Football Leaks paints a depressing picture of the state of our game

The latest round of Football Leaks paint a depressing picture of the corruption plaguing the beautiful game.

The Football Leaks have football leaked, and now we can say for certain what we have long been forced to say for merely almost certain: Everything is bad. Manchester City’s owners are especially bad. PSG’s owners might be even worse. UEFA is as toothless a little governing body as has ever rigged a bidding process.

And the money? The money talks, it sings. It stands up and walks around and boards a private jet and meets a foreign dignitary for lunch and maybe buys him a nice new watch and even considers establishing some sort of FIFA-independent European Super League, all so that it may go on talking forever, at increasingly unethical volumes.

We knew this, though, didn’t we? Kind of, sort of, mostly. And so the first question raised by the latest round of leaks, the most high profile of which were published in a four-part series in Der Spiegel last week, is whether these new details actually change anything, if they’re capable of spurring anyone to meaningful action.

To be sure, the details have done something. They have given us specific examples of specific ethics breaches in the absence of which we had previously been left only to gesture vaguely in the direction of The Badness. Our old corruption word cloud — image laundering, Qatari sovereign fund, migrant labor, Gianni Infantino — has been rendered into intelligible English.

But the resulting information hardly indicates a way forward. Indeed, the two biggest stories so far — that UEFA let City and PSG determine their own punishments for violating its signature legislation, and that Europe’s richest clubs have been in talks to establish a Super League — are a perfect illustration of the self-perpetuating character of the corruption at play here.

Because FIFA and UEFA fear the Super League, the problem is not (or not only) that City and PSG (and presumably any other super-rich clubs who feel like it) can get away with violating UEFA rules, but that UEFA has an incentive to let them. A charade is beneficial to everyone. Or everyone that matters, anyway, which is to say the super wealthy.

There is of course one solution, possibly only one solution. A massive, possibly global, organized action by fans. A collective decision to stop watching the sport, to stop providing these organizations the sort of money that allows them to do whatever they want. Even then, we’d have to wait until the current TV deals run out before anything changed.

And this is perhaps the saddest fact of all. We’re not responsible for this state of affairs, and yet this state of affairs would never have come to pass if not for our unwillingness to do, even simply to say, anything about it. We have been, in a word, used. Maybe now we can at least take some solace in knowing exactly how.