talking sport 620

Why do these idiots keep buying football clubs?

Looking at Portsmouth there seem two types of businessman: the normal ones and the ones who get involved in football
Sulaiman al-Fahim
Sulaiman al-Fahim clearly thought he'd bagged a bargain after buying Portsmouth for £1. Photograph: Matthew Childs/Action Images

The week has seen a peculiar bleeding together of its two big stories. As Portsmouth stood shivering on the steps of the High Court it was hard to avoid the comparison with poor old half-naked Toni Terry, painfully aerobicised on some Middle Eastern beach, dazed and betrayed and with only a small jewelled bikini to keep her upright, but still somehow filled with a painful sense of hope.

The most striking discovery has been the lack of any kind of narrative in Portsmouth's implosion. The facts just sit there, pointlessly. Sulaiman al-Fahim bought the club for £1 and owned it for 43 days. Ali al-Faraj bought it and never went there once. Lots of other people, most of them unusual sounding, have also done strange things. And in the middle of this you keep coming back to a single unanswered question that perhaps holds the key. Why do all these idiots keep buying football clubs?

"Idiots" shouldn't be taken the wrong way. Many of these people are proper businessmen who no doubt own fax machines and talk on the phone while frowning and perusing documents. Idiots is more a term of affection – and also of category distinction for people like me whose only knowledge of "businessmen" until now has tended to come through football club takeovers. In the end you come to believe the world of "business" is made up entirely of furtive, shiny-suited men with vague and diverse "interests" who may have at one time fallen foul of the Kazakhstani housing benefit fraud detection authorities. Those people you see on the tube with zip-up attaché cases. Your friends with proper jobs. This is what they do.

Reading the details of the Portsmouth hearing I finally began to get sense that perhaps there might be two types of businessmen out there: ones who work in the normal world and do things like run the second biggest supplier of electrical fuse wire in Scandinavia. And the other type of businessman, the ones who get involved in football clubs. I'm no economist, and this is probably a technical term I've picked up from somewhere, like bulls and bears and stags, but for some reason the word "idiots" just keeps coming back.

The point is we shouldn't be cross with these idiots or blame them. It's not their fault that modern football is a lure for the confused; that it operates like an inverted episode of Dragons' Den, reversing the usual dynamic of a man bowling in with a plan for a kind of in-car air freshener that smells of concentrated essence of slightly dusty car and being told: "You seem furtive and crazed. For that reason I'm out." In football it's the other way round; the fruitcakes are the ones with the money. All that the people in the big chairs have to do is say: "Yes, brilliant, particularly the bit about ready-mouldered lozenges that can be dropped straight into the gear-knob well."

With this in mind I suggest we introduce a new fit-and-proper-person test that instantly disqualifies from owning a football club anyone who actually wants to own a football club. This is for their own good and can be justified on grounds of idiocy-probability. Only people who have no interest in owning clubs will ever get the chance. Your unmarried aunt who wears leather lace-ups and is brusque and sensible and collects coupons; she can own a football club. Although, let's face it, she's unlikely to want to because it's such an entirely random, business-insensible process, not to mention gorged and decadent and wrung out.

Which is why somebody really should warn these idiots. Somebody should tell them they're going to end up selling up for £1 and then being linked to something confusing, perhaps involving Nigeria. That all they can expect is a chimera of briefly flattering idiot celebrity. And that … Ah.

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