BOOK PREFACE - One Extinction At A Time

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PREFACE - ONE EXTINCTION AT A TIME


"Everything seeks its own death including power" - Jean Baudrillard


Football is fucked but its impending death could be a liberation.

The perfect storm of mafia control of much of the sport, systemic corruption, insider trading & matchfixing, doping, institutional & media capture and rogue club ownership founded upon a neo-proprietarian template is an unstable vessel in calmer times but, with the covid-19 pandemic and climate catastrophe, football sails in wild and choppy waters.

As the football agent and bookmaker-backed Project Restart desperately lobbies the UK government for special status for the Premier League, cartels are fragmenting, institutions are in conflict, monopolies are dividing, partnerships divorcing and loyalties splitting in a disaster capitalism free-for-all scrap for a slice of the future of football.

This temporary and chaotic new normal helps to expose the perfect crime rather than making it pay.

Football's disaster is free market capitalism's too.
British football has disintegrated during the coronavirus pandemic - there are no rules for a voided or cancelled Premier League season, player contracts don't mention pandemics, the calendar is too overloaded to allow completion of the current tournaments, while the broadcasters call the shots as the Premier League's bubble is totally dependent on the product being seen worldwide.
Football is demolished by covid-19.

Additionally, football has a massive carbon footprint - private jets, away fans, excessive global travel as executives, agents and mafia hopscotch around global hotels.

Professional football has existential problems.
Football has to change.

Football is equivalent to neo-proprietarian capitalism in the manner that it has responded to coronavirus.
The elite enacts a class war based on the already existing inequalities.
So, lower and lesser staff are furloughed while club owners grab government handouts; big business is rescued while small and medium enterprises fear drowning in a Darwinian struggle for survival due to lack of funding; top football clubs ride out the storm via their hotlines to power while lower level clubs are Bury-ed beneath the debris.

There is no prompt return to a new normal no matter how resolute the PR outpourings of Project Restart and their "making-it-up-as-you-go-along" excuse for strategy.

Football cannot convince society of any special status in troubled times.
Its only strength is its corruption.
Football is able to make demands of government due to the muscle afforded the sport based on the bizarre mathematics that determines that the losses to the Treasury due to the corruption in football is far exceeded by the array of revenues and incomes brought into UK PLC by those very same corruptions.

Football's revenue streams and networks are currently incapacitated to dangerous levels - coronavirus could mean the absence of fans from matches for up to two years according to the Robert Koch Institute.

Meanwhile, the gap between fan and club expands remorselessly.
Private equity operations are asset stripping your beautiful club, sovereign wealth funds are whitewashing the murder of a journalist via the purchase of your local team, bookmakers are buying your town.

Club versus agents, league versus clubs, cartels of clubs versus the rest of the league, broadcasters versus the Premier League, agents controlling media, all with the menacing market makers and manipulators pulling the strings behind Project Restart.
This is unsustainable just like all Ponzi scheme neo-liberalism.

The Football is Fixed Network surf the zeitgeist of corruption - that ocean between the reality of the corruption and the fans perception thereof. The 'value' of the Premier League as a brand depends upon the vast expanse between these two states of consciousness. As football fragments in mafia turf wars, the robustness of this infrastructure weakens and security is haphazard.

Zeitgeists change.

And who knows when the cash is going to start flowing again?

"UEFA's vision of a wondrous specific day when all Europe's teams walk back out together simultaneously is fanciful, to say the least" - Keir Radnedge

Football is having its soul stolen while the fans face away from the field of play.

The role of the Football is Fixed Network has to be disruptive here.

So, the club formerly known as Rangers liaised with the Scottish Football Association and stole some titles via tax wheezes but Celtic decided that the best manner in which to expose these shenanigans was to secretly fund an NGO to 'independently' prove malfeasance by the Ibrox club.
Poor strategy.
Stalemate was the result rather than anything resembling justice over Resolution 12.
Two wrongs don't make a right but by exposing these hyperrealities, we make enemies at both clubs.
Don't blame the messenger.

