1. What is a club in any case?
Not the building or the clubs or the people who represent it.
Not the TV contracts, the get out clauses, the marketing dept. or the executive boxes.
It's the noise, the passion and the pride in your city. It's the feeling of belonging.
It's a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the first time, holding his fathers hand and gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and without being able to do a thing about it, he falls in love and is absorbed.
Without the fans, football will be passionless. "Will you have fries with that?".
2. What's the new business model?
The clubs compete against each other in a competition where clubs of similar strength are grouped into "leagues". The intense competition between clubs has led to big debt from player transfers and from a club being taken over when a new owner injects equity.
But of course what counts is the ability to service this debt from turnstile receipts, paraphernalia sales and TV licensing deals.
What's happened is that Netflix and Amazon have come along with new money for a new super league, backed by JP Morgan on behalf of the banks who want their money back.
3. Who will win - the new super league or the old leagues?
There is no stronger force in society than the sense of belonging. It is axiomatic to the word "society". However, it can be so diluted by including ever larger numbers of fans that the passion is reduced in each of us to a trickle. That puts the clubs' accountants in charge and money not passion calls the shots. That's business.
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