Give it ten years and the Premiership will be in Beijing
I have a prediction to make - a long-term one, the sort Gordon prefers, not one of these short-term, easy, obvious ones, such as Berbatov will not be at Spurs next season, Ronaldo will not be at Man United two seasons ahead.
It came to me while watching the new Indian cricket league, not that I know anything about cricket. But then I don't know anything about television or modern pop music or film stars or chefs - God, what a lot I don't know about - yet it doesn't stop me looking at all those blurry snaps of celebs at parties in the Evening Standard's magazine and elsewhere and thinking, all these people, and I couldn't name one.
The new Indian Premier League, which might well fail totally, has attracted the world's best cricketers to play for brand-new clubs over a six-week season - and all it's taken to attract them is money, vast amounts of it.
What's fascinating to me is that it's happened in India, not England or Australia. I always assumed England and Oz were the heartlands of cricket. Also they're countries with huge amounts of money plus marketing, advertising, television and business moguls, and those were the obvious cynical prats - I mean visionaries - capable of dreaming up this whole project. I know Indians love the game, but not to the extent of creating this Harlem Globetrotters parody of cricket.
But of course it all makes sense. India is a huge country, far bigger than England, economically buoyant, growing fast, with scores of billionaires willing to invest in something that might make them popular, give them a better global profile, be fun, and make them even more money. In other words, they are behaving like all the other foreign billionaires who have invested in our Premier League.
Now that is short-term, and the money will move on soon, when things change. After all, England is small, only 50 million people. There are bigger countries in Europe, such as Germany with 82 million, or in South America, with Brazil at 190 million. Why aren't their leagues paying the best wages in football? It stands to reason that eventually some other football-mad and also prosperous country will get its financial and marketing act together - and then the world's best players will gravitate there.
It's the money that attracts them, not our weather or food, about which they moan all the time. Andriy Voronin of Liverpool has even been complaining about our medical services, cheeky sod. We can do that, but foreigners can't. The net result, as we all know, is that home-grown players can't get into the Arsenal team or even into the Chelsea youth team which got to the youth final. That did surprise me - eight had been brought from abroad and three from Yorkshire. It's child abduction.
But it won't be a European or South American country which eventually usurps our Prem. India has given us a clue as to what is more likely to happen.
I should have thought about it earlier. Two years ago I did a little interview about football for Chinese national radio - a weekly half-hour radio prog called UK Soccer Review, listened to by 58 million. One little radio prog!
Wait till they've all got TV. Wait till they're all wearing repro shirts. Wait till China is a world superpower with merchandising and media moguls who have trillions to burn.
I give it ten years. In 2018, the top foreigners will have left England and be playing in the CPL - Chinese Premier League, named in English, for global exposure. You read it here first.
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