Football Goes Peaky Blinders

Peaky Blinders is the only decent drama that the BBC has produced in decades.

Combining the war criminalities and state terrorism of Winston Churchill and the Irish Office, police brutality, communist takeovers of the Unions, the fixing of horseracing (both on-course and off), the schisms of the IRA in the Irish Civil War and the role of gypsies on the peripheries of society, the show is pure theatre...
... just like top flight football.

Much of football is no longer sport but theatre and there are many in the game who are happy that this triumph of spectacle over integrity has been achieved.
And there are arguments from the moneyheads that this theatre is greater than integrity if it enhances the brand.

But spectacle has darker sides - the linking of agreed match outcomes to multi-billion pound betting markets and the winning of titles.

Take two recent games...

Leicester City's 5-3 win over Manchester United was pure spectacle. But the result was in the market pre-match via insider trading by an individual on the field of play. This match was fixed despite the drama.

Juventus 3 Roma 2 was a hell of a watch but Juve won via two penalties that simply were not penalties as neither occurred in the area and the second one wasn't even a foul.

Rudi Garcia (the Roma manager who was sent to the stands for mimicking the playing of a violin after the first fake penalty): "It's a shame that the penalty boxes are 19 yards here. Perhaps it's time to help the referees work out when it's a goal or a penalty. This is the 21st Century, a foul is outside or it's inside [the area], simple. You can have replays at pitchside."

Francesco Totti: "For years the same old incidents keep happening. I don't know if we were beaten by referees, but we certainly were not beaten by Juventus tonight... Juventus should have their own league as by hook or by crook they always win."

But video technology will create integrity and, for different reasons, the criminal on the field of play at Leicester and the Old Lady of Turin do not want integrity...
... they want matchfixing.