’s trademark red, or a quixotic Shareholders’ United plan to buy back ownership (Glazer’s controlling stake was bought for £780 million, while most of MU’s 30,000 ordinary members owned a fiver’s worth of shares each).

O’Neill, editor of Red Issue, the independent fanzine famed for its caustic but literate criticism of the MU elite, floated one last ditch option – because Glazer’s financiers were banking on MU fans’ continued loyalty, why not seriously dent MU’s fan and revenue base by setting up, from scratch, an alternative Manchester team, one based on community ownership and control, one that would be obedient to democracy not the Dollar.

Thus was Football Club United of Manchester (FCUM) born as a protest tactic to pressure MU to abandon Glazer and return the club to its supporters.  O’Neill took his cue from rank and file AFC Wimbledon fans who had set up a supporter-owned replacement club when theirs was torn up by its London roots and transplanted north to become Milton Keynes Dons.

To work as an effective protest, FCUM would have to be viable but, only seven weeks out from the start of the 2005-06 season, the rebel movement had no club, no structure, no money, no ground, no coach, no players.  They also faced opposition from the doom-merchants and naysayers, the nervous nellies and cynics, the big talkers and empty promisers, hostile journalists (‘does anyone seriously believe people will stop watching MU because of who’s running the club?’, snarked one), logistical setbacks, the fading fires of enthusiasm, MU’s former hooligans who got physical, and devoted MU fans who taunted FCUM followers with cries of ‘Judas’ and ‘traitor’.

Nevertheless, all obstacles were overcome as the audacious football revolutionaries won the commitment of thousands of MU fans on the basis of the club’s founding principle of democratic ownership and control - each paid-up member would be a co-owner;  election of the governing board and all major club policy decisions would be decided on a one-member-one-vote basis;  ticket prices would be affordable;  local youth development would be prioritised for the playing ranks;  the club would be a non-profit organisation that avoided “outright commercialism” (including on-shirt sponsorship); any profits would be re-invested in the club.

 

Neither would the football revolution stop outside the club premises.  FCUM was dubbed the ‘Red Rebels’ by the local press not just because they were rebelling against MU’s traditional jersey colour but also because the club’s founders envisaged a club with a left-leaning “social conscience“.  Players and management, for example, banned interviews with the BBC in solidarity with the Beeb’s striking journalists.

 

The FCUM revolution, however, went a bit Animal Farm after its heady early days as the club’s philosophy was betrayed by a bureaucratic clique which developed around chief executive Andy Walsh, who appointed his former comrades from ‘Militant Tendency’ (the highly sectarian Trotskyoid entryists who had tried to take over the Labour Party from within during the 1980s) to “nice, cushy roles” and robust salaries within the administration whilst manoeuvring his allies onto the board.  The ‘Walshocracy’ recklessly pursued revenue and completely stuffed up the club’s finances with debt, ironically replicating the Glazer debt debacle at MU.

At times, O’Neill got a bit down in the dumps with a touch of the Orwells, wondering if it was worth keeping the FCUM dream alive, but, together with his “small band of idealists”, he mobilised members behind FCUM’s original banner of “protest and rebellion” and, defying Orwell’s anti-revolutionary defeatist pessimism, there was a second, successful, revolution with the undemocratic, nepotistic, dissent-crushing board of betrayers routed in 2016.

On the field, after starting football life in the very bottom tier of English football, nine whole Divisions below MU in the Premier League, FCUM had stunning early success, winning promotion season by season until their part-time players met stiffer competition further up football’s professional pyramid where mid-table mediocrity and relegation scares awaited them.  But they have survived.

So has MU, however, where Glazer appears to have been accepted.  A trophy cabinet of silverware has lulled fans into passivity on ownership issues whilst a monetary era of record low interest rates has kept, for now, a lid on the debt time-bomb of £400  million bequeathed by Glazer even as the American tycoon has shovelled out £1 billion in money-for-nothing dividends.

Not just in terms of footballing glamour, but on fundamentally political issues of democracy, ownership and control, the member-run, community team of FCUM and the make-a-buck commercial team of MU are truly in different leagues.   Although the book’s regurgative, blow-by-blow, email-by-email account of the internal FCUM power struggle could have done with some cruel-to-be-kind editing, O’Neill has, with Red Rebels, played a blinder.

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, DANIEL ELLSBERG

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

DANIEL ELLSBERG

Bloomsbury, 2017, 420 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

One of the first reactions of Daniel Ellsberg to his revelatory acquaintance with US nuclear war planning in the 1960s was for the private sector consultant to the White House and Department of Defence to decline to join the superannuation scheme of his company, the RAND corporation.  Ellsberg had gloomily concluded that he would not last the distance to collect on any retirement pension because he believed that US atomic war strategy made nuclear Armageddon more likely, and frighteningly near.

