Gorby has a Lot to Answer for As Football Loses Its Soul

Evening Standard - London › September 05, 2008

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Summary

MANY people might be held accountable for the transformation of domestic football into the bedazzling, bamboozling madhouse that reached a new crescendo of lunacy this week but I blame Mikhail Gorbachev.

It was all very well disbanding the USSR, and quite possibly a minor relief for the countless millions freed from the yoke of the communism in which the very hands-on FA chairman Lord Triesman once believed. But would it have killed Gorby to have had a thought for how ending the Cold War might affect English football? Everything changed the day Roman Abramovich arrived with all those billions from the mineral reserves of the former Soviet Union. He opened those floodgates, and here we are, a few years on, drowning in the utterly surreal fact that Manchester City is now the planet's richest and thus potentially most successful club.

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Extract

Gorby has a Lot to Answer for As Football Loses Its Soul

I ask you, Manchester City. "Oh, it's bleedin' terrible at Maine Road," observed a certain Mancunian comic when his team was maroon...

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