Why London’s football clubs keep rolling on the back of capital’s riches | Barney Ronay

‘This is a sport geared around money, an environment in which London’s extreme disproportionate wealth can’t help but begin to exert its own gravity’

As Samuel Johnson said: when a man is tired of London, he’s probably been there for about half an hour or so. And what a city London has become these days, with its restaurants, its tall buildings, its brain-mangling weight of financial and social pressures. The fact is, and I write as someone who has lived here all his life, these days it feels as though nobody really loves or even likes London that much. Not least because London doesn’t actually want to be liked, but presents itself instead as a beautiful, frightening, frictionless economic machine.

A city founded on trade and commodities finds itself given over more or less completely to both, populated by those forced to endure the city out of economic necessity, and headed up by a sharp-elbowed uber-population of the well-heeled and the hungry. Spend enough time here and you quickly realise that the old saying there’s an arsehole in every village isn’t true any more, because they’ve all left and gone to live in London, a city whose turbines run on arseholes, that positively seeks them out, promising not only to enrich them but to comfort them with the presence of others.

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via Chelsea | The Guardian http://ift.tt/1t5J3pC