 

Ellsberg’s other response, however, was to redouble his vow to oppose nuclear weapons, initially as a civilian alarm-raiser within the US administration, then by leaking the government’s nuclear war secrets in what would have been a precursor to his historic exposé of the US war in Vietnam (the Pentagon Papers).

 

In The Doomsday Machine, Ellsberg writes that it was the stark projections of a nuclear war’s body count - “the extermination of over half a billion people” from blast, heat, fire and radioactive fallout, and then, globally, from the crop-failure and starvation resulting from the sun-smothering, stratospheric soot and smoke of a decades-long ‘nuclear winter’ - that flicked him from technocrat-with-a-conscience to law-defying activist.

 

After failed attempts to rouse Presidents and Defence Secretaries, it was with “a different level of civilian authority in mind” that Ellsberg took direct action.  When he photocopied the Top Secret Pentagon Papers held in his office safe, Ellsberg also Xeroxed its other contents – eight thousand highly classified documents on US nuclear war planning. 

 

As public release of the Vietnam secrets took real-time priority, Ellsberg stashed the nuclear war material in a garbage bag buried in his brother’s backyard compost heap.  Barely one step ahead of the FBI who came poking around after their suspected Vietnam leaker, he relocated the bag to the local rubbish tip where it met disaster from the rain and wind of tropical storm Doria in 1971.

 

Ellsberg’s document retrieval team desperately searched for the lost bag but did not find it before the contents of the trash site were used as landfill and concreted over for the construction of an apartment complex.  Now, however, digging through his memory and subsequent research, Ellsberg, for the first time, tells what he knew and the nuclear myths that continue to need busting.

 

‘Nuclear deterrence’ has kept the peace for seventy years?  Myth.  Only extraordinary good luck has kept the weapons, locked-and-loaded during geo-political crises and always at the launch mercy of “false alarms, accidents and unauthorised launches”, in their silos.  Deterrence, the alleged principle behind the balance of terror that has supposedly prevented nuclear war for seven decades, is “a deliberate deception”.

 

The ability to inflict retaliatory atomic carnage was never the defining, ‘defensive’ feature of nuclear weapons.  Their whole point is to be the nuclear muscle behind offensive military and political aggression.  The Bomb allows a nuclear-armed state, like a fist-happy footballer ‘getting in first with the retaliation’, to land the first blow.  Why allow an enemy the first shot, especially when even one thermo-nuclear H-bomb (a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima-type A-bomb, which itself packed half the total firepower of all the bombs used in the second world war) would result in the mass frying and irradiation of untold civilians.

 

US nuclear war strategy was, from the start, designed for ‘first-use’, to take out all the nuclear weapons of the then-Soviet and Chinese foes, either in a pre-emptive attack or in an escalation of a regional Cold War conflict.  The “planned slaughter” of billions of people is in-built into such a system.

 

Nuclear weapons have never been used since Hiroshima?  Not so.  Every single President from Truman to Trump has made direct threats, risky bluffs or entertained thoughts of raining atomic fire and fury on an adversary.  All have kept nuclear weapons’ use as an option ‘on the table’ to force a geo-political adversary to back down, exactly as a gun pointed at the head is used as a persuader.  Ellsberg cites two dozen post-war occasions of such ‘atomic diplomacy’ by Washington, from Korea to Cuba, from Berlin to Vietnam, from Iran to Pyongyang.  The use of nuclear weapons is ‘unthinkable’?  Think again.

 

But at least there is no such thing as an omnicidal Doomsday Machine which is only the stuff of fiction?  Untrue.  The US nuclear arsenal, says Ellsberg, is a ‘Doomsday Machine’ (Russia has its own equivalent, too), a system that is pre-programmed to ‘use them or lose them’, to fire all its missiles at once.

 

A RAND colleague had once described such a Doomsday plan as a parody of ‘mutually assured destruction’, the nuclear deterrence strategy at the time.  Stanley Kubrick, gave the concept a darkly satirical run in Dr. Strangelove, his 1964 movie in which a lunatic general, using his delegated authority, initiates a nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, triggering the Soviet’s Doomsday Machine to unleash all its H-bombs in response and wiping out all life on Earth in a giant nuclear conflagration.  When Ellsberg saw the film, he remarked ‘That was a documentary!’.

 

The bomb is safely under Presidential veto control?  An illusion.  On hair-trigger alert, the bombs await only a presidential order to launch, or the command of the President’s many authorised delegates (top military officers) or, “reverberating downward in a widening circle” of launch authority, their numerous subordinates (field commanders, ship captains, even individual bomber pilots), on their own, possibly ill-informed, initiative.

