The Cuckoo Problem

The cuckoo has always been a great metaphor. Lay your egg in somebody else's nest and let them do them do the hardwork of upbringing until the chick is ready to fly.

It is, at its simplest, the investment banking model. Invest, grow and IPO for highly concentrated gains, excluding of course those who have done the real work of creating the conditions for the IPO.

At this moment, the European Super League is a gift that just keeps on taking, and perhaps the biggest cuckoo on the block. We take a game born in villages and shaped by fans, and turn it, in a few decades into a business where the owners have absolutely no interest in the game other than as a nest for their financial offspring, and the farce of it is that the motivation behind it is the need to keep feeding their voracious children. What other business I wonder, faced with huge declines in revenue, maintains it's bloated business model?

The cuckoo is a short term visitor and is in decline, driven mainly by lack of food in its n…