New book: No Questions Asked

My new book – ‘No Questions Asked: How football joined the crypto con’ – is released on 22nd January 2024.

The blurb…

No Questions Asked is the fascinating, bizarre and disturbing story of what happened when English football talked itself into believing that crypto could make us all rich.

Based on the author’s agenda-setting reporting, No Questions Asked is a forensic investigation of greed, lies, negligence and fraud in the world’s most popular sporting league.

The book uncovers an extraordinary series of failures, as club after club ignored their responsibilities to their fans and signed deals with sellers of high-risk, unregulated financial products that almost universally collapsed in value, costing investors billions of pounds.

No Questions Asked is an incredible account of cryptomania – a tale of fraudsters, false identities, fan tokens, ghost ship firms, bogus investments, pyramid schemes, NFTs, gigantic losses, organised crime and the world-famous football clubs who threw their fans to the wolves.

‘Football has always had more than its fair share of scams, chancers, and con artists, but with the arrival of cryptocurrency it has gone to a new level. No Questions Asked explains how crypto and its evangelists tried to colonise football, and provides all the questions football clubs should have put to them.’

David Goldblatt, author of’ The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football’ and ‘The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football.’

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If you want a taster, you can read the first chapter for free here: https://theuglygame.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/no-questions-asked-intro-chapter-martin-calladine.pdf

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If you’re a journalist and would like to interview me about the book, you can reach me @uglygame on Twitter.

American Hustle: The Moscow Connection – Project Big Picture and the end of football as we know it

Inside man Rick Parry is planning the sporting heist of the century.

In the mid-90s, when the Premier League was in its infancy, Russian President Boris Yeltsin was in trouble. He was struggling with a stagnant economy which meant poor poll ratings and a dire shortage of funds for his re-election campaign.

Rick Parry briefing EFL clubs on his plans

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – Socios, West Ham and the magic beans of digital fan engagement

Originally, the blockchain was going to destroy government, undermine the global financial system and create a libertarian paradise. Ten years on, it’s reduced to helping the Dildo Brothers monetise their much put upon fans.

Shaun Through The Looking Glass – why the EFL’s ‘full strength’ rules are among the strangest in all of football

The Checkatrade Trophy rules oblige league teams to play a ‘full strength’ side. And yet the EFL has revised these rules so as to make them impossible to breach…

“He’s taken us as far as he can.”

Is it wrong not to want your club to be in the Premier League? Is it old-fashioned to just enjoy the game and be happy your club still exists?

Harvey Headbanger – the EFL chief presses on even though his plans lie in ruins

The numbers are in: Shaun Harvey and his Checkatrade Trophy have failed. Both must be scrapped.

With just the final left to play, we can begin to measure the success or otherwise of this season’s changes to the Checkatrade Trophy. By bringing in young players from top academies, did it – as promised – revitalise a struggling competition? Did it inject new excitement for fans, new money for clubs and new hope for the future of the England national team?

Temples of Boomer Esiason – fandom, shattered bones and long-distance sporting love

After thirty years, I’m going to see my team. For the first time…

Stockport Syndrome – Football League rejigs, regulatory capture and why Shaun Harvey is failing

League football in England has some serious problems. These include, in no particular order: the generally poor financial state of the clubs; the chasm between the Football League’s revenues and those of the Premier League; numerous rogue owners; increasingly uneconomic academies; a lack of investment in grassroots facilities and coaching; unaffordably high ticket prices; and glacial progress on fan ownership and safe standing.

Save the children – how a simple change to Financial Fair Play could improve youth development

The Financial Fair Play (FFP) initiative was supposed to help make the game financially sustainable. But, in an effort to encourage clubs to invest in youth, Uefa and the Premier League have inadvertently turned academies in profit centres, creating incentives for them to scoop up ever more players, even ones with little prospect of making the first team. It’s time we stopped rewarding this damaging behaviour…

Why does the Premier League attract all the worst people from the NFL?

Among the many unseemly aspects of the news that the self-proclaimed ‘Big 5’ had been caught discussing a breakaway European Super League, was the fact that they were discussing it with Stephen Ross, the owner of the Miami Dolphins. It led me to wonder why it is that it’s primarily the NFL’s worst owners who are most interested in the Premier League. (I’ve also written about why I think the league might actually be a good idea.)