 

Vote Democrat in the hope that wiser heads and warmer hearts will prevail in the White House?  Delusory.  Barak Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presided, for eight years, over thousands of nuclear weapons and authorised $1 trillion to ‘modernise’ the US nuclear arsenal.  The ‘liberal icon’, Hillary Clinton, was as orthodox a nuclear hawk as one could fear to find.  The fiery ‘socialist’, Bernie Sanders, was a budget-conscious nuclear downsizer but no  abolitionist.  In these rancorous anti-Trump times, however, it has only been these Democrats’ nemesis, the bombastic Trump, who has worn any heat on the issue whilst the smooth Obama, the sensible Hillary and the radical Sanders were given a free pass.

 

As Ellsberg notes, it isn’t Trump who is mad but the nuclear weapons system itself.  Proliferation to rogue or unstable nations is less of a threat, says Ellsberg, than the existing nuclear weapons inventory of the nine nuclear-armed states, primarily the US and Russia, poised to launch at a moment’s notice - the bombs are a “catastrophe waiting to happen”.  Ellsberg finds that, with all its buttressing myths discarded, there is “a dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning”. 

 

Ever since Hiroshima, which had appalled the young Ellsberg, he had abhorred nuclear weapons, even when he was swept up in a lot of anti-communist Cold War malarkey about fictional missile gaps and “cold-blooded Bolshevik leaders”, even when he served as a Commie-fighting officer in the US Marines, even when he was a leading Harvard scholar of deterrence theory as a ‘necessary evil’.

 

And even when Ellsberg, in the economics (not nuclear) arm of RAND, had to pitch in with RAND’s “military intellectuals” on immediate, and inevitably nuclear, Cold War crises, he tried, fruitlessly, to tame the bomb.  He drafted guidance for the Pentagon recommending alternatives to the Doomsday plan, including ‘limited’ nuclear war by attacking ‘just’ Russia and ‘sparing’ China, or attacking ‘just’ military, not civilian, targets.  It wasn’t much of an improvement, he now concedes, but “you should have seen the plan it was replacing!”.

 

Ellsberg learnt that all the original nuclear war principles and the Cold War fictions the US government and military lived by were political theatre and lies.  Such fundamental dishonesty and policy gibberish are still current - “the basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago,” concludes Ellsberg.

 

Ellsberg laments that public discussion of US nuclear war strategy is taboo but, despite the sometimes hard going technical matter and his frequently bewildering wanderings through the bureaucratic maze, Ellsberg’s book, and his courageous example of truth-telling, can only help to transgress the politically-induced complacency and acquiescence that surrounds nuclear weapons and their threat of planetary ruin.  Ban the Bomb!

GRAPPLING WITH THE BOMB by NIC MACLELLAN

GRAPPLING WITH THE BOMB: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests

NIC MACLELLAN

Australian National University Press, 2017, 383 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Nobody better reflects the military and political elites’ cavalier attitude to nuclear weapons than the architect of Britain’s hydrogen bomb program, Sir William Penney, who, in meetings in 1961 between US Democrat President, John F. Kennedy, and UK Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, casually answered a question on how destructive the new weapons were by saying that ‘it would take twelve to destroy Australia, Britain five or six, say seven or eight, and I’ll have another gin and tonic, if you would be so kind’.

 

This casual indifference of Britain’s real-life Dr. Strangeloves to their grim new military power seeped out of the cosy gentlemen’s club they inhabited to inflict an all-too-real toll on the victims of ‘Operation Grapple’, the nine atmospheric H-bomb tests conducted in 1957 and 1958 in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony (now part of the independent nation of Kiribati) in the Pacific Ocean, as Nic Maclellan documents in his diligently-detailed yet anecdote-enhanced history, published on the 60^th anniversary of the tests.

 

In the vast seas, safely far from London, any human inventory were considered unworthy of more than cursory consideration, particularly the thousands of indigenous Gilbertese islanders, ‘primitive peoples’ (in the language of British authorities) for whom radioactive fallout protection levels were set at more lax standards than for the ‘civilised’ military and civilian personnel who staffed the test sites.

 

Britain (and France and the US) did not need to seek, barter or bribe permission to irradiate their out-of-sight/out-of-mind backyard, says Maclellan, a veteran activist for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific, “only because they were colonial powers in the region” and could do as they liked with their colonial possessions - “in the 1950s, there were no independent and sovereign island nations in the South Pacific”.  None.

