All the other countries have a soccer league, so why can’t Moneyland?
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A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
I’m a bit confused about why we still talk about soccer “clubs.” I know that Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, and the rest started out as actual clubs that anyone could join but – over the ensuing decades of increasingly rampant commercialization – they have strayed so far from the original model that still using the word “club” to describe them seems a little like going along with North Korea’s self-designation as a “democratic people’s republic.”
This is not to say of course that there aren’t such things as actual soccer clubs – I wrote about one, AFC Wimbledon, a few years ago and it remains an extremely admirable enterprise that deserves to have a film made about it (producers: I’m available) despite its decision to muscle out the local greyhound track – it’s just that once your team is owned by an oligarch, a sheikh, or rapacious venture capitalists, it is no longer a collective, and you are just a consumer of its product.