Sunday 6 April 2014

A POLITICAL FOOTBALL

Coining it in: Wayne Rooney is paid £500,000 per day and is laughing all the way to the bank. James Campbell reveals an uncanny similarity between professional footballers and their bosses, and politicians. The solution: don't support professional football and in the political arena, don't vote.
Whether it’s voting or supporting, the solution is in our hands

Guest blogger JAMES CAMPBELL offers a solution to football supporters who are fed up being ripped off. He explains how direct action against the ills of football can also be applied to politics.

I WAS talking to a Newcastle United fan the other day and he was bemoaning the fact that money had ruined football.  In general terms he thought it was obscene that the likes of Wayne Rooney was getting paid £300,000 a week and that Mike Ashley was using Newcastle United to make money for himself and had no interest in the footballing success of the club beyond that.

I asked what he was doing about it. He didn’t have a clue what I was on about.  So I asked if he held a season ticket at Newcastle or a Sky Sports subscription to watch football.  Yes to both.

So I said OK, cancel both, don’t go to another game, buy another shirt or any other merchandise until things change.  Encourage others to do the same.  The response: “Ye cannot dee that, ye’ve gotta support ya team man.”

I asked if he’d protested in any way. He said they often chanted anti Ashley slogans at games and once turned their back on the field before a game….so he pays the man he hates his hard cash to shout abuse at him.

So I explained that he was as responsible for the ruin of the game as Rooney, Ashley and all of the others fleecing it.  He looked utterly scoobied.

So in really simple terms I went on.  What do you think would happen if everyone just refused to renew their tickets and cancelled their Sky Sports?

Blank look…..



OK this is what would happen, cash flowing into the club would stop from ticket and merchandise sales.  Advertisers and other sponsors would stop pumping money into a club where attendances disappeared because there would be no audience to see the advertisements.

If everyone did this across all football clubs then the profit in it would disappear for these deep pocketed money men.

Same with Sky, if everyone stopped their subscriptions they’d begin to get the message, stop showing football and more importantly stop pumping their money into the game.

Once the cash into the game dried up the obscene amounts of money being paid to players would stop, then as a result the game would be played only by those who genuinely enjoyed the game, had a passion for it and as a result would probably be better at it.  It would probably be more watchable without huge sums of money at stake and therefore better for fans.  In short ultimate the power is with the punter, as long as they act together.

This is much the same as my view on voting…..

Replace players with MP’s, paid obscene amounts of money for doing very little and to be honest, most probably couldn’t give a crap about what they do as long as the money keeps flowing.

Replace teams with political parties with supporters who will blindly follow their team regardless of how badly they let them down over and over again.

Replace owners and sponsors with party donors and lobbyists who on the face of it are also supporters pumping money into their party for the love of it, but in reality they expect that money to be repaid several times over, it’s an investment.  You put money in so that MP’s change laws to make you profits or vote on things in a way that protects your interests.

The currency paid by the supporters?  Your vote!  None of this can work without the votes.

Voting validates the whole thing, they use the vote to say everything they’re doing they do it in your name.  So like football what we need to do as a nation, if we want to fix our political system and get back people who will only represent us because they believe it to be the right thing to do and to protect the interests of the people they represent, is very, very simple.

STOP VOTING! Do it now, encourage others to do the same…..It will only work if everyone joins in!

FEEL IT? LOVE IT? THEN SHARE IT!

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5 comments:

  1. I don't vote. I don't subscribe to sky. I am a small drop in a HUGE ocean, until everyone wakes up. . . then we will become the waterways of the world.

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    1. Each person is like a snowflake, individually unique and beautiful but largely unable to change the world around them. Acting together in small group snowflakes can become a snowball, an annoyance, a sometimes painful one. Keep rolling that snowball around long enough to gather more individuals coming together with the same purpose and that snowball gets bloody big. Start it rolling downhill and all the other snowflakes who're wandering idly in it's path will join it because it's what all the other snowflakes are doing.....Soon you have an landscape changing avalanche.

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  2. This makes no sense at all.
    Voting doesn't cost you anything, it's a right, hard-earned by the generations that came before you. If you don't vote because you're protesting against the broken system you can be damn sure the corrupt bastards who broke it will, or the mad right-wing nutters who want you to live in fear, or the religious lunatics who want their power back. If you don't vote you're giving your power to them. You protest against the system by voting for someone better (or at least the one who is less bad than the rest) because "the system" is the corruption and self-interest of the ruling parties. By not voting you are protesting against democracy itself. If you prefer to live without democracy you should try living in North Korea or Zimbabwe.
    Not going to a football match isn't the same. It costs money so you protest by not doing it. You get to keep the money and spend it on something better. The footballing equivalent of not voting would be to burn your own money after you refused to buy a season ticket with it. Idiotic!

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    1. I should also add that I think the idea of not giving your money to football clubs or anyone else you don't like is perfectly valid and we should all follow that advice.

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  3. Turkeys dont vote for christmas. if you still seriously respect our democracy, and think you can use it to better the lives of the people, I would ask "OK so how did we get here then?". I don't remember voting for giving the banks the right to invent money. We are not fighting or trying to replace 'democracy' we are trying to introduce it.

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