LET THEM EAT CAKE pt.II
The Premier League: it’s the best league in the world! Except it’s not, is it. Let’s set aside any debate over how good the (shivers, spits, dry heaves) product is, which wouldn’t be much of an argument anyway, seeing Chelsea are walking one of the most boring title races in history yet can’t even cope with visits from Bradford City in the cup without touching ventilated climacool® cloth, or that the Scottish league, the Scottish league, is far less predictable right at this minute. No, The Fiver’s disdain is mainly reserved for the abject manner in which things are run off the pitch. What a miserable business it is.
Or, more to the point, what misers run the business. These people are far from financially inept: hats off to them for brokering a record £5,140,000,000 deal with Sky Television and the Post Office Telecommunications Channel for the rights to show more not-quite-as-good-as-the-third-division skill and sub-Caledonian drama until 2019! Well done, everyone! But oh, the humanity! When the chief executive of the Premier League, equality’s Richard Scudamore, was today asked whether the deal made him uncomfortable, given players are paid millions while 19 of the 20 clubs refuse to pay the UK Living Wage to the kind of folk who cook Richard’s dinner, serve Richard’s gin and tonic, sweep away Richard’s litter, and clean around the rim of the diamond-encrusted fittings in Richard’s executive bathroom, he replied with a haughty sniff: “No, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable.”
The Marie Antoinette of football administration explained his well-upholstered position with a brazen non-sequitur. “The reality is,”
he brayed, “just like in the film industry, in the pop industry, the talent, the absolute talent, gets paid a disproportionately high amount.” A valid viewpoint, even though nobody’s been asking for the tea lady to trouser the same salary as Ángel Di María, just that she gets an extra £1.35 an hour and can thus hopefully avoid a life of Just Scraping By. Scudamore then trotted out another tired old trope of lazy entitlement: “At the end of the day there’s a thing called the Living Wage but there’s also a Minimum Wage, and politicians do have the power to up that Minimum Wage. That’s entirely for the politicians to do, that’s not for us to do.”
Another valid viewpoint, albeit one from a man who hasn’t had to rummage around for coins to buy a loaf of bread a couple of days before pay-day any time recently. It’s also rather undermined by the fact that the one Premier League club to have happily agreed to meet the Living Wage is Chelsea. And they’re easy with coughing up the additional London weighting of £1.30 an hour to boot! When you’re outflanked on the left by renowned pinko liberal Roman Abramovich, as well as bolshie socialist Boris Johnson and communist institutions such as Barclays Bank and Nestlé, perhaps it’s time to have a little rethink about the way you view the world.
LIVE ON BIG WEBSITE TONIGHT
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“It is an amazing amount of money. In one way it is positive for the teams, but I think it is pretty negative for the future of international football for England” – Lord Sugar, there,
bemoaning the Sky/BT deal. That’s the same Lord Sugar who, in 1991, bought Spurs at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, to ensure Robert Maxwell, a confidant of free-to-air ITV, didn’t get his hands on the club. The same Lord Sugar who as the new Spurs chairman contacted Sky during the 1992 TV talks to inform them they’d been outbid by free-to-air ITV, and that they’d better get a revised bid in double-quick. And the same Lord Sugar who made a few pennies here and there by selling Amstrad dishes to Sky. Come on England! We’re all right behind ya!
PROBABLY THE LAST OF YOUR MUNDANE ENCOUNTERS WITH FAMOUS PEOPLE …
“When I first moved to New York some years ago I found myself working in a fancy designer clothing store. One day in walked leggy supermodel Linda Evangelista followed by a not-so-leggy Fabian Barthez. I didn’t let on that I knew he was a famous goalie until she threw something at him and he dropped it. ‘Manchester United,’ I said.‘I know!’ she said. ‘And he can’t even catch.’ To be fair they were both a bit merry” – D Lynch.
“As a wee seven-year-old living in the shadows of Old Trafford, my dad had taken me fishing on the Bridgewater Canal. As usual, he was annoyed I was managing to fill the keep net at a considerably faster rate than he was, when the shout came to pull our equipment in due to an oncoming barge. This was nothing out of the ordinary, what with it being a busy waterway, but the individual and his menagerie of passengers was, given it was Eric Cantona and what I assumed was his family. I looked at him, he glared at me before I squeaked out an inaudible ‘hello’, to which Eric returned with a gruff ‘bonjour’. It’s certainly a better story than the time I neighboured Anderson in the urinals at a charity event at said stadium” – Scott Lloyd.
“In 1976 I was on my sandwich year, working in the reception of Novotel Marseille Aeroport. In those days it was still the law, usually ignored, for every guest to complete a little form on arrival and these were handed over to the police on an irregular basis. Imagine my joy when Alf Ramsey came through the door one day, surrounded by a lot of football players. I knew they were football players because one of them was Peter Osgood. Relying on their ignorance of common practice, I made every single one of them complete the form, then stole them to give to my brother. I have always assumed, because of the aforementioned Messrs Ramsey and Osgood – the only two I recognised – that this was the England team; but on doing my homework 38 and a half years later, I find they must have been the Southampton team, on their way to losing to Marseille in the second leg of their European Cup Winners’ Cup tie (Saints won 5-2 on aggregate and eventually lost to Anderlecht in the quarter-finals). I feel sure they were all very flattered to be mistaken for the England team, and I now understand why my brother, a lifelong West Ham supporter, wasn’t as impressed at my daring as I thought he should have been” – Phillipa Suarez.
FIVER LETTER
“In his data dossier delight (yesterday’s Fiver), Big Louis went a long way toward proving the revered tactician Sam van Allardijk wrong: Manchester United haven’t gone backwards under Van Gaal, they’ve just gone Sideways. Echoing
your newspaper’s assessment of the 2005 film, the United manager’s argument somehow feels ‘bathed in a solvent of exquisite sadness’” – Peter Oh.
JOIN GUARDIAN SOULMATES
Chances are that if you’re reading this tea-timely football email, you’re almost certainly single. But fear not – if you’d like to find companionship or love,
sign up here to view profiles of the kind of erudite, sociable and friendly folk who would never normally dream of going out with you. And don’t forget, it’s not the rejection that kills you, it’s the hope.
BITS AND BOBS
Around 2,000 people showed up at Manchester City’s football academy to watch
New York City FC’s first ever game against St Mirren on Tuesday evening. “It was a beautiful day for the club,” trousered David Villa after he David Villa-ed the first goal of a 2-0 win.
And Morocco’s FA has rejected “all sporting and financial sanctions” Caf has imposed on it for withdrawing as hosts for the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations. Caf banned Morocco from the next two tournaments, dished out a hefty £656,000 fine and ordered the north Africans to pay £5.9m in compensation last week.
STILL WANT MORE?
SIGN UP TO THE FIVER
Want your very own copy of our free tea-timely(ish) email sent direct to your inbox? Has your regular copy stopped arriving?
Click here to sign up.
THUNDERING, WEAPONS-GRADE IDIOCY WINS THE DAY AGAIN. WELL DONE! WELL DONE, INDEED!
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기