Come on then. Player, club, manager, organisation, referee, administrator, pundit, or anyone else. Whose influence has been the most malign, whether directly or in terms of copyists?

The Premiership wins this by about a furlong, surely?

So many candidates

Blatter?
Dave Richards?
Arsene Wenger?

Roman Abramovich
Real Madrid/florentino perez
Malcolm glazer
Silvio Berlusconi
Blatter

If you think that the premiership is the worst in this respect you should take a closer look at the ins and outs of La Liga and Serie A.

In terms of the commercialisation of the sport, no league holds a candle to the Premiership.

I was thinking more in terms of structural unfairness to be honest.

Richard Scudamore wins this by a country mile

7 posts and no mention of Rupert 'satan' Murdoch?

Scudamore is just an unspeakable cunt who should be dragged behind a truck. He doesn't have the impact or the power of some of the others.

Abramovich has stolen Billions and is involved in the running of a fascist state, he has also Completely bollocksed the PL as a commercial entity. Real Madrid stole several hundred million pounds of state money, turned football into Perezhilton territory and with the assistance of Barcelona completely destroyed the integrity of the spanish league.

Malcolm Glazer managed to load arguably the biggest and best run club in europe with an unsustainable debt, which is greater than that of the entirety of the spanish league, opening the way for the LBO of Liverpool and Man City and eventually Arsenal.

Silvio Berlusconi uses football to rule a country to keep out of jail. The rest doesn't need going into.

And Sepp is sepp.

Scudamore just isn't in the same league as these people.

Murdoch did most of his damage before the last decade

Oh contraire. Every none of the people you mention is doing it for greed. Scudamore is a believer.

He's a free marketeer who belives he's creating a glorious global vision for football, liberated from regulation by vested interests, free to pursue the only thing that matters - profit.

He's been utterly central to neutralising New Labour's interest in football, keeping the FA in servility and packaging football for Sky. Sky pay the bill, but they can only buy what is being sold to them.

He has pushed for a conception of the club as thrusting neo-liberal business (in contrast to the essentially feudal conception of most other big club owners) and by promoting the Premiership in this vein, has helped it become the global behemoth that strangles the football clubs and leagues elsewhere and causes people doing the right thing, like the Bundesliga, to contemplate abandoning what makes them different and special in a race the bottom of corporate profiteering, greed and myopic hype and boosterism.

The rest are hucksters, bent bastards and greedy fucks doing what bent bastards, hucksters and greedy bastards do, and those who do what they do at club level are only able to do so because Scudamore has so assidiously created the framework for them and enabled it.

but that makes him a useful idiot rather than a real force for evil. it's the difference between bill o'reilly and Dick Cheney

Berlusconi bought Milan more than 20 years ago and was first elected Prime Minister in '94, so he's at least as time-barred as Murdoch.

You've got a better argument with Perez and the Merengues (the training ground bailout was 2000 or 2001), but the commercial dominance of Real Madrid and Barca goes back much further than that (though it is fair to say that its impact was less nefarious because the sums needed to remain competative were much smaller).

I still think the Premiership wins.

I know that ad hoc was being facetious above, and doing a bit of knowing anti-Arsenalness, but I think Arsene Wenger, rather than being the most damaging footballing entity of the last decade, is a strong candidate for the most positive footballing entity of the last decade, certainly as far as top level football goes (there would obviously be quite a few more candidates, some very close to home, if we were to go below the top level).

Perhap an idea for another thread. But first, lunch.

real and barca have each have a tv deal bigger than the rest of the league put together and have had for about a decade. They have launched an unsustainable financial arms race that has gutted most other spanish clubs, and the weird thing is that as member owned clubs they weren't doing it for profit. They were doing it becuase they are pure cunts.

Berlusconi has used football to gain political power again in the last couple of years. As leader of a G8 Country, He is a major geopolitical player. He's a cross between rupert murdoch and charlie Haughey. I think he counts. Berlusconi, moratti, and the agnellis have also negotiated individual television deals that have completely destroyed Serie A as a league.

While Murdoch definitely has a place on this list, he has been rather quiet since 1998.

And I am the Life wrote:

QUOTE:
I was thinking more in terms of structural unfairness to be honest.

I wasn't.