Deals such as the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United should be subject to the scrutiny of an independent regulator
It was perhaps the writer and journalist Arthur Hopcraft who got closest to the heart of the visceral appeal of our national game. In The Football Man, published two years after England won the World Cup in 1966, Hopcraft wrote: “What happens on the football field matters, not in the way that food matters but as poetry matters to some people and alcohol to others: it engages the personality.”
Last May, the billionaire owners and hedge fund opportunists behind the ill-fated European Super League (ESL) project found this out for themselves. The six most powerful clubs in the Premier League, shamelessly intent on defecting to a global sporting cartel, ignited a fans’ revolt of passionate intensity. Boris Johnson, not a football follower but a politician who knows how to read the signs of the times, found the right register of response: “These clubs, these names,” he said, “originate from famous towns and cities in our country.” They should not be “dislocated” from these places “without any reference to fans and to those who have loved them all their lives”. The Premier League took its place alongside Mr Johnson as a champion for careful stewardship of the people’s game.