We exposed Shinawatra's crystal-burying corruptions in his takeover of Manchester City. We also publicised Joe Hart's issues with gambling debts and the City of London police inquiry into matchfixing. Yet we are also the whistleblowers who revealed the existence of the Liverpool cartel of clubs, the apparent control of Professional Game Match Officials by Liverpool and the systemic corruptions perpetrated against Manchester City in EPL seasons 2018/19 and 2019/20.
The issue is the rancid systemic corruption that rules British football through an absence of any institutional oversight or effective media scrutiny or suitable regulation.
Don't blame the messenger.

The fake deals in fairy tales.
We expose the Leicester City monstrosity of matchfixing and manipulation.
Don't blame the messenger.

And some reasonably intelligent people object to us pointing out the potential conflicts of interest due to Tony Bloom owning Brighton & Hove Albion FC and the Starlizard betting entity (under the stewardship of his cousin).
Don't blame the messenger.

This book is a hybrid of fact and fiction-based-upon-fact and covers the proliferation of systemic corruption in British football from the onset of the Premier League in 1992.

The fiction-based-upon-fact sections sometimes incorporate refraction of a reality making it opaque, on other occasions the actors are revealed, while in other instances they are viewed through a prism to a spectrum of multiversal realities.

This book will examine corruption in football both systemic and particular and will explore the impending death of football in its current form.
Death as liberation.

We explore what shapes the future of football might take.

This book is also about inequality and putting a dollar figure on human life, the failure of free markets, externalities, privatised elites, disaster capitalism and unsustainable neo-proprietarianism and the not wanting to return, post covid-19, to a world where the 1% become exponentially richer while the rest of us exist at various strata of the precariat hoping that the dice being rolled don't wipe us out in the latest round of the game of life.

We reveal much in this book but some content is redacted and many individuals are coded. Names, characters, businesses, states, places, events and incidents may be either the product of a diseased imagination or used in a fictitious manner only linked to the truth via multiversal wormholes. Apparently, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or anywhere in between, or actual events is purely coincidental, a fluke, a freak entanglement.

We choose constructive engagement but plan for war.
Although win-win is never on the table of psychopathy, zero-sum leads to mutually assured destruction.

We eschew full disclosure of the criminalities at play as the issues are general rather than specific.
Mafia maneuverings are a constant hustle.
It is the bigger picture that needs to change for football to move forward with any semblance of integrity.

Marginal gains psychopathy underpins neo-liberalism in sport and wider society.
The slide towards black market is incremental but unrelenting - doping being an outlier evolving to doping being the norm; a Premier League game that doesn't have matchfixing inputs now being something worthy of comment.

Marginal gains is peak strategy for political behavioural scientists, a nudge here, a nudge there.
Grabbing bits of turf left right and centre, one bit at a time.
But marginal gains is how underhand behaviour reveals itself to forensic analysts and psychologists.

Take herd immunity.
At the time of writing and for over two months now, it has been obvious, despite denials, that the UK government's policy towards coronavirus is herd immunity.
Government strategy sails as close to the shore of herd immunity as the public zeitgeist will allow at any given time without, at any instance, admitting it.

"Nudge theory is a poor substitute for hard science in matters of life-and-death" - Sonia Sodha

Some business sectors look very vulnerable in a pandemic and the football industry existing in a regressive hierarchy primed on fake, fraud and matchfixing is a hyper-inflated bubble waiting to burst.
Crises, on this level, lead to a rewriting of the rule books.

The form in which football will initially return will not be football as we know it.
No player celebrations, quarantine, no excessive away travel distances, neutral grounds, limited integrity in the competition, face masks for the players who aren't refusing to play, extra substitutes, piped crowd chanting and no fans.
Empty stadia echoing to silent crowds.
And football without fans is nothing.
But football as a gambling medium controlled by mafia interests is less than nothing.

The holistic nature of the perfect storm in which we currently reside may only be exited with an equally holistic response.
This book offers you an entirely new blueprint for global football.
Because at the moment we are all watching on as our sport dies and rigor mortis slowly sets in.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Max Planck, science advances one funeral at a time.


JBullivant, Manchester, May 12th 2020


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