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English football club Manchester United is embroiled in two sticky situations right now that are splitting fans into two camps I am going to call “The Moralists” and “The Sportalists.”
The first issue is that the club, considered one of the most valuable brands in the sporting world, is for sale. For over a decade, United fans have hated the American owners who bought the club with leveraged debt and have since overseen a long period with little success on the field and a frustrating approach to on-and-off-field development. Now, however, a more ominous cloud is looming: Oil Money. The most likely buyer is a Qatari banker with close connections to the state. While such an owner would surely open the floodgates of opportunity in terms of new player signings and stadium improvements, many fans are not pleased with Qatar’s record on human rights. They accuse the Qatari owner of being a proxy for an evil government that wants to indulge in “sportswashing[*],” which is a vague term for laundering dubious behavior through the glamor of sport. It also doesn’t help that United fans have spent the last decade accusing their cross-town rivals Manchester City – who were transformed from a third-rate club into dominant champions shortly after they were purchased by Abu Dhabi oil billionaires in 2008 – of profiting off of blood money. So you have The Moralists claiming that they can no longer support the club if it’s bought by LGBTQii++-unfriendly oil barons, and you have The Sportalists excited by the prospect of ending a humiliating decade by unleashing the clubs innate financial power with additional oil-funded swagger.
The second issue is similar, but concerns a player rather than new prospective owners. One of the club’s brightest young stars, 21-year-old Mason Greenwood, who scored his first professional goal for the club at the age of 17, and who has the tools to become one of the best strikers in the world, hasn’t played for the club in a year. His girlfriend accused him of rape accompanied by an an audio recording of Greenwood making menacing threats along with video recordings of her bruises and other wounds. Criminal files were charged and Greenwood was suspended pending the outcome of the trial. A year later, and it looks like that trial is not going to happen. The charges have been dropped and the couple has reconciled. This is not stopping The Moralists, however, from insisting that Greenwood should never play for the club again, that the evidence was clear regardless of trivialities like legal conviction. The Sportalists, on the other hand, are reluctant to lose a remarkable on-field asset, especially when the team has been thin in the attacking department. Even accepting that the team is currently playing well under a new manager and has another star, Marcus Rashford, scoring for fun, a talent the likes of Greenwood is not something to be casually tossed away. Would his return stain the brand, and/or derail the current rebuilding project? Does it matter that current league leaders Arsenal are currently fielding a star with his own closet full of rape allegations albeit without criminal charges?
I don’t spend much time worrying about morality in entertainment. I am fully in the “separate the art from the artist” camp. I watch soccer to watch good soccer just like I watch Woody Allen and Roman Polanski movies for their rare artistry (and I will defend Allen against all charges; not so much for Polanski). I am a Sportalist. Maybe Sportalists are the “silent majority,” but Reddit fan groups are awash with moral superiors declaring that if either Qatari or Greenwoodian presences are allowed to sully United in the near future, it will be the end of the historic club as we know it.
Sportalists are downvoted into oblivion in the corners I frequent. The Moralists, meanwhile, argue that Qatar/Greenwood will trigger fans who are sensitive to LGBTQi++/Sex Abuse issues. News has been leaking that the Manchester United women’s team is categorically opposed to Greenwood’s return, while the men’s team is split. It’s worth remembering that some of Manchester United’s players have been friends and co-workers with Greenwood for four or more years, so it might not be as easy for some of them to cut ties so cleanly without some equivication.
Both of these issues are interesting as examples of clear moral arguments pitted against pretty clear sporting benefits, mirroring the Culture War dynamic of, depending on how you look at it, Virtue Signaling Busybodies vs.Blissful Ignorants, or, Higher Consciousness vs. Lower Desires. Wokeness vs. Commerce.
[*] About “Sportswashing:” I don’t really understand this accusation. It seems to me that by buying a high profile entertainment service, the Qataris are bringing more attention to their human rights issues rather than hiding them behind the sport. If anything, I would expect a gradual adoption of western attitudes the more the Qataris are involved with western business people in western settings. At the very least, their human right records are not likely to get worse should they become owners of Manchester United, so from a utilitarian perspective, this argument seems moot. In what scenario does Qatari ownership of Manchester United make their human rights abuses worse? Someone rich enough to buy the organization already has the resources to do whatever they want, so I fail to see how it enables increased evil. It reeks to me of a selective quest for unattainable purity, which is a form of self-destruction.