 

Panicked by a mooted UN ban on atmospheric H-bomb tests (a temporary moratorium was decreed in 1958 and made permanent in 1963), Whitehall raced to join the US, Soviet and French H-bomb powers, throwing time, caution and safety to the strontium-laden wind.  One aspect of the British tests, however, remained indispensable – keeping it from the public.

 

A “culture of secrecy” pervaded the program, from Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s decision in 1954 to go thermo-nuclear to the ensuing decades of soothing, official reassurances that the testing posed ‘negligible’ health hazards.  Just to be sure, however, that such claims would not be exposed through challenges in a court of law, the UK temporarily withdrew from the UN’s International Court of Justice jurisdiction over nuclear weapons tests in 1955 (a tactic London reprised in 2017 over the pace and scale of implementing UN resolutions on general nuclear disarmament).

 

The involvement of Britain’s regional Commonwealth allies in its H-bomb testing program was also designed to avoid alarming the public.  Australia had been ruled out as a possible H-bomb test site because of “the Australian Government’s need to mollify public opinion over radioactive fallout” which had been animated by Australia’s hosting of Britain’s earlier tests of its (much less powerful but still filthily potent) A-bombs but the ever-loyal, Cold War Menzies Liberal government provided the uranium.

 

Reflecting troubling public concern, the equally loyal New Zealand Nationals government posed the usually unspoken question between political friends by writing to London that ‘why, if there is no danger from these tests, do the British and Americans not hold them near to home?’, regrettably demurring about proposals to use New Zealand’s islands for the tests (which would be a ‘political H-Bomb’) but provided extensive but less visible logistical support, on the quiet, for the testing program.

 

Whilst the British authorities celebrated the H-bombs’ new megaton yields, the human casualties had less reason to smile.  Military personnel and civilians copped the radioactive fallout, some, in what a confidential Army memo admitted, as deliberate human guinea pigs with the aim of discovering the effect of the explosions on ‘equipment, stores and men, with and without various types of protection’.  To add chemical insult to radioactive injury, Fijian troops had their fly-ridden, military camps doused with regular doses of the toxic insecticide, DDT.

 

The health legacy from the nuclear tests endures through radiation-damaged genes passing on diseases and birth defects to the children and grandchildren of the Commonwealth military veterans and the islanders.  Yet, the British government continues to deny adequate financial compensation to the victims by stubbornly contesting the health effects of radiation.

 

Denied, too, is the “moral culpability of the state” for the damage it inflicted.  A 2004 class action by 1,011 UK, NZ and Fijian veterans ground to an exhausted halt in a decade-long tangle of technical and legal mud, sparing Britain’s Ministry of Defence any payouts.  As a sop in 2015, the Tory government included the British nuclear veterans in a £25 million government charity fund but this covers all UK military veterans, not just the A and H-bomb veterans (with diddley-squat for the indigenous Kiribati citizens).  The fund is also constructed in a way that absolves the government from any future legal liability for compensation.  There has been no admission of guilt.

 

The nuclear establishment at its dangerous and devious worst is well displayed through Britain’s H-bomb tests, where the initial crime is followed by bureaucratic chloroforming of public enquiry, a defensive war of legalistic attrition and the political distortion of independent medical findings.  First comes the damage, then the denial.  The power, and the danger, of the atom is easily matched by the power, and danger, of its political masters.

PLOTS AGAINST HITLER by DANNY ORBACH

THE PLOTS AGAINST HITLER

DANNY ORBACH

Head of Zeus, 2017, 406 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Nazi Germany is a test case in historical counterfactuals.  If the assassination-plotters and coup-conspirators in the German military had succeeded in their many attempts from 1938 to 1944 to remove Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, then entirely different options to years of mass military deaths, civilian slaughter and horrendous concentration camps would have come into play.

 

The German military Resistance almost pulled it off but were dogged by continual bad luck, including faulty bomb technology, last-minute changes to Hitler’s schedule, and a mounting frustration which frayed the discipline necessary to the resistance network’s clandestinity.  Nevertheless, they came agonisingly close to saving the lives of millions.

 

Yet, as Danny Orbach (University of Jerusalem historian) discusses in The Plots Against Hitler, the military resisters’ entitlement to moral approbation has been challenged by revisionist historians.  These critics rightly point out that the German military rebels were, with few exceptions, conservative authoritarians.  Some had cooperated for many years with the Nazi regime.  Some had been mass murderers and war criminals responsible for directing the slaughter of Russians, Poles and Jews.  Some were anti-Semites who supported ‘legal and non-violent’ discrimination against Jews in Germany or their expulsion to a Jewish ‘homeland’.

