Hello and welcome to Downstream, the show that says if politics is downstream from culture,

then well with the Bechton works. It's become something of a cliche to say the games gone

in response to everything from var to handball to too many or not enough red cards, but perhaps

maybe this time Yada might be right. With Sunday's announcement of a European super league

formed by 12 breakaway clubs, including the so-called Big Six of the Premier League,

people starting to wonder if this might indeed be the end of football as we know it,

and perhaps it's been a long time coming. Since Russian billionaires,

Roman Abramovich's purchase of Chelsea in 2003, football clubs have become lucrative

investment options for oligarchs, oil barons and super wealthy conglomerates. While the romance

of the game remains tied to increasingly foggy notions of community, tradition and neighborhood,

the reality is that in many ways football reflects the worst of the global economy.

It's a marketing tool for fossil fuel giants and corrupt regimes, a revenue generating machine

for American corporate interests, and what was once the people's game has now morphed into

something else entirely. With me to discuss the super league breakaway and how sport created by

the poor was stolen, really, by the rich, is Lawrence McKenna, podcaster, YouTuber and Twitch

streamer. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks a lot for having me. This is great.

I've been waiting to get more football and Navarre, and this is just a flimsy pretext.

I absolutely saw that. The message came through and I was like, oh, this is ideal. You are

going to pretend that we're talking about politics. It's like, oh, she sent me this message six

months ago saying, why do you have time? Exactly. The moment will come. I first saw you on the

kickoff, and there was that clip of you which went super viral recently, which was ripping into

the greed and the kind of quite mercenary logics governing the modern game. So where else can

...