Beware NSFW:
https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/sg39af/mason_greenwoods_ex_girlfriend_accusing_him_of/
https://twitter.com/thfc___dan/status/1621155177146507271
The leaked pictures and leaked audio are all over the Internet,
that's the difference to Partey and the rape allegations against him.
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Describing Qatar as just "LGBTQii++-unfriendly" is disingenuous. You are implying that it's just some silly wokeists concerned about trivial matters. Qatar is a totalitarian absolute monarchy where dissidents are regularly imprisoned, migrant workers are abused and prevented from returning home, women are legally subservient to men, and yes, homosexuality is a crime punishable by imprisonment. It is perfectly reasonable to not want to have anything to do with Qatar's government.
I guess what I try to do while looking at this is to remove all of the baked-in assumptions, because I'm not sure I trust that they apply.
The first assumption from the moralists, is that this individual banker with direct family connections to Qatari royalty is a proxy for the State of Qatar and is guilty of all their evils. This may be true. I don't know know though why I am required to assume it is true and base all of my reactions on this "truth." It's not uncommon for younger inheritors of archaic systems to be less enamored of the archaic systems and their practices.
Second, that the purpose of buying the sports franchise is somehow an intentional step in some plan to do further evil, rather than something that exists in parallel to the supposed evil.
Third, yes other foreign owners have cheated. I hope they are penalized for it. It doesn't look good right now for Manchester City. Does that mean all foreign owners will cheat? Again, an assumption that requires evidence.
And, this is on me, because I haven't researched it, but I'm assuming neither have the redditors/twitterers who are so strident about it: what exactly are Qatar's worst sins and how common are they? They have a weird migrant labor system and what I think are backwards attitudes toward women and gays. So does most of the world. And it's hard to find specific abuse metrics from any organization that doesn't also consider the USA a horrible white supremacist system guilty of crimes against humanity. I would want to see some kind of data that suggests Qatar is getting worse and not gradually liberalizing like most places do, just on a different slower timetable. In any event, my prior is that isolation of a government is worse for the oppressed people than greater exposure. As long as Qataris own big European soccer clubs, there is going to be attention paid to their malfeasance.
As for the influence of rich foreign owners on EPL clubs, AFAIC, that horse is already out of the barn. The decision now is whether to outlaw it for everyone, or invite more of it for better parity in the league. I can't get too bothered by a team already owned by one set of hated foreigners getting sold to another set of foreigners, especially if the new set of foreigners might turn out to have a more positive approach to running the team. And it's not like there is an array of appealing suitors getting boxed out by a Chad. All of the options suck on some level.
It's hardly a black-and-white scenario and hard to figure out the noise-to-signal ratio. So I default to: Is any of this related to why I watch football? No. As long as the players and coaches are not compromised, whatever.
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LGBT issues did become a focus during the world cup itself, but not because no-one cares about anything else. Qatar doesn't get the flak Saudi Arabia gets for restrictions on political freedoms, partly because it is a bit freer, and the working standards/freedom of migrant workers had just had its time in the news cycle I suppose; for years after Qatar won the bid it was by far the dominant issue.
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I think the characterization of those opposed to the sale of the club to Qatari buyers is a drastic simplification. The moral factor is one element of opposition, but I think it is one of many and not necessarily the major factor or even something people believe in beyond being used as a stick to beat their opponents.
Rather, there are several points that are likely to be important:
The fact that the Qatari ownership at PSG and the Abu Dhabi ownership of Manchester City are rampant cheats, and the suspicion that Newcastle's Saudi owners and Man Utd's new owners will soon follow suit, ruining the credibility of the game.
A more general distaste for the fact that football will be reduced to a proxy battle between middle eastern states. This will particularly be the case for local United fans, who are likely to see many of the supporters for the buyout as distant, 'fake' fans who have no real connection to the club.
A distaste for the overall financial health of the game that has seen money become an overwhelming factor in success.
Downplaying the moral element as mere "LGBTQ unfriendliness" is also deeply uncharitable. I can't speak overmuch on the Qatari government, but the ills of Saudi Arabia are very well documented, while there is strong evidence that the Abu Dhabi ownership of City engage in murder, torture, and slavery.
I find it more than a little unfortunate that everything has to be about how they're mean to a certain group of special people rather than simply saying, "I don't like Islam and the last goddamned thing in the world I want is a bunch of Islamist cunts owning a British football club". Some of the reasons to not be much of a fan of Islam include the whole throwing gays off rooftops and veiling women thing, sure, but they don't stop there, and those aren't necessary to justify a preference for British football clubs to be British-owned.
