Gstaad
Purity in a sport does not mix with popularity, and defending the former is anathema to the hucksters, crooks and profiteers who make up the latter. In this I do not include the sportswriters of serious newspapers, with whom I actually sympathise. They see what’s going on, but they have to report on sport and there are, after all, libel laws to protect the guilty. In the birthplace of sport — where else but Greece — football is as rotten as anywhere on earth, except in places like Thailand, where betting comes first and sport second.
When my father ‘owned’ a premier division team during the early Seventies — AEK — the various agents and advisers of the club skimmed millions off him by bringing in South American ‘Greeks’ to be inspected and sold to the club.
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