I woke up this
morning and found myself living in a foreign country, England without the NHS.
When do we get to re-join the United Kingdom? No one ever asked us if we wanted
to leave it. All this, and Paolo Di Canio, too.
David Miliband was going to have to resign from Sunderland, anyway. He could hardly have done the job from New York. But one hopes that this appalling appointment will
finally bring to a head the question of who owns this country's last great
expressions of working-class culture, and last great focal points of local
patriotism.
There
should be mutual ownership of the clubs by the fans, as in Spain. And there
should be municipal ownership of the grounds, as in, now that we come to
mention it, Italy.
The
Americans would never permit ownership of major sports teams by foreign
nationals thousands of miles, who knew nothing about the local culture and who
cared only about the money. They are right. Nor should we.
Here in Chicago I am happy to say that the City via the Park District owns Soldier Field where the NFL’s Chicago Bears play. Some people complain about the field being too rugged, but it fits the hardscrabble image of the city and I like it.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, our archenemies the Green Bay Packers have the best set up in all of American sports. The City of Green Bay owns the stadium and the fans collectively own the team itself. The system of mutual ownership has been so successful that the NFL has banned its spreading to other clubs.
There have been some foreign owners of sports teams in the U.S.
The Seattle Mariners are owned by Hiroshi Yamauchi, former Nintendo CEO, but I do believe the other baseball owners forced him to agree to have less than 50% of the shares so he could not be the full majority owner, although he has more shares than any other single shareholder.
I think the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets are owned by Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov.
Unsurprisingly,Prokhorov also heads a neoliberal political movement in Russia that is critical of Vladimir Putin.