Would football really be worse off without its big investors? Great clubs like Liverpool are in crisis –

-and fans can't even afford to watch them on TV.

David Mitchell in today's Observer 10.10.10 http://bit.ly/b3ScuO.

As an enemy of football, I'm delighted by the crisis facing Liverpool. Its successes, traditions and combination of a global fan base with a strong geographical sense of identity make it a tricky institution to despise, but I can do it. It's complicit in one dull sport's infiltration of so many media and conversations, so much of the precious part of my brain that I reserve for ire and, at times of forthcoming national disappointment, so many upstairs windows and car aerials. It's the epitome of what makes football hard to kill: popular, successful and even charming. Assuming you don't support Everton......
...Its (football)popularity has allowed it to court the big money that's made its coverage spill out of the sport into the news, gossip and financial sections of newspapers, and stimulated huge TV and sponsorship deals, takeovers and transfers, oligarchs and sheikhs, as well as a community of young men so baffled by how much the world over-values their skills that they desperately oscillate between vacuous, self-important wives and cynical, publicity-seeking prostitutes – and then back to the wives again for the glum inevitability of financially motivated forgiveness.....

And what would have happened without any of this investment? Would top flight football have stopped? Would tickets to matches be even more expensive? Or would Wayne Rooney just have had to settle for cheaper whores?......cont(follow link above)