English football is an anomaly

Attanasio might be a clever, disciplined operator in the world of American franchise sport and there’s plenty of evidence for that. But that world runs on a completely different logic. Baseball, like most U.S. sports, is a closed circuit. No promotion, no relegation, no genuine local peril. It’s built to protect investors, not identities.

English football isn’t built that way. It’s messy, emotional, geographically rooted, and still shaped by its working-class birth. There is a book worth reading called ‘The End of the Terraces’ which talks about how English clubs were never “brands” to be optimised but civic institutions, born from place and class. loyalty isn’t rational, it’s ancestral. You inherit it. You don’t shop for it.

That’s what Attanasio doesn’t yet get. He’s walking into a moral economy, not a market. In baseball, a team can move cities and everyone just shrugs and buys new merch. Try that in England and you’ll have people chaining themselves to the gates. The whole culture runs on a kind of collective madness that makes perfect business sense only when you stop treating it as business at all.

American owners always underestimate that tension. They think they’re buying a sports property, but what they’re really buying is a set of memories, grudges, accents, and ghosts.

Norwich isn’t Milwaukee with yellow shirts.

Posted By: Canarrojo on October 27th 2025 at 17:38:25

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