news-engine

In what is becoming one of the folksier rituals in American sport, the Philadelphia Phillies defeated the Minnesota Twins 7-1 on a baseball diamond carved out of farmland in Dyersville, Iowa last week. For the third summer, a competitive Major League Baseball fixture was relocated to this midwestern corn patch to commemorate Field of Dreams, the beloved Kevin Costner movie from 1989. Undeniably schmaltzy but beautifully choreographed, the pre-game ceremony included Hall of Famers from days past emerging from the thicket of overgrown stalks, just like the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson and his stricken colleagues in the film. Far less romantic was the match being broadcast on Netflix, which meant the old codgers who live for baseball were floundering around trying to locate the live stream. Those who eventually succeeded saw that, for all the quaint nods to history and WP Kinsella’s wonderfully imagined novel, the outfield walls were pockmarked with gaudy advertising hoardings for the ubiquitous FanDuel and BetMGM. Jackson’s White Sox were once banished for allegedly throwing the World Series at the behest of bettors; these days, baseball, like so many others, is in the thrall of odious gambling corporations. Welcome to the modern sporting world. Where everything must go. Traditions and heritage reduced to clear. The game long, long gone. Which game? Every bloody game. Bought and sold to the highest bidders, packaged and repackaged, asset-stripped and revenue optimised, branded and rebranded. Grifters grifting. Racketeers racketing. Everywhere. Always. A global menace where empty suits are somehow encouraged to toy with stuff that truly matters to people in ways that can’t and shouldn’t ever be measured on balance sheets. READ MORE While Liverpool fans were horrified by Bond villain Jeff Bezos ominously buying into their club, the Los Angeles Lakers may change hands for the second time in 10 months. Billionaire financier and part-owner of Chelsea, Mark Walter, whose brief reign has included mass lay-offs, increased ticket prices and four federal investigations into his business practices, will make a tidy $2.5bn profit when he sells the Lakers to venture capitalist Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger. Iger is famous for cutting 7,000 jobs at Disney and keeping theme park employees pay disgracefully low, while Kushner is the charmer who was central to Gianni Infantino’s shameless attempt to sell off pieces of the World Cup. A recurring theme here. The commodification of everything and everyone. As flies to wanton boys, cherished institutions that are part of the fabric of society have become the playthings of the investment class. Clubs that are the lifeblood of cities reduced to stock market listings, traded back and forth between greedy plutocrats craving the next big score. The bastard children of Gordon Gekko speculate to accumulate on sport as they might do on oil or precious metals or foreign currencies. One more way of padding the fortune. The demented drive to monetise infects all and explains much. Like the next Spanish Super Cup taking place in Istanbul, the NBA sending the Denver Nuggets to meet the Indiana Pacers in Mexico City this November and the NFL dispatching teams to Rio, Melbourne, Paris, London and Madrid over the coming months. With the World Cup and Champions League bloated and disfigured beyond recognition, the smart money says New York or Boston will host a competitive Premier League game before the decade is out. All part of the same playbook. Grow the market. Amplify sales of overpriced tat. Maximise the return on investment. And studiously ignore the local fans. Indeed, damn all the consequences. Witness the NFL seeking to expand its regular season to 18 games, increasing the brain-damaging workload on already exhausted players just to add another potential zero to television rights packages being squabbled over by Bezos and Iger and others with their snouts in the trough. By the time the 18th game comes around, the Chicago Bears, so-called Monsters of the Midway, will most likely be playing home games in Hammond, Indiana, 27 miles across state lines from fabled Soldier Field. After 105 lucrative years in the Windy City, the club George Halas paid $38,000 for now turns a $200m annual profit and is worth $9bn. The current owners, including some of Halas’s descendants, are upping sticks because the Windy City authorities won’t give them enough tax breaks and handouts to fund a new stadium. All that precious history sacrificed on the altar of the bottom line. The price of everything. The value of nothing. Major League Soccer just announced Larry Berg will be its new commissioner. A private equity billionaire, Berg is part-owner of LAFC, Swansea City and Roma. At last count, chunks of 16 MLS teams belong to other investment capital outfits. A telling stat. It might explain why this money racket is the only national league on earth that doesn’t offer promotion and relegation. Ostensibly set up 30 years ago to grow the game here, this joke shop is now completely run for the benefit of the owners’ bank balances. On Randall’s Island in New York this week and next, the French Football Federation (FFF) is running soccer camps for kids starting at age five. Famous for harvesting talent from the banlieues of Paris and other economically disadvantaged areas in their own country, the FFF is out here charging gullible upper middle-class Americans $107 per day because a couple of the coaches have a cockerel crest on their tracksuits. The grift. Always. Everywhere.