Behind The Lines Ep 6 - Still Beautiful? The Cynical World of Globalised Football

Behind The Lines with Arthur Snell · Sep 28, 2023 · 1h 3m

We’re living in an age of the self-confident autocrat: China is rising, President Erdogan coasted to a managed re-election and in the Gulf, the Arab monarchies are riding high on oil prices boosted by Putin’s war in Ukraine. And what do the autocrats do with their money? They use it to buy influence. And one of the ways that they can do this is through football, the most popular sport on the planet.

In 2003 Roman Abramovich, the now-sanctioned Russian billionaire, bought Chelsea football club, setting into a motion a process of flooding the English game with colossal amounts of money. As we…