 

It is a lengthy charge sheet, from which the critics conclude that, had the military Resistance toppled Hitler, although Europe may have been spared the vicious worst of Nazism, little would have fundamentally changed in fascist vision and practice in Europe.

 

Orbach is dissatisfied with both the romanticisation of the military Resistance as moral heroes of the anti-Nazi struggle and with the heated indictment against them as insufficiently anti-Nazi.

 

One of the loyalties of the German military officer caste was to their political leaders.  This included the Nazi regime but, for some officers, these early bonds began to weaken because of their professional disagreements with Hitler’s security bodies (the SS and the Gestapo), personal grievances and career marginalisation, or strategic policy differences over the scope and timing, but not the aims, of a war drive for territorial expansion which they supported in principle.

 

There was usually a major trigger which turned growing dissent into a dramatic break with the regime.  This could be one violent Nazi outrage too many such as anti-Jewish pogroms or the persecution of non-conformist clergy (all the conspirators held deeply religious beliefs) in Germany, or SS atrocities against Jews, civilians and Russian POWs on the eastern front (which the resisters-in-waiting saw as bringing dishonour on the Wehrmacht).

 

For example, the best known of the military rebels, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic officer and Nazi loyalist who organised Operation Valkyrie, the resisters’ final, and fateful, assassination and coup attempt, had his Damascene anti-Nazi conversion in response to the SS mobile death squads (Einsatzgruppen) which slaughtered eastern front civilian Jews wholesale.

 

The resisters might have at one stage agreed with many Nazi principles but their opposition to their violent implementation eventually revealed the inseparability of the conception and execution of Nazi philosophy, and a network of military dissidents cohered around their opposition to Hitler’s war crimes and military follies. 

 

The resisters came from the top levels of the army (including Generals), military intelligence, even the Gestapo itself.  These closet anti-Nazis led a nerve-wracking double life inside Hitler’s war machine, plotting to arrest or kill Hitler and his top political lieutenants.  Some were able to save prominent individual Jews from the Holocaust.

 

Their civilian wing came from the domestic civil service bureaucracy and the foreign ministry, whilst they also reached out to a broader popular support base for post-coup legitimacy.  They planned a Nazi-free Germany in concert with the centre-left politicians and trade union leaders of the SDP, who they slated for top posts in a post-coup government installed by the military.  Despite the resisters, in nearly all cases, being strongly anti-communist, they even made overtures to the political and paramilitary underground of what was left of the German Communist Party.

 

The failure of Stauffenberg’s Operation Valkyrie resulted in the crushing of the military resistance.   Almost every member was arrested, tortured and executed (unless they beat the Gestapo to it through suicide).  The most prominent leaders were hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks to maximise their humiliation and degradation.

 

The resisters paid with their lives in an attempt to save millions of others.  This, says Orbach, qualifies them as heroes.  Their anti-Nazi moral integrity, however, is heavy with enough caveats to not rule out that, had they succeeded, they may have had recidivist relapses into quasi-authoritarian rule-by-elites with overtones of a Nazism they had been supportive of in their early careers.   Their self-sacrificing, and profoundly tragic, fate, however, indicates that an anti-Nazi moral redemption is at least as likely a legacy for those German military rebels who took up arms against Hitler.

THE BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-Rich Owners, JAMES MONTAGUE

THE BILLIONAIRES’ CLUB: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-Rich Owners

JAMES MONTAGUE

Bloomsbury, 2017, 330 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

At this stage of the 2017 English Premier League (EPL) season, it looks like either of the two Manchester teams to win the championship - and with barely a Mancunian between them.  Both Man United and Man City have overseas owners, overseas managers and overseas-dominated player lists.  The same foreign flavour emanates from most of the clubs in the elite competition – whilst only thirteen imports in the whole of the competition took to the field on day one of the season just 25 years ago, now 67% of players (and 69% of managers) are from overseas.

What the EPL clubs also share, not coincidentally, is wealth, loads of it – billionaires own the clubs, millionaires coach them and highly-paid players pull on the jersey.  What, asks the British journalist, James Montague, in The Billionaires’ Club: The Unstoppable Rise of Football’s Super-Rich Owners, has happened to this quintessentially English working class game of yore?

Big Global Money, that’s what.  Rampant capitalist globalisation has opened up an international footballing meat market, turning the people’s game into a plaything of international profiteers.

The pivotal year was 2003, when Chelsea, whose EPL existence was threatened by a large debt burden, was purchased by the Russian billionaire, Roman Abramovich.  This shady businessman had graduated from minor ventures like rubber duck salesman (under Soviet President Gorbachev’s free market reforms) to staggering wealth from the liquidation sale of state assets at massively discounted prices to the most corrupt, greedy and politically-connected new money kings of post-Soviet Russia.  Abramovich had scored a spectacular goal in picking up one of Russia’s largest oil companies for just 2% of its true, three billion dollar, value and he used this windfall to finance his Chelsea vanity project.