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Are the 'Moralists' even a sizable group, and not, say a tiny minority of woke social media obsessed football fan who simply claim to be speaking for a larger group?
I assume the median English football fan is a low to low-middle class man who couldn't give a shit about LGBT issues.
I'm reminded of the English team's halfarsed moral grandstanding with the Qatar World Cup.
This doesn't really grasp the picture for a few reasons. Firstly, it's about way more than LGBT rights. Not only in the sense that 'sportswashing' concerna are about slavery/labour rights and political freedoms at least as much as LGBT issues, but also because beyond concerns about gulf nations' human rights problems it's about 'fairness' as well, the notion that oil money propels a team to artificial success rather than growing a club 'organically' without huge outside parachute payments. Man United are rich, of course, but got there without the huge infusions of cash that a City did.
Also, and slightly tangentially, I think the idea that working class men don't give a shit about anything to do with social issues or foreign affairs and just want to drink beer and watch football is a little outdated (or rather has never really been accurate). Sure, they don't care as much as the average young university graduate, and most people happily watched the world cup, but lots and lots of fans don't like gulf money in football, at least in part due to sportswashing, albeit the 'fairness' factor probably being more important.
So, no not really. This isn't just a social media issue.
Even if not true generally, it does tend to be true while they are watching football.
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Is there any reason why this would be the case? It didn't work with Chinese, and I don't think there's any reason to assume it as the default.
It did sort of work on the Chinese, didn't it? They realized that they needed to liberalize their markets to some extent, and they aren't as oppressive as they were during the 1970s, when they still had political prisoners starving to death by the millions in Communist re-education camps. I mean, even if China almost fully sucks right now, it's still progress from where is was 40-50 years ago, right?
So the quality of the Chinese re-education camps has increased. What a liberal victory! Now their political prisoners are surveilled constantly instead of starving to death. I suppose that counts as progress, but it's not the kind of progress that would satisfy anyone rioting in Seattle in 2000.
Not a metric I would put any stock into.
Another issue I take with the moralists is that there is seemingly no plausible metric that would satisfy them. There's a lot of talk about being "on the right side of history" but very little interest in the long arc of history. Progress is never enough nor fast enough, the work is never done. Once you let their nose inside any tent they will ruin it with relentless reform until it no longer resembles what they once were trying to protect.
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I think the fact that they are a smaller country is one reason. China is so big and economically muscular that they can throw their weight around. Smaller countries must integrate into an international system if they want to do well. Also, china is not the only datapoint. South Korea started off a military dictator ship and transformed into a (somewhat shaky) liberal democracy. Singapore is known for being the model authoritarian state, but they have been very slowly loosening the ratchet. Various peripheral European states have been influenced to clean up their act in various ways by the economic power of the EU.
Yeah, it all depends on who wants what from whom. If Qatar is seeking something from the west and spending billions to achieve it, they should be somewhat mindful of what the west thinks of them, right? I mean, it's not like for $4.5 billion they can now execute gays during the Old Trafford halftime show. If anything, it seems like this investment is more likely to require them to suppress things that the west won't like about them.
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Moralists seem like lower status. Even here and on right-twitter. These people have never been that popular. Even in the 90s Bill Clinton polled well despite the scandals, which if anything only made him seem cooler among his base and undecideds. Same for Trump, who brushed off his scandals.
Interesting, this concept of moralism being lower status. If so it suggests high status people are amoral, so populists are right to be suspicious of them. Everyone from Epstein and co. to Silicon Valley EA folk.
Woke elites suck all the air out of the room, consumed as they are by a so-called new puritanism. But a lack of puritanism may be a bigger problem. It's the broad PMC - the normies and 99% of the elite - that want to institute a moral framework whereaa the true high status people calling the shots are essentially still living in the carefree vaunted 90s.
It doesn't follow that those who aren't moralists are amoral. A moralist does not have to consistent, honest, effective, intelligent, or correct, and their actions, or the actions they desire others to take, do not have to make the world a better place. All a moralist needs is to think they will.
A moral non-moralist however, merely needs to think that not evangelizing or exemplifying is sufficient, and they may be right.
"A moral non-moralist" is quite literally a contradiction in terms.
