Sweet Nothings

Football fans who tend to get their news nourishment from limp-wristed, knitted-sweater, bleeding heart leftie liberal outlets (or pretty much anything to the left of the Daily Stormer) will probably have noticed a consensus. Certain topics now appear in articles with increasing regularity, like a checklist of targets to hit: FFP or lack thereof, the super league fiasco, ticket/subscription/merchandise prices, all sorts of shady oligarchs, arms dealers and human rights abusers (some of them actual state actors) waltzing through the laughable fit-and-proper-person test, and so on. Many of these will seep into the pieces that are ostensibly about on-pitch happenings, and all of it nudges you towards one inescapable conclusion: Football is shit.  Perhaps the most hot-button topic of all, and one that adds a very modern moral quandary to the game, is sportswashing. The Saudi takeover of Newcastle has been a major catalyst, since it came hot on the heels of other naked sporting power pl...