How we can reclaim football from the corporations and oligarchs who have stolen it | OneFootball

Unless you’re an extremist who delights in greed, exploitation and an amoral landscape, I think the majority of us know there’s something deeply wrong, exploitative and both financially and morally unfair about modern football. But most of us, in the face of a pernicious, outright lying right wing press and the seemingly unassailable economics involved, just don’t know what to do about it. Easier just to shrug and mark it down as another victory for the c***s in the ongoing war between good and evil.

But a different, better way is attainable for football and this radical book, Football: The People’s Shame. How To Revolutionise A Sport by Micky P. Kerr, says how we got here, who’s to blame, what the revolution wants to achieve and how to make it happen.

I doubt anyone would disagree with the principles and aims of this proposal. Because it doesn’t have to be like this, even if you think it does. No stone is unturned here. It isn’t just a pipe dream. You don’t need to be a revolutionary to be part of this social revolution where the sport is an asset to each individual and society as a whole, not a shallow, plastic money trench to be used to enrich an elite and exercise soft power over the pliant.

Whereas I relied on experience, anecdotes and polemic when writing the best-selling, Sports Book Of The Year-nominated ‘Can We Have Our Football Back?’, this guy actually does the hard yards and breaks down the economics, the hows and whys of his reimagined game, shorn of everything that tries to turn us into customers attending a leisure facility. Creating civic institutions owned by and for the people it serves, he highlights how easy it would be if we can rid ourselves of the Thatcherite free market principles that hardened into an orthodoxy, then became established as the only possible reality.

Of course, if a more financially, sane, democratic game with its roots embedded in the local community sounds like Communism to you, this book will not grow on your barren intellectual, moral and cultural wasteland. But if you pine for a more communitarian game which is owned by the people who love it, has the interests of the community at its heart and doesn’t seek to squeeze every drop of blood out of our already desiccated bodies, this book will prove to you how it could be achieved if the fans, administration and government rise to the challenge of creating a more inclusive game and remove it from the blood-smeared hands of corrupt organisations, multi-national corporations, vicious, murderous nation states and the balance sheets of the profit hungry.

If it has a message, it is ‘don’t lie down as they create a status quo which doesn’t benefit us or society in any way’. A better, more fair, less greedy sport is within our grasp – let’s take it.