No. A moralist is one who virtue signals their morality and makes it their identity by declaring themselves above the immoral, a righteous example for all to behold. One can be completely moral in thoughts and actions without preening about it like a moralist.
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Moral non-moralist? I suppose evangelism must then be subject to such a difference of degree than that it becomes a difference in kind. How would we even know that a moral non-moralist is not themselves a moralistic (too much moralism) or amoral (not enough). Some form of radar must detect it.
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The point that I generally give the Moralists is that it's pretty damn icky to be handing someone hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in compensation while knowing that they have engaged in morally outrageous and/or antisocial behavior. Having it come out that someone has committed an egregious act, and then paying them huge sums of money that they are, let us grant, contractually entitled to sure feels like you're rewarding them/overlooking behavior that, were it known earlier, would likely have disqualified them from such a payment.
But to the Sportalists, I agree that what happens within one's 'personal' life is just that, personal, up until it actually harms some cognizable social interest and/or directly impacts their performance on the field. As such I can easily ignore someone's sexuality and/or taboo sexual proclivities, their general bad attitude/snobby/narcissistic behavior, their profligate spending habits, their drug use (in the off-season), their relationship with their kids or spouse. If I had to track the personal lives of every single player of every single team in every single sport I followed I simply wouldn't be able to enjoy the sport for the sport.
Indeed, I'm somewhat inclined to even ignore domestic disputes even involving violence, since those are inherently he-said-she-said situations and are best settled privately anyway.
One thing I'm also not sure how to feel about is the whole "paying your debt to society" bit where if someone is arrested, charged, and convicted of a serious offense and serves their punishment, are we okay saying "that's in the past, now here is your 6-7 figure salary back."
Because there is an argument that once someone has committed such an offense, it's probably better to let someone else have a chance to take home that reward, instead. Few people's skills are truly so irreplaceable that they're the only one capable of filling that role. But the whole point of punishment is to make things right and allow us to 'move on' past the criminal behavior. Or is it?
(I'm specifically thinking of Alec Baldwin as I type this)
What did/didn't he do?
Well that was a slipup, I meant to write ALEC Baldwin.
But Adam Baldwin was found guilty of thoughtcrime a long while back for supporting Sad Puppies.
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And this is the entire reason woke is dominant in the first place, and it's also why the more uncommon your skill or interests is in your childhood, the more anti-woke you are as a baseline (and why those people- that we usually call 'nerds' or grey tribe in general- tend to tolerate more social weirdness both evil and benign).
Why would you think that? If they're offensive to corporate society and we have a surplus of the similarly-able, why shouldn't we just (mission-)kill them and move on? (Alternately: is a mission-kill equivalent to a catastrophic-kill in both intent and result? And if it isn't, why wasn't the writer of 2 Arms and a Head justified in his desire to die?)
In a liberal society, obviously yes. The entire concept of "debt to society" is that society still needs you after the fact so the punishment has to be finite- this is why labor-dominant societies differentiate between finite and infinite (death) punishment, and why capital-dominant societies favor permanent mission-kill as punishment (which is why the relatively new categories of DV and sex offenses- both crimes against the capital associated gender, mind you- are permanent).
Yes, that's why woke is both creeping and inherently destructive (insert C.S. Lewis "approval of their own conscience" here) in a way liberalism is not, and it's why "no ethical consumption under
capitalismliberalism" is so popular among the woke: liberalism, in socioeconomic circumstances too thin to sustain it, has no valid good-feeling counter aside from "no u".More options
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I don’t really know or care much about soccer, so I’ll just comment on sportswashing.
Why do billionaires want to buy sports teams?
Maybe they expect to make money through revenue or through a later sale. Or slapping advertising on jerseys will benefit their brand. Not the supermarket sort of branding, since football fans (hopefully) aren’t basing their oil purchases on that, but something more valuable. Prestige, whether among outsiders or among rival tycoons. The same rat race which gets people to buy gold-plated toilets.
So if someone you hate expects to benefit from something…wanting to keep it from them is pretty normal.
As an aside, distrust of Qatari money predates the World Cup LGBT push. I seem to recall complaints back when they were awarded the World Cup, but it was about abusing migrant labor rather than gender politics. The wiki article says this goes back to at least 2012. But there’s plenty more to complain about. Sharia and enshrined Islam for the Bush-era neocons. Old fashioned sex discrimination for the women. Corporal and capital punishment for the bleeding-hearts. Child abuse and camel jockeys for the, uh, luddites?
