Football is no longer the people’s gameFor more than a century, English football carried a romantic, almost mythic status as “the people’s game.” The Premier League ‘Big Six’ — Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham — sit atop a system designed, whether by design or consequence, to keep everyone else in their place. The roots stretch back to the formation of the Premier League in 1992, when the biggest clubs broke away from the Football League to capture a greater share of television revenue. The Glazer family’s leveraged buyout of Manchester United in 2005 loaded the club with debt while extracting hundreds of millions in dividends and fees. I fear the “people’s game” will no longer be for the people, but rather the rich, the corporations, the pop stars.