The weekend football ate itself!

Football has eighty million reasons to have lost touch with its roots and reality this weekend. The game of the people. The game that has prided itself as being the same on the park pitch on a Saturday to the floodlights of Old Trafford has gone crazy. Cristiano Ronaldo was purchased for eighty million pounds by Real Madrid. To put this in context Newcastle United football club who until the end of May in same league as Manchester United was recently put up for sale for one hundred million pounds with the common consensus being that it could be purchased for less. That is right one of the twenty richest clubs in the world could be purchased for the same cost as a player.

Why have Real Madrid done this? Jealousy. Barcelona won the champions league and Real Madrid can not stand it. The hatred goes back to the Spanish civil war and has driven the avarice in football to new levels. As I write this Madrid have spent 139 million pounds on new players. This has huge repercussions on the rest of the game has it has already inflated the prices of players all over the world. The gap between rich and poor is now greater than ever. Madrid has made this move during a worldwide recession.

Football has gone success mad to such a degree that it is hard to imagine where it will stop the pursuit of success has made it so that clubs would rather be in so much debt than think about failing. Their are exceptions to this rule. Arsenal football club have built a new stadium and rather than buying great new players are paying off the stadium. Every club in the premiership is leveraged to the hilt. The problem with all this money sloshing around out at the top is the fact that the bottom of the game is forgotten. Not just non league football but the level where kids play football in the small junior clubs.

Maybe the ridiculous spending is the turning point for lots of fans, not the fans do not want success but the thought is that when a player earns more than a fan could earn in a hundred lifetimes. Sky sports a company built on the subscriptions of football fans is already feeling the pain, despite paying a record amount of money for the rights to broadcast football in the UK the number of subscriptions have dropped. The clubs of the premiership have struggled to sell season tickets. Football is eating itself, there can be no doubt of that. Will their be an economic realignment? Probably not but the connection with the local community is now hanging by a thread.