Point is: It’s easy for people to care about one or more of these things. Even Norf FC fans. From there, the resulting behavior can be explained by principled opposition, or just by spite.
Because billionaires are not Ayn Randian heroes as superior to ordinary men as ordinary men are superior to bugs, but normies, only with big pile of money.
Because they love sports like every normie does and can, unlike poor normies, really indulge their passion.
It is hard to accept, but sometimes the simplest explanation is the real one.
See this classic from The eXile excommunicating Tom Clancy from the ranks of war nerds ;-)
It is written tongue in cheek, Gary Brecher knows well it is not so easy to be warlord or condottiero in modern degenerate age, but not impossible.
For example, this guy managed to change the course of world history (well, most probably not exactly as he wished) at cost of few million bucks.
Wonder what this Brecher guy thinks of Frank Amodeo.
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Or because sports teams are one of the most unobtainable status icons of wealth. There are only 30 NBA teams, only 32 NFL teams. Only so many Premier League teams, or clubs with the cachet of ManU.
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It's very smart:
tax implications
for fun (free tickets, mingling with players)
bragging rights , branding
better returns than almost any asset class
The barriers to entry are obviously very high , even for partial ownership. Like Bay Area real estate, which is also great, it seems to be investments that have very high barriers to entry, tend to be among the best, plus scarcity. There is only one "Lakers". Bay Area homes are great and the returns are like a perfect smooth chart that beats the S&P 500, but REIT funds are much worse by comparison, but way easier for regular people to invest.
The reasons these investments have done so well is that they act like a call option on income inequality. Today there are more billionaires than ever chasing the same number of teams.
One interesting thing about income inequality is that it tends to increase as time goes on then massively resetting in times of crisis. The last reset was over 75 years ago in the United States, but of course other countries have had them much more recently.
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There are a bunch of reasons.
Owning the team gives them bragging rights of course. But it also gives them access to the best seats, corporate boxes, and players.
If a client is playing hardball in negotiations they can treat them to the best seats at the game followed by beer with the star players.
Also good seats often have face values below reporting limits but street values in the thousands. So you can give them away as legal bribes to politicians, police chiefs, or whoever.
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Sporting benefits...for Manchester United.
I don't know where you discuss soccer, but that's an important element imo of why "sportalists" would get downvoted in sporting spaces. If it's a Man U forum it's one thing. But if one is supporting injections of oil money on a general sporting forum (e.g. /r/soccer) then it should be expected that the vast majority of fans loathe that argument because the vast majority of fans not only don't benefit but their teams are hurt by it. Why would they support the trend?
The hatred of oil/foreign money's impact in English football is not just about morality or concern for Qataris or whoever - hell, I could argue that's secondary*- it's arguably a bad thing for the fans of every club ; even rich ones like Man U because they now need to spend more to compete with clubs that now have few financial constraints for reasons that have nothing to do with footballing success.
To say nothing of the fact that it can lead to direct cheating - e.g. Manchester City, who has faced two probes on both an English and European level for outright cheating rules designed to stop any random billionaire or sovereign state from over-spending relative to a club's finances in order to gain an advantage. Given that other, less monied clubs with worse lawyers HAVE been punished, this naturally creates a lot of resentment.
The other thing to factor in is that this sort of thing just completes the delocalization of clubs. Taking them from local entities to global conglomerates with no true loyalty - so you're more likely to end up with situations like America where clubs threaten to move at will and blackmail their cities to get enticements to stay. Given some of these clubs have been in these regions for a century, this worries some Englishmen.
Why does this matter to fans of other teams? Well, just recently the top teams in England almost seceded to join some new European league that would provide them with more money with none of the risks involved in the current Premier League or UEFA Champion's League (where money was divided based on performance). Doing so would have diluted the competitiveness of both leagues and potentially harmed the revenue for everyone else.
This is only true if you believe that the impact of people who have deliberately set out to counter sportwashing are a) inevitable and b) of as great a magnitude as the benefits of having someone like Leo Messi - a hero to hundreds of millions of kids- promoting your country.
Put it to you another way: what would you bet on? People hating Nike cause of sweatshops or people loving Nike cause of Jordan?
They adopt the minimal norms that allow them to do business with the West. But, precisely because they're buying in at a commanding position, they don't necessarily need to adopt the rest, especially locally (perhaps this is an unwelcome reminder to Western liberals about what the actual essential norms for global trade are and that they don't include supporting gay rights). Third World populaces are also well-practiced at adopting what they like from Western countries and leaving the rest.