Abramovich has since splurged north of £2 billion on top quality international players, and the silverware has duly followed.  Other EPL clubs have had to join the new financial arms race or die i.e. face relegation and the loss of their coveted slice of the EPL’s billion-pound broadcasting deals.

No longer can talented local lads take to a pitch which is now reserved for players with wage packets of up to £200,000 a game in a ridiculously overpriced global player transfer market.  No longer can ownership rest with the “local businessman made good” (Man U was once owned by a local butcher) or even with millionaires; only the super-rich can now cut it – billionaires have bought outright, or own controlling shares in, fifteen of the twenty EPL teams.

The ethical price ticket of this money invasion is steep.  Abramovich, for example, is from a long line of Kremlin-favoured business cronies with financially hazy pasts.  Other fiscal felons from the global kleptocracy have embraced the world’s most popular sport for the sparkling distraction it provides from the financial and humanitarian crimes of the game’s new owners.

The former Thai Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, for example, bought a majority stake, illegally using state funds, in Man City in 2007 to perfume his shonky human rights and corruption record.  When a military coup ousted him from office and froze his liquid assets the following year, Shinawatra was forced to sell his footballing holdings but the ethical fog did not lift, however, as Man City’s new buyer was Sheik Mansour al Nahyan of the autocratic monarchy which rules Abu Dhabi, the biggest emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (which also owns Melbourne City in Australia’s A-League).

The UAE’s grotesque wealth rests on massive oil deposits, a brutal state security apparatus, the outlawing of strikes and severe exploitation of the Asian migrant workers who build the leisured elite’s air-conditioned skyscrapers, malls and airports in 50 degree heat.  In 2004 alone, the embassies of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh sent 880 of their construction worker citizens back home in body bags.  The price of a prestige English football club is a small overhead willingly incurred by the UAE business-royals to help cover up their failings in labour relations and democracy.

Qatar’s Middle East despots, too, are anti-democrats and migrant-abusers who know the image-cleansing and profit-protecting value of sport, including their (corrupt) purchase of the 2022 World Cup hosting rights, their sponsorship of some of the biggest clubs and competitions in Europe, the naming rights of Arsenal’s new stadium, and the acquisition of French power club, Paris-St Germain, an “asset just like any other” on the state-run Qatari Investment Authority’s books (alongside Sainsbury’s, Harrods, Barclays Bank, Volkswagen, Porsche and Miramax).  Qatar Airways, the state airline which bans unions and sacks women cabin crew on pregnancy, is prominent in the fiefdom’s football outreach.

In the US, of course, the profit motive (well-honed in their domestic basketball, gridiron and baseball competitions) is central - the American owner of Man United (the property magnate, Malcolm Glazer) sees football as a pure “entertainment product” for commercial exploitation through advertising, television broadcast subscriptions, ticket prices and merchandising.

The fabulously wealthy elite of China, on the other hand, has to mix profit with politics (party approval at home and ‘soft power’ abroad) through its football investments.  A Chinese lighting manufacturer (which also owns the Newcastle Jets in Australia), for example, signed a sponsorship deal with Portugal’s’ second division which required the top ten clubs to include at least one Chinese player.  Meanwhile, to the background of the English and Chinese political leaders’ mutual celebration of Sino-Anglo trade and investment ties, a Chinese media mogul’s wise acquisition of a stake in Man City and a seat on its board paid promotional political dividends in China by procuring one of the rare slots (there are only 36 of them) in the English Football Association’s Hall of Fame for Man City’s Sun Jihai, a name not quite on par with fellow famers like George Best, Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton.

It is not just the foreign rich who have compromised ethics.  The British billionaire owner of Newcastle United, for example, is a sportswear retailer whose mega-wealth rests partly on a workforce exploited through zero-hours labour contracts and sub-minimum wages.  A British steel mogul is an industrial-scale tax evader whose state-supplemented player shopping spree included the goal-scoring metronome, Alan Shearer, to take the unlikely Blackburn Rovers to league championship glory in 1995.

The money culture of football matters in many detrimental ways.  Apart from the moral stain of an ownership wealth tainted by thievery and exploitation, the hegemony of money corrupts fairness through the ‘financial doping’ of teams to win titles and it concentrates success amongst the few, predictable, glamour teams.

