It was bound to happen. Yes, the quality of play has raised dramatically since the early 1990s. Yes, yob football culture and the accompanying hooliganism have been nearly erased from the game in England. Yes, improved stadiums have (mostly) been receiving greater and more diverse supporters. And most significantly, yes, the profile of English club football around the world is now head and shoulders over its rivals La Liga and Serie A. However, only the most naive of football supporters would classify these advances as anything more than happy side-effects of the neo-liberal, money-mad and culture-cleansing ideology of the Premier League and the corporate-sponsored conglomerates masquerading as clubs that compete therein. As everyone knows, not all side-effects are pleasant. With steroids for example, increased muscle-mass comes with a shrunken Dick. In the PL's case, his name is Richard Scudamore.
Powerful leagues in North America, unsatisfied with total domination of viewership, television rights, and merchandise sales at home, have been seeking a breakthrough in Europe and Asia by proposing league games in foreign countries. The driving concept behind modern consumer capitalism is perpetual growth, which cannot be achieved if you are limited to only one or two national markets. Scudamore, for whom football is merely a vehicle for increased consumption and profit generation, by proposing international league fixtures is, like his North American counterparts, merely following the strict tenets of modern global capitalism. Recent populist griping from fans about the 39th game doesn't take into account that Scudamore, the Premier League and the PLC clubs are just cogs in the indifferent and all-encompassing machine that is the 'free' market.
The problem is not the growing ease with which foreign players move between leagues and countries. I've written on this site that the amazing internationalism of the Premier League is a good thing and I still believe it is. In some sense the top flight in Britain has always been this way, as the ''Scotch Professors" poached to play in English League One clubs at the turn of the last century illustrate. What isn't a good thing is to completely sever club football from its roots in local geography and culture. The popularity of football in Britain has always been linked to the ground itself rather than the carousel of players, managers and owners who make use of it. Football provides a gathering-place for a local community united in one cause, echoing the utopian ideal of sport. The more football becomes commodified, forced to conform to a a one-size-fits-all standard of production for easy universal consumption, made fit for television and now featured in travelling-circus league games detached from the regions that gave birth to the clubs and the grounds they play in, the less it captures the imaginations and hearts of those who live and breathe it.
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