Behind The Lines with Arthur Snell

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We’re living in an age of the self-confident autocrat: China is rising, President Erdogan coasted to a managed re-election and in the Gulf, the Arab monarchies are riding high on oil prices boosted by Putin’s war in Ukraine. And what do the autocrats do with their money? They use it to buy influence. And one of the ways that they can do this is through football, the most popular sport on the planet.

In 2003 Roman Abramovich, the now-sanctioned Russian billionaire, bought Chelsea football club, setting into a motion a process of flooding the English game with colossal amounts of money. As we know now, and as many suspected for years, Abramovitrch owed his wealth directly to President Putin - so the money that infused English football from this point was effectively looted from the coffers of the Russian state. Russia would not be alone in seeking to use football to burnish its image - in 2008 Abu Dhabi bought Manchester City and Qatar bought Paris Saint Germain three years later. In both cases these small Gulf emirates successfully used football to increase their global reputation and influence. This process appears to have continued, with Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup and the purchase by Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund of Newcastle United as well as the establishment of a new Saudi Pro League, drawing in top players from all over the world. As part of the Newcastle deal, the Premier League appeared to have been given assurances that the Saudi Public Inverstment Fund was separate to the Saudi state, which is patently untrue. What this appears to show is that the English football authorities will believe what they want if it brings in the cash, with little thought for the consequences.

To discuss the geopolitical and sporting implications of these changes I was honoured to be joined by Miguel Delaney, chief football writer at the Independent, who has been researching and writing about the geopolitics of football for several years.

You find Miguel on Twitter @MiguelDelaney and at the Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/author/miguel-delaney

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Vyner Street Productions

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On the 30th August a military coup took place in Gabon in West Africa, dislodging the president Ali Bongo, whose family has controlled the country for nearly 60 years. That military takeover in Gabon followed swiftly on the heels of a coup in Niger, one month earlier. There seems to have been a spate of these in the Sahel region of Africa. Indeed, within a period of just over two years, every country in a 5000km line from Conakry on Africa’s West Coast to Port Sudan on the East, has experienced a military coup.

And there’s a bigger picture here: democracy around the world isn’t doing very well. In the United States, Donald Trump’s chaotic rule ended in rejected election results and a violent insurrection. In Britain, we have had multiple prime ministers without a general election. Across Europe authoritarian populists contest - and sometimes win - elections. In Hungary, Poland, Israel and turkey, we see independent institutions under threat and in some cases entirely circumscribed. And of course in Ukraine, democracy is fighting for its life against a militarised fascist regime.

So this week I wanted to get the big picture, to understand what is the health of global democracy and what are its prospects. And who better to talk to about this than Brian Klaas, who is an expert on African coups, a politics professor at UCL, and author of the brilliant book Corruptible, who gets power and how it changes us. I hope you’ll find our conversation interesting - it was, and this surprised me - a lot more encouraging than I’d expected.

You can find Brian’s book here: https://brianpklaas.com/corruptible He is on Twitter @brianklaas and his Substack https://www.forkingpaths.co/ is also worth a read.

Thanks again for listening to this podcast. Please subscribe and spread the word. You can leave comments and thoughts on my Substack here https://arthursnell.substack.com/ I’m also on Twitter @snellarthur and now on Bluesky @snellarthur.bsky.social

Vyner Street Productions

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