“On football as on so many other issues @UKLabour 2019 manifesto is shown to be far seeing and ahead of the curve.” For Labour’s former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott, this Sunday’s news that six English clubs had signed up for a long-vaunted European Super League — a closed shop of fifteen big name, wealthy clubs without promotion or relegation — gave the lie to the idea that sports aren’t political.

Back in 2019, the British press was keen to accuse Labour of overreach by even talking about sports — the Daily Express, for example, ran shrieking headlines about Corbyn’s “communist” plan to “nationalise football clubs . . . starting with Liverpool.” Yet that manifesto has since been shown to be entirely accurate in its diagnosis of the country’s problems with corruption and corporate control — in football and beyond.

It called for football supporters’ trusts to be able to buy shares when their clubs changed owners, and to be able to appoint or dismiss board members. Labour proposals would have mandated that the English Premier League pay 5 percent of its annual television income to grassroots football, and pledged to add women’s football to the list of sporting events that should be broadcast on channels that were free to watch, ban zero hours contracts, and guarantee that all professional clubs pay their staff a living wage.