Friday 22 January 2010

up pompey!

is the name of a book I'm reading by Chuck Culpepper, an American sports journalist falling in love with soccer. It is eerily familiar given my journey into NFL fandom, but it's different in as many ways as it's similar. One thing that massively resonates early on is:
I knew nothing of the specific fraudulence of any player or manager
Whatever to that. Portsmouth are now facing administration. It's not because they are unlucky. It's because they are incompetently run and live beyond their means. They're not the only ones. Football is laughably badly run.

I know it's apples and oranges, but it's a bit unfair on law-abiding bankers (who are nothing like as clever as they pretend) that people are angrier with them than tax-dodging football clubs. People are sympathetic to Portsmouth because lots of people are fans, and it's not Portsmouth's fans fault, and nobody likes the taxman. But I have to pay my taxes, and so do they. If they don't go into administration and get screwed over, then they will carry on behaving deludedly and badly (like the banks). Of course, unlike the banks, they do go into administration and get screwed over. I feel sorry for them.

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