Comments on: Is Sepp Blatter a Marxist?

By: Chase

Chase — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:26:48 +0000

Liverpool’s first team after everton left anfield was a team full of scots. We brought in 13 scots for the starting 11.

By: Richard Whittall

Richard Whittall — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 21:49:41 +0000

Thanks all — yes, perhaps the greatest indicator the the love of money in football is ageless was the various ways owners and players managed to get around the ‘amateur’ only clauses in days of the Old Etonians, I think there’s something about that in Goldblatt’s book as well…

By: Ahmed Bilal

Ahmed Bilal — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 04:03:26 +0000

Nice article Richard, don’t think the genie (football as business) can be put back in the bottle so we’ll have to learn how to deal with the money in football. Personally I don’t have much hope for this generation, let alone the future.

By: Fredorrarci

Fredorrarci — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 02:56:59 +0000

Hoorah. A beacon of sense.

Way to cite history, re. the Scottish players. Wasn’t Preston’s 1880s side, the first great pro team, full of Scots?

What bothers me about the particular strand of decline-and-fallism that holds olde worlde players as unimpeachable paragons of virtue is the failure to acknowledge that the opportunity to display such “breach of loyalty” simply wasn’t open until recently (in England, at any rate): retain-and-transfer bound players as serfs, and even after Hill and the PFA’s ‘victory’, freedom of contract at the expiration of the deal didn’t come until Bosman. It’s easy to claim that loyalty was more common before, but how are we to know exactly how those players would have dealt with the current football economy?

By the way, thanks for luring me to this site, Richard (that’s in case you’re due a commission for it).

By: Andrei

Andrei — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:52:43 +0000

Nice, I usualy tend to agree with Marx and Engles, I do not think that their principles should apply to people earning 120,000 per week, since they are the bourgeouis, not the proletariat.