Serious lucre also tampers with cherished football traditions, whether that be though altering traditional strips, colours and logos, or covert plans for a breakaway European-wide competition restricted to a qualification-exempt and relegation-proof elite of ‘legacy’ clubs, a mooted competition that avoids the risks to their rich owner’s investments from missing out on the existing pan-European competition.

Although Montague doesn’t address the deeper issue with the capitalist commodification of football - players as production inputs, the sport a media product, all run for profit – most detrimental is the disenfranchisement of local players and fans from a community connection.  Cheering on the heft of the owner’s wallet and celebrating the international managers’ and players’ monetary valuations is hollow compared to barracking for a team that has an authentic grass-roots identity.

Montague takes some heart from supporter ownership of football clubs (AFC Wimbledon, Exeter City, Portsmouth) but this model is feasible only in the lower, cheaper Divisions, and even these people power football roots are fragile – Pompey’s rank-and-file (2,500 supporters with £1,000 shares each) yielded to the temptation for higher league honours and sold to a former Disney CEO.

In 21st century capitalism, football always seems to be an away game played on Big Money’s home turf.  Still, there’s always next week, or next season, and upsets against the odds do happen, not just in the weekend kickaround but in the war between the classes as well.  It’s all to play for.

THE LAST OF THE TSARS Robert Service

THE LAST OF THE TSARS: Nicholas 11 and the Russian Revolution

ROBERT SERVICE

Macmillan, 2017, 382 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

At Tsarskoe Selo, the Romanov monarchy’s palatial rural retreat where the former ‘Tsar of all Russia’, Nicholas 11, was detained after being forced to abdicate by the February 1917 revolution, the once all-powerful autocrat found much to get annoyed about.  In particular, Nicholas disliked the military bands which serenaded him with rousing renditions of the anthem of liberation, The Marseillaise, and, with black humour, Chopin’s Funeral March. 

In The Last of the Tsars, Oxford University history professor, Robert Service, recounts how the Tsar’s guards had lost all deference towards their former ruler, refusing to shake hands with someone who, during his reign, had refused to take theirs when they had beseeched the ‘Little Father’ for help when respectfully protesting their democratic and economic impoverishment only to find the reform-shy Nicholas ordering his troops to open fire on them.  Poor Nicholas, always hopelessly out of touch with the lives and the hopes of his subjects, found their handshake rebuff “bewildering and painful”. 

As the anti-Tsarist February revolution gave way to the socialist October revolution, Nicholas became increasingly aggrieved as the relative luxury and indulgence during his detention relocations to Siberia and finally to Ekaterinburg (the capital of the Urals region) was replaced by more austerity, including the removal of pudding from his three-course evening meal (at a time when the lack of sugar was the least of his fellow citizens’ material hardships). 

Citizen Romanov was also to be held accountable for his criminal past.  The Bolshevik-dominated Council of People’s Commissars (equivalent to our parliamentary Cabinet) resolved to bring Nicholas to trial in Moscow when the crises afflicting revolutionary Russia (blockade, invasion, civil war, famine) allowed.  Service, an inveterate anti-Bolshevik,  instinctively calls the proposed trial a “show trial”, conveniently reading back into the pre-Stalin era the judicial terror of late-1930s Stalinism. 

The trial option receded, however, as monarchist rescue plots were hatched in conjunction with counter-revolutionary ‘White’ armies which made sweeping territorial gains.  It was the swift advance of the ‘Czechoslovak Legion of ex-POWs’ into the Urals which sealed the Romanovs’ fate.  Unable to evacuate their prisoners from Ekaterinburg, the Urals Bolshevik leadership resolved to execute the Romanovs.  They sought Moscow’s sanction before carrying out the decision but it never came as time ran out.

This is where Service gets to his main, and usual, business – conducting his own show trial of socialist revolution and the Bolsheviks in general and Lenin in particular.  Despite his laborious investigations, however, Service finds no gun still smoking in Lenin’s hand.  Forced to concede that “no unequivocal sanction” to proceed with the execution was given by Lenin, that there is “still no verification” and that “documentation is slender about Lenin’s culpability”, Service is forced to resort to the generalisation of the “bloodthirsty tirades” of Lenin “creating and endorsing an environment of violence”, a “climate of opinion” which made murder a Bolshevik political principle as they delivered “catastrophe” and mass terror to Russia.  

Service allows no mitigating circumstances in his prosecution of the Bolsheviks.  He does not admit any military exigencies which confronted revolutionary Russia with the threat of violent extinction and forced extreme and peremptory measures in response.  Any context that might explain Lenin’s advocacy for harsh treatment of the revolution’s key enemies is disallowed, such as the Bolsheviks’ extraordinary early generosity to the counter-revolutionary Tsarist Generals which was ruthlessly returned with artillery, bullet, pogrom and mass executions. 