There's also an argument that it causes corruption of Western values internally. If you are a moral crusader who is insistent on certain values, you must know that you have limited impact on the Saudis at home. But it must be worrisome to see even a superficial adoption of their traits in the West.
The idea that trade will make us all more similar was supposed to work in the other direction!
* Roman Abramovich is widely seen as opening the floodgates and most people hated him for the perception that he bought a title. The fact that he could be accused of looting Russia only added some support to the general resentment.
If anything, the "sportwashing" argument here serves as a convenient way to criticize foreign billionaires without actually reconsidering the basic structures that created this problem. With private ownership it's inevitable that local owners would give way to even richer foreign ones. In other countries many or even most clubs (I believe this is the case in Germany) are fan owned or owned by member associations and so one billionaire can't unilaterally do everything. This is not the case in England and nobody seems inclined to impose something like mandatory fan rule (you'd think it would be easier now, with Brexit) . So better to blame foreigners and "sportwashing".
EDIT: Annnd johnfabian said it far more succinctly. I need an editor :|
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I think a lot of the "Sportalists" have practical reasons to oppose a Qatari takeover as well. The English Premier League is rapidly becoming a real transfer arms race as wealthy foreign investors takeover storied clubs that for decades (or even more than a century) were rooted in their local community. Not only does this in many ways destroy the matchgoing experience of the local fan as the club switches to the foreign tourist as its source of matchday revenue, it has affected the competitive balance of the league and international football.
Say you have a local pub you like. It's got friendly locals, a knowledgeable bartender, a cozy atmosphere. Is it wrong to oppose it getting taken over and replaced by a McDonalds? "Oh but it has better revenue and economic productivity!" Who cares? The experience has been sterilized, homogenized, replaced by something you could have gotten a million other places.
At least one of the benefits of European sports organizations is that unlike the North American cartels you can reasonably vote with your wallet. FC United of Manchester was the club founded by fans opposed to the Glazers' takeover, and hopefully they'll see a rise of support. The issue of course is that a Qatari owner probably won't be too displeased to trade Manc fans for fans in Pakistan or Nigeria or Indonesia.
Yeah.
The free market fundamentalist in me says "If the corporatized replacement is able to draw in customers by providing a decent experience at a competitive price point then it isn't an economic loss if the local mom 'n' pop store goes under."
But the somewhat more sentimental localist in me recognizes that the sheer amount of resources that can be brought to bear by an international corporation renders the outcome patently 'unfair' in that there's no way that the locals, even if they coordinate perfectly, can pony up the funds to resist the will of an uncaring entity that senses an opportunity for profit. At least, not without the locals calling in international support of their own. And the problem that once the original pub is closed, razed, and the McDonalds built in it's place, there's no going back since all that history and tradition can't just be restored by rebuilding the place. So even if the McDonalds fails and closes up shop it's not easy to just revert to the prior set of circumstances as if nothing changed.
So I, myself am precommitted to supporting local businesses that I enjoy against any takeover attempts even if from 10,000 feet up it appears more 'efficient' to have the corporate entity take over.
In Toronto since the start of the pandemic the number of local businesses that have gone belly-up and replaced by chains has been enormous. Toronto has extraordinarily expensive real estate, so large corporations with the capital to purchase land outright rather than rent have a big competitive advantage over small businesses. You walk along King or Queen west and compare it to what it looked like four years ago and it's a total wasteland.
I think this is just one way in which the current market is geared towards large multinationals rather than local business.
Yeah. And there's a lot of migration going on through and amongst the states, so this means the 'character' of many areas HAS to change to accommodate the influx.
And this is just how things work, and always has worked. Ascendant multinationals are best suited for the world as it currently exists.
I do recognize that I'm part of a fairly small minority who view the concept of maintaining local, folksy 'flavor' as a terminal goal in itself.
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Yeah, the division between moralists and sportalists is actually problematic in that it implies people who care about the sporting aspect all have the same interests here. They clearly don't. Man U benefits from being bought by an oil nation, Southampton doesn't get anything in that trade, but all the negatives in terms of hurting the competitive balance of the league (aka a sporting issue) still exist for them.
If you look at American sports for example, there are mechanisms in place that slow down spending and push for some equity. Are those decisions "moralist"? Are they being made cause people don't like the moral politics of whoever's in the draft that year?
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