We don't know what, you know, what the... eventual makeup of the squad will look like but Liverpool has already been in the news you know in the last few weeks because at this conversation we'll really try to think about the role of you know say private equity in global football and Liverpool is a useful example for that so let's chat about you know some immediate matters a third of Liverpool a little over a third of Liverpool football club is now controlled by a consortium that counts Jeff Bezos among its leading faces Really, the big point, you know, to begin this conversation, and I'd like to begin first with Tony, is that how big a challenge that is for Liverpool in terms of its future operations as a football club, and should the club's fans be worried? That's

a tough one, and I tend to be a little sanguine about ownership in the sense of we can't control ownership.

Football was monetized, commoditized, financialized actually is the correct term I'm looking for, quite some time ago.

So you think, well, why does a consortium...

Why do hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms, et cetera, buy football clubs? What's the value of the asset? And it's not rent.

I mean, I think, maybe this is wishful thinking, it's not so much rent extractions.

As in, they're not looking for the revenues that the club generates by virtue of its share of the TV revenues, which is the primary revenue stream.

Anyone has guesses? Is it like one of the promoters said? Is it Ipswich? Ipswich.

He also hosted a podcast for Al Jazeera about the 2018 World Cup called The Game of Our Lives, and this time around, he'll be on our show often as a kind of resident scholar on football, soccer, whatever you'd like to call it.

It's a great honor to be your World Cup analyst.

I've been writing about the World Cup and obsessively following football for 40 years now.

So I've never played the game, I've never coached the game, but I have been in the pews most of my adult, even most of my [laughs] childhood life.

[cheering] So definitely, as a journalist, I've always been very aware of the underlying meanings of what happens on a football field, and the way I think about the game is most inspired by something that the great Trinidadian political writer CLR James once wrote about cricket.

He was trying to capture the anti-colonial meaning of cricket, and he had used this aphorism, "What do they of cricket know who only cricket know?" I.e., you don't really understand what's happening in a football stadium unless you know about everything that's happening outside of that football stadium.

Are you expecting any protests or moments like that, which were definitely attention-grabbing, this time around?

I would be shocked if there weren't, uh, moments of protest.

What is it, Tony, about this, this game? And is it the same wherever you go?

Yes.

And the reason is I think that this game has been globalized to the point that because of satellite television, I think this really begins in, in the 1990s, that it facilitates a global civil society sharing in real time a set of experiences that are unprecedented, unprecedented in our ability to share them.

So when one point five billion people watch the World Cup together in real time, that was never possible, uh, you know, forty, fifty years ago.

Um, that essentially everybody is gasping at the same moment.

Everybody is cheering.

Everybody is elated.

... is, forgive me, a little naive.