Liverpool Football Club is over for me

I’ve spent the last eighteen years telling anyone who cared to know that Manchester City (previously a football team that I was quite fond of) had shot to the bottom of my list, having been acquired by the Abu Dhabi United Group to become the PR arm of the United Aram Emirates. And I’ve spent the last five saying that Newcastle (formerly Everyone’s Second Favourite Team) were now my second least favourite, having been acquired by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia as a PR exercise to make us all forget they’re a regime that chops up journalists. It distressed me that the vast majority of Newcastle fans just shrugged, welcomed the cash influx, and carried on as normal.

Now my own team — Liverpool, who I have loved for very nearly 50 years — is in the process of being acquired by one of the worst people on the planet. At the time of writing, a consortium including Jeff Bezos owns 38% of my club. (Ha! My club! As if.) And if Bezos alone isn’t bad enough for you, the consortium also includes billionaire Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. It’s also being credibly reported that the Bezos consortium holds an option to buy a controlling stake.

The club supposedly gets £1.65 billion, which is ridiculous. If anything is guaranteed to make the Premier League more of a Haves vs. Haves Not competition, it’s a cash injeetion of that magnitude. It will also cheapen whatever future success the club achieves. I’m just not interested in that.

Now. I am weak. I know I’m weak. I know that if I let myself, I’ll get sucked into this coming season despite myself. (Just as I got sucked into the recent bloated and corrupt World Cup.)

That’s why I am posting this publicly. I need to commit to being the kind of fan that I wanted all those Newcastle fans to be, otherwise I’m in greater danger of weakening. So I’m saying it in public: no more watching Liverpool for me. No more caring about what Dominik Szoboszlai gets up to, or how long Virgil van Dijk can last, or whether Harvey Elliot gets a fair chance.

I’m not abandoning the club. The club abandoned me.

Or to put it another way, I’m not abandoning my club. I’m abandoning Jeff Bezos’s club.

R.I.P.