Football Poets

Following his unbelievable photoshop of Corbyn sitting next to Hitler, Alan Sugar has just written a rather bizarre poem about him as well. I thought I’d respond. NB: this is about football but It is also about a lot more.

This is a poem I wrote in 1992. At the time Sugar, boss of Spurs and also of Amstrad, manufacturer of satellite dishes, played a pivotal role in securing Murdoch’s satellite company Sky the rights to show live games at the start of the Premier League. He declared his interest, of course, and no-one in Murdoch’s pet press said anything about it, of course. Ludicrous top-down inequality in football was the result, fans now mean nothing, money means everything, football as a microcosm of society. My poem is more about Murdoch than Sugar, but the whole business STINKS and, of course, in the days before social media few people found out about it, due to the Murdoch/Tory stranglehold on the press.

This from ‘When Saturday Comes’ magazine:

For the Premier League and its nascent romance with satellite hardware, the big deal arrived in May 1992. Amstrad owner Alan Sugar’s role in the seminal meeting of Premier League chairman at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on May 18 that year is hard to overstate. Faced with rival bids from ITV and BSkyB, the chairmen were meeting to vote on the destination of the new Premiership TV rights deal. On the morn­ing of the meeting Sugar, in his capacity as Spurs chairman, was supplied with a sealed envelope con­taining the substance of ITV’s offer. Swiftly don­ning his Am­strad hat, Sugar immediately phoned BSkyB executive Sam Chisholm from the lobby of the hotel to leak details of the £262m bid.

Witnesses are said to have overheard an excitable Sugar instructing Chisholm to “blow them out of the water”. Why would Sugar do such a thing? Amstrad, under his guidance, were the main suppliers of dishes to BSkyB. Chisholm duly provided his counter-bid and in a moment of laughable propriety the Spurs chairman then offered not to vote on the deal, although it was subsequently agreed that he could do so. The Sky bid was accepted by 14 votes to six, Sugar’s vote proving crucial in com­pleting the required two-thirds majority. Amstrad’s share price jumped by £7m on an­nouncement of completion of the deal. A venture founded in football’s urge to gorge itself on the TV revenue stream of satellite broadcasting; given shape by the self-serving machinations of a dish mogul with a foot in both camps; and destined to mortgage itself utterly to the demands and rewards of the schedulers: the Premiership launched three months later.

There you have it in a nutshell.

Alan Sugar is also the figurehead of The Apprentice, which glories in celebrating nasty, money-grabbing, inhuman behaviour in all its capitalistic forms. I don’t care that Alan Sugar has left the Labour Party. Do you?