Manchester City, Chelsea allowed to do what they want but now Newcastle United blocked | OneFootball

Last week, I had an article published on The Mag which highlighted how Nottingham Forest and Everton had spent money and then paid the price with a points deduction.

The point of the article being that the rules of Premier League governance are being developed to stop clubs doing what “big” clubs have always done, by flexing their financial muscle.

Buying the best players and putting together teams that win trophies.

Blackburn (a big club a hundred years ago) back in the nineties flexed their financial muscle buying Alan Shearer, David Batty etc. and became winners of the Premier League.

Newcastle United then flexed financial clout with the world record signing of Shearer for £15m.

Nothing new here.

Back in 1979, Trevor Francis became the first £1m player to move between English clubs, when Brian Clough purchased the striker for Nottingham Forest from Birmingham, when Forest were on the rise and regulars in Europe.

When Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea, very little was done to curb the spending, he was simply Jack Walker on steroids.

When Man City took the spending to the next level, the people supposedly in control began to be aware that things were not quite right for the so-called big clubs of the Premier League and terms like “Nation State“ were bandied around in the media.

So where does that leave Newcastle United?

Back in the early nineties, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Caughty created a band called the KLF, that crashed the music world and then tried to crash the Art World. On a remote Scottish Island, a million pounds in cash was burned and videoed purely for art.

Artworks are sold for millions of pounds and increasingly grow in value. Artwork that has been created, such as soiled bedding and fried eggs and a doner kebab (I’ll let you work out who the young British artists are), sell for huge sums, because of their intellectual profile.

So how does Capitalism in the art world sit against the world of sport?

If people are willing to invest huge sums of money for Art, then why can investors not put huge amounts of money into football clubs?

PIF has the key word investment in it.

Just as art dealers speculate on young artists, there is no one reining in their investment with fair play rules.

Capitalism, you pay, you get it, whatever the price.

The KLF dumped a dead sheep on the stage of a music award ceremony and pretended to spray bullets from automatic machine guns into the audience. They also released a track called it’s Grim Up North (though this was complete irony as they were revelling in Northerness) where they just listed all the small towns in the North of England in the belt from Liverpool to Hull.

I live in London and people have said “so you are from the North”, I simply correct them with “No I am from the real North.”

The KLF had a huge banner that simply said “The North Will Rise Again.”