What Liverpool have done is wrong, but they had no choice – thoughts on Liverpool’s pricing announcement and the need for regulation.

My first thought yesterday on reading about Liverpool’s new ticket prices was, as yours might have been: isn’t it sad to see Liverpool, one of the world’s great clubs, saddled with owners who seem happy to raise prices despite taking the club no nearer to success.

Once the anger subsidies, though, you recognise that pure greed is rarely a motivation behind someone’s actions, especially successful businessmen.

Building a title-winning team: an NFL vs Premier League comparison

The NFL’s commitment to competitive balance isn’t an abstract idea. It will be taking the field for the Super Bowl shortly.

Superficial success – why you’re told everything is great, even though you can’t afford to buy a house and football stinks

We’re often told that English football is more successful than it’s ever been. Can this really be right?

How competitive is the Premier League? And how competitive are other European leagues?

It’s a common complaint that English football is getting more predictable. Has there ever been a time when so few teams have had a shot at winning the title?

To find out, I decided to have a look at some other leagues going back to the end of the Second World War.

Is it already too late to save the Premier League from itself?

Interesting things are happening in Scotland as fans struggle to reclaim football and revive their teams. But in England, despite the groundswell of fan disillusionment, it may already be too late to save the Premier League from itself…

‘After Fifa, it’s time to bring reform home to England’: a piece for TheSecretFootballer.com

Below is a guest piece I wrote recently for The Secret Footballer’s site.

We are all piling-in on Fifa, Qatar and Russia – and rightly so in my view. But I think we need to guard against the idea that the problems are, effectively, the result of a greater propensity for and tolerance of corruption in other cultures. English football, I argue, needs reform now to safeguard it against following Fifa into the mire…

Piece for TheSecretFootballer.com: ‘Failure is not an option’

Below is a guest piece I wrote recently for The Secret Footballer’s site.

Looking at youth development policy, it was published in the week that Richard Scudamore declared that the Premier League has just two metrics for its success: attendance and global viewing figures. In the piece, I examine the effectiveness of the Premier League’s EPPP and the FA’s B teams proposal, and then question the assumptions that what’s good for the top PL sides is good for the national side and for the rest of football generally and that, even if it isn’t, the needs of the PL outweigh the needs of lower-division football.

To me it’s pretty clear that policymaking in this area, as with so many others in football, needs a much broader definition of success…

‘The shirt off your back’ – a piece for FAN on why the Premier League should have to share merchandising revenue

Below is a piece I wrote for The Football Action Network (FAN) on football’s finances. With the new TV deal announced, I wanted to challenge the notion that, while this money should be shared, other sources of income should be considered the sole property of clubs. It is the league, I argue, that enriches the top clubs, not the other way round…

Piece on competitive balance for The Football Action Network: ‘A fork in the road’

Below is a piece I wrote for The Football Action Network (FAN), an important new pressure group aiming for top-to-bottom reform of the game in England, starting by making football part of the general election campaign.

The piece looks at sporting competitiveness in different leagues by tracing the fortunes of Huddersfield Town and Green Bay, two pre-war titans in their respective sports…

On the necessity of destroying the Premier League’s pre-eminence

I recently wrote a piece for The Secret Footballer website about 5 lessons the Premier League could learn from the NFL. It was meant to provoke and entertain by showcasing some ideas, big and small, that the Premier League could benefit from considering. (And to help sell my book, of course.)

17. “I’m going all in with Andy Impey.”- Nostalgia, club ownership and the rules of the Ian Culverhouse game.

Because there’s stability of ownership.

Nostalgia is form of psychic defence mechanism: the inexorable attachment to the mistaken belief that things in the past were better gives us mental shelter from the awfulness of the present. Thanks to the internet – where all new technologies are pioneered by pornography, popularised by hipsters and then polluted with presenile reminiscence by the middle-aged public – nostalgia is better than it’s ever been. For football fans, in whom nostalgia rises to the level of a mental disorder, it’s doubly so.

And thank God, because without it I’d have to care about Alan Pardew nearly headbutting someone. I’d have to have an opinion about the remarkable success of the Southampton youth academy. I’d have to give real thought to Demba Ba. And why would I want to do that when I could be thinking about Ian Culverhouse?