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Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

I found it interesting how everyone agreed that football should not be run solely for profit and fans need to have a say in how clubs are run. It United both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. But applying the same sentiment to corporations seems controversial.

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Playing the devil's advocate:

Football has its roots in amateur and local associations with little or nothing to do with profit.

In fact, only in the 1990s (with the explosion of cable TV and sports channels) did it started becoming a huge industry.

Corporations do not share the same pedigree, so they aren't "betraying" their roots.

That is just a matter of social convention.

We could all agree that corporations should be socially run and football clubs should be private corporations.

People are saying that football clubs are rooted in society in the very same country whose leader once said “There is no such thing as a society”.

The world is what we make of it.

> Playing the devil's advocate

I think my employer will only pay for one more comment :)

I agree, but most things in life are social conventions. The problem is not identifying them, but changing them.

Private run corporations tend to add a lot of value to society. Private run football clubs not so much, people prefer their amateur run clubs. You could say the first sentence isn't true, but that is what people think and why they voted like this.

Private run corporations that don’t add value tend to have a hard time, even if it takes a few years.

Recall Microsoft’s much-hated dominance 20-30 years ago and how they’ve had to change.

Think of your own behaviour as a consumer, always trying to buy the best and the most for the least. You’re training the cybernetic organisms known as corporations to add value conspicuously and voluminously... or die.

Many private corporations creates a bottleneck and then squeeze it of value and gets money that way. They don't go under, they thrive since people have no options but go through that bottleneck. Using democratic votes to decide when to stop companies from doing that makes perfect sense.

Agreed, especially if legal machinations are used to create the bottleneck. True competition is the key here.

In my day job as a consultant, I see many small and medium corporations, and I can tell you that the successful ones are the lean & mean value creators

Value is a highly subjective term. Some claim that social media companies don’t add value. But they continue to thrive. Even tobacco companies are only dying because of extensive regulation. They add short term value maybe. But in the long term many dont. And by the time they die the damage is done.

There are also counter factuals. The value a corporation prevents from being created due to monopolies or lobbying. That cannot be measured and maybe greater than the value added.

People vote to regulate companies they feel detract value, like Tobacco or in this case Football. Your point doesn't contradict mine.

Equally I could say that football is, and should remain, a private activity, which governments should leave well alone.

If fans want to buy or create and run football clubs they are free to do so. If private investors want to invest in football and buy or create and run football clubs they are free to do so.

I don't think there should a way football 'should' be run, again I think this is a private activity that may be organised and run however people like within the law.

The same goes for corporations in general.

Well there is always the is-ought problem. And we get around that via social consensus. There was nothing really wrong with the super league idea from a pure capitalist perspective.

In fact according to neo liberal capitalist logic this is the best way to run anything including football.

Many major clubs have had issues with the way the Champions League works for years and it is a well-known problem. The ESL is just the latest symptom.

It's not ideological or "neo liberal capitalist logic", though I agree this is mostly a business problem.

But even at a more basic level this is about liberty. I don't see a fundamental difference between clubs wanting to set up the ESL and people in a town wanting to set up a tournament among them of whatever sport or legal activity they please. The State has no business interfering.

Now of course the fans (as fans and customers) can equally make their voice heard and vote with their feet if they are not interested.

My only concern here is this attempt by the government to dictate how football should be run.

yes, and also no persons is dying for decisions making on his soccer team favorite. here is not healthcare or automobiles, where bad decision are costing lives. it is game and there is no justifying aj interfere by governments.

And belief neoliberalism is starting to crack, which is why there was such widespread negativity to this announcement. People have realized that neoliberalism is just a way to funnel wealth and power into the hands of the few, and surprise they don’t like that.

The sport in general and football in particular were historically subsised by goverments. Quite a lot in some places.

Yes because the analogy doesn’t make sense. Can you explain how the two things are equivalent?

Football club - a collective enterprise rooted in a society run in the service of collective goals.

A large corporation - a collective enterprise rooted in a society run in the service of collective goals.

You are being deliberately imprecise to make them seem equivalent. While some clubs are indeed corporations (with shares) they are mostly treated as associations, whose goal it is to advance the sport competitively, win the various competitions and deliver good entertainment. The primary goal of corporations is realizing good returns for investors.

That goal is a social convention. The CEOs of the worlds largest corporations themselves recently discussed moving away from this as a goal to something they call “stakeholder capitalism”.

We see this in debates about moving supply chains back on shore and focusing on domestic job creation. Those are not legitimate complaints if corporations and their profit is an unquestionable moral principle.

yes they are legitimate goal even for pursuing only profit. supply chain on shore is maybe in some way more reslilent, with especialy in geopolitics. job creating is leading to more prosperousing in society and more customer. also maybe these things are reduce likelihood of being smacked with unfortunate regulating.

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