A Good Kicking

Our economic, social, cultural and political life is in the process of being freed from Rupert Murdoch, who is to be sent packing along with each and every one of his courtier politicians and his bent coppers.

And Joey Barton and Nile Ranger have been refused entry to the land where the NFL still has the equal sharing out of ticket and television revenue, and where there is still the hard salary cap for players, as well as very extensive welfare provision. The NBA and MLB more than do their bit, too. In all three cases, displaying the name or logo of a commercial sponsor on the kit would be considered the very height, or depth, of sacrilege. Look up the ownership structure of the most recent Super Bowl winners. Barton and Ranger are unthinkable characters who would long ago have been shown the door, or if necessary put through it.

So we have another opportunity to free our economic, social, cultural and political life. This time from domination by football, a pursuit which would be of no interest to at least half of men and at least two thirds of women even if it were not now the means whereby the well-heeled patronisingly pretended to admire barely literate, drunken, drug-addled, prostitute-frequenting wife-beaters and gang rapists because they confirmed every prejudice about a certain social class.

As do the WAGs, who are now the real point of English football, and the supreme example of how our popular culture has mostly been turned into what homosexual men think that heterosexual women should like. There really is nothing camper than football: the figure usually held up as our greatest living footballer is noted for wearing a skirt in public and for wearing his domineering wife's knickers in private.

This double opportunity will not come again.