Another historical sleight-of-hand by Service is his focus on the Tsar’s captivity.  More as an ironic chuckle about the jailer becoming the jailed, Service briefly acknowledges (it gets one sentence in a 400-page book) that popular hostility to Nicholas existed because he had “despatched thousands of political prisoners” to forced labour, imprisonment, exile or execution. 

There is, however, no detail given to explain the Tsar’s nicknames of ‘Nicholas the Bloody’ or ‘Hangman Nicholas’, no political indictment of the rabid anti-Semite, anti-democrat and reactionary nationalist who had spilled the blood of millions of Russians in disastrous wars and who ran a police state relying on repression and censorship to keep order. 

There is no recognition by Service that, for the year and a half of the Tsar’s detention, all that stood between the deposed tyrant and a vengeful people was the top leadership of the ‘murderous’ Bolshevik Party.  Instead, the end-game takes centre stage starring an almost innocuous Nicholas as victim and the Bolsheviks as the perps. 

Nevertheless, Service still convicts Lenin, not Nicholas, of political immorality.  Although Service can’t quite pin the Tsar’s execution on the revolution’s top dog, it seems that anti-socialist fervour, including amongst establishment Oxford dons, will suffice to trump scholarly history.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF FIFA David Conn

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF FIFA
DAVID CONN
Yellow Jersey Press, 2017, 328 pages

Review by Phil Shannon 

In no breast did the prodigious financial corruption of world football’s administrative elite beat more vigorously than that of Chuck Blazer, the head of football in the north and central American and Caribbean regional body.  Chuck was not called ‘American soccer’s “Mr. Big”’ for nothing – his bottomless appetite for high-calorie nosh gave him a gargantuan girth, which was financially matched in size by his tax-sheltered bank accounts which bulged with millions of dollars received through fraud, embezzlement, bribes, perks, gifts and inducements, so much so that not only could he afford to rent an entire floor of luxury apartments in the prestigious Trump Tower in Manhattan but to preserve one of them solely for the use of his cats.

The cat angle is just one of the juicy tidbits from The Fall of the House of FIFA by Guardian sports journalist (and Manchester City fan), David Conn, to add to what is by now a widely-known story of how global football’s governing body, Fifa, has personally enriched its leading lights through bribes and material inducements to vote for Fifa’s top office-holders and World Cup venues, and kickbacks to award broadcast and sponsorship rights.
Fifa’s off-field corruption scandals have now been exposed to such an extent that criminal indictments, arrests or investigations have grown to take in 27 of Fifa’s most senior global administrators, whilst six other Fifa officials (including the Fifa boss of four decades, Sepp Blatter) have been sacked for ethics violations.
The FBI has declared Fifa to be a RICO, a ‘racketeering-influenced criminal organisation’, and, like another notorious RICO, the Mafia, the Fifa rot started at the top.  Blatter had, like a true Godfather, kept a ‘clean-hands’ image, turning a blind eye to the graft of his lieutenants in order to guarantee, at election time, his own prestigious position (he craved the title of ‘Mr. President’) through keeping the Fifa financial gravy train well-fuelled for its executive passengers.  Blatter was also able to eschew personal crude corruption, such as cash bribes in brown envelopes, because of the dizzying scale of the Fifa President’s multi-million dollar annual salary and bonuses, and four-yearly World Cup ‘performance pay’ reward.
The final act of Fifa’s unravelling was prompted by the credulity-stretching decision in 2010 to award the 2022 World Cup to the tiny desert state of Qatar to be held in the sweltering summer.  Russia, which won the 2018 World Cup hosting rights at the same time, thoughtfully decided to destroy all computers and other documentary traces that might contain evidence of massive corruption concerning their bid, too.
The ’reform’ broom of the new Fifa President, Gianni Infantino, looks to have many gaps, however.  He enjoys the perks of the job and its reduced but still generous remuneration, whilst he has compromised the independence of Fifa’s refurbished oversight committees.  When Infantino came under early suspicion for ethical misbehaviour as President, Fifa’s new ethics body cleared him, rather unsurprisingly for a committee whose members can be sacked by the very people they are investigating.
Unfortunately, Conn spends most of his book navigating the intricate maze of FIFA corruption, too rarely lifting his eyes to take in the bigger picture – how capitalist globalisation has infected the world game by monetising sport, making profit its main guiding principle and rewarding an unaccountable stratum of top administrators (and grossly overpaid elite players and coaches) whilst starving football’s mass grass roots.  The problem with Fifa, like that of capitalism, is the familiar one of too much money and not enough democracy.