This is Owen Jones, welcome to the podcast. Now the super league fiasco. What does it tell

us about capitalism? Does this struggle show that football can be reclaimed? What's happened

to football over the last generation? And if this victory can be scored, then why not

apply it elsewhere, where the role of capitalism is equally punicious. Now I talked about this

with Tribune Editor Ronan Burton, sure. Really interesting chat about what's happened,

what's happened and what could happen. Do support us on Patreon and the support function.

Leave us a review and a five star if you want to help other people listen to it. And with

that, here's Ronan. So football has long been embedded in working class communities.

Manchester United was founded by railway men. And you know, if you go back to the 50s,

not to glamourize by any stretch that time, the maximum salary for players was 14 could

a week during the season. It wasn't very much above the average manual wage. And at the

trade union congress, one footballer spoke of the conditions of the professional football

as employment being a kin to slavery. So things have definitely gone from one extreme to

the other. So what happened? How did football, which was so drenched in, you know, in the

ethos of working class life in this country and other countries, what happened to it over a long

period of time in Britain and elsewhere? Sure. I think you have to see football as part

of broader social trends. And obviously, there's a particular story that's going to be told

now and it's accurate. There's a lot to it, which is the commercialisation that runs from

the 90s onwards. The arrival of the Premier League on the scene, which itself is a breakaway

league from the English football league. And the idea behind the Premier League was that

English football had this great commercial potential and possibility that if you aligned

it with the power of broadcast television and the money of Rupert Murdoch, with the elite

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