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Comment by NKosmatos | Hacker News Reader

“Football’s future cannot be dictated by the expectations of those whose first duty is to maximise financial return.” Very well said…replace the word football with internet/technology/web/research/university or so many others and you might understand why this single powerful phrase is so important.

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To my knowledge there's a lot of infrastructure NFP that have not sold their assets: the NICs, IETF, FSF/GNU, Debian, WikiMedia (sort of)

Platitudes sound nice but in the real world you need incentives and there are plenty. Other than real madrid and barcelona and a few italian clubs, very few euro clubs are run as non-profits. Easy to argue that maximizing financial return is the reason football has grown in prominence over the last 20-30 years.

I say that but I also agree i dont think fifa or any of the regional orgs need more or any financial incentives. Keep profits for the club, keep the governing body to governing, and the regional orgs to organizing.

I actually think this is an area where the us could do a lot of good - sweep in, clean out fifa and as many of the regional orgs as you're able (they're connected), and keep the pressure on. Only the US is really able to do this and we hate cheating in sports.

> Other than real madrid and barcelona and a few italian clubs, very few euro clubs are run as non-profits.

Not non-profit per se, but the Bundesliga[1] requires that teams are majority owned by club members and investors are limited to minority ownership.[2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesliga

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50+1_rule

* with a few universally hated exceptions

In Portugal at least, all (I think? At least all the major ones like Benfica, Sporting and Porto) of the clubs are sports associations and are controlled by the club members. This does not mean that there isn’t major money in this, but a club president can get removed by fans, which happened with Porto recently (due to corruption… the club almost went bankrupt).

These clubs are often very old as well, and often were small regional clubs that got big, so they are significant in their cities and do a ton more than just football.

> in the real world you need incentives

There is no implication that "having incentives" must be interpreted as "considering profit maxxing as the first and foremost goal".

Profit motive destroys yet another aspect of life on Earth

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