“Enshittification” is a word coined in 2022 by Canadian author, journalist and blogger Cory Doctorow to describe the relentless decline of products and services over time. Originally, he was particularly referring to online enterprises, which start by attracting users with high-quality and good value offerings before soon becoming just an advertising vehicle for big business and ultimately ending up as a profiteering rip-off flogging low-grade rubbish to enrich their shareholders and executives.

Doctorow identified some of the most obvious examples of this in the insatiable and unregulated US Tech sector:
Airbnb: Began as a cheap and popular alternative to hotels, until the start-up capital was spent and the bargain prices disappeared. Having garnered a captive market, Airbnb prices are now frequently higher than hotel prices – all for the privilege of fewer amenities, extra fees, untrustworthy advertising, hidden cameras, draconian rules and non-existent quality control.
Amazon: The retailer wooed customers by selling goods and delivery charges well below cost price. Then, having established a huge base of both customers and sellers and running an effective monopoly of the book, e-book and audio book markets, Amazon remorselessly raised prices and squeezed bigger and bigger fees out of sellers while its website became dominated by advertisers who paid to be high up the search rankings.
Dating Apps: Supposedly designed to matchmake gullible people looking for lurve, the ‘dating’ scam quickly sussed out that happily paired-off couples are no longer paying customers. So, the opposite incentive became paramount: keep them single and thus forever monetised, forking out for a cruel experience of endless rejections and failures.
Facebook: Facebook’s free service lured millions – and that turned into a cunning stunt, making it extremely difficult to leave the social media site as that would mean leaving ones ‘friends’ and established networks. Once users were prisoners, the material people wanted to see was buried under an onslaught of advertising, algorithms and metrics as feeds were flooded with sponsored content, misinformation, far-right politics and general corporate crap.
Google: With few ads and relevant results, Google became the foremost search engine. Massive perversion of the site then ensued as everything entered in the search box was optimised to come up with commercial results that benefitted Google and its advertising customers, while the actual topic being searched for was relegated to distant pages far down the pecking order. Rigging the ad market and sacking thousands of staff, Google then shifted to search inquiries being answered by bots, churning out AI slop that shows you what it wants you to see not what you asked for.
Netflix: After Netflix spent billions making sure it won the streaming wars it wielded its quasi-monopolistic position to raise prices, introduce ads, block password sharing and ditch any originality in favour of dumbed-down brain rot.
Twitter/X: Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022 destroyed in record time what had been a genuine public forum and turned it into his personal mouthpiece. He had algorithms adjusted to prioritise his own bigoted, ignorant posts, introduced fees for posting and paid subscriptions, and presided over a massive increase in hate speech on the platform. Huge losses in advertising revenue and the migration of millions of users to new platforms followed, but the world’s first trillionaire didn’t care: he had achieved his aim and annihilated something civilised and progressive.
Uber: App-based taxi company Uber grabbed a great chunk of market share by ignoring local licensing systems and keeping prices artificially low with subsidies from ‘venture capital’ funding. Once hegemony had been secured, the cost of travel rocketed through ‘surge pricing’ and drivers’ pay was made subject to ‘dynamic adjustment’ (translation: severe cuts).

Yes, when allowed to, capitalism destroys everything it touches. With incredible and ever-accelerating speed, capitalism has wreaked havoc on nature, the biosphere, the environment, climate, society, civilisation, intelligence, values, decency and humanity itself. Bought off by crude consumerism, manipulative marketing, delusions of ‘convenience’ and a propaganda blitz encouraging hyper-individualised, infantilised egomania, countless billions of people across the world are now just easily duped, profoundly ignorant putty in the hands of billionaire oligarchs, tech bros, autocrats, megalomaniacs and out-and-out fascists.

But the destruction hasn’t stopped at those big issues; it has seeped into every corner of culture, no matter how trivial or inconsequential. Football is a good example of this. In itself, football is not important. For more than a century it was a grippingly unpredictable spectacle of highs and lows for ordinary people cheering on their village, town, city or country. Then turbo-capitalism’s need to monetise and commodify everything took over, and now, everywhere football is played, the familiar capitalistic traits of profiteering, empire-building, monopolising, asset stripping and stockpiling have turned the ‘beautiful game’ into one more ugly corporate ‘industry’ dominated by rapacious robber barons.

Like all sports, football has been ruined. That took some doing, given that it was an adored, vivid, vital, history-saturated cornerstone of life for millions of people in the UK alone right up until very recently. But now, thanks to a combination of utterly disreputable ruling bodies FIFA and UEFA, rampant globalisation that has eradicated clubs’ connection to their locality, spectacular greed, ludicrous pandering to puerile fads and passing fashions, the US takeover of anything with money-making potential, and the staggering ignorance and ineptitude of those who should be protecting football’s rich culture, it is now just another hollowed-out ‘product’ that has become meaningless, formulaic, choreographed and deathly dull.

So much is rotten about contemporary soccer:
■The copycat tactics that have abolished the rich variety of national styles
■The sterile, overcoached, robotic, stats-fixated, predictable stodge that is perpetually served up
■The over-hyped, over-sold and over-rated ‘big’ leagues where money determines everything and rootless global mercenaries are hoovered up to maintain their purchased status, none more so than the rotten to the core English Premier League
■The mindless pursuit of perpetual growth – whether in competitions, squads, games played, salaries, TV coverage, profits, etc – dumbly killing the goose that lays the golden egg and failing to grasp that less is more
■The larcenous prices excluding the working-class support that built the clubs in the first place
■The identikit, characterless, vainglorious, sponsor-saturated stadiums, stripped of atmosphere, policed by surveillance cameras and filled by corporate fat-cats, cripplingly conformist tourists, yank-style ‘families’, middle-class bandwagon jumpers and thick consumers with no knowledge of the game or its past
■The rampant sports-washing as clubs become weaponised public relations tools for oligarchs, tyrants, murderous repressive states and dirty money, or else nothing more than cash cows to be milked for every last drop of money by American private equity and asset stripping
■The hideous and deeply unappealing millionaire players bought and sold for obscene transfer fees, interchangeable, boring, personality-free cyborgs who have never read a book, sporting obligatory vulgar hair-dos, tattoos, mansions, arrogance, narcissism and trophy brides
■The tearing-up of the laws of football that had worked well for over a century in order to please the super-rich clubs – like the farcical VAR that ridiculously misunderstands the spirit of the game in a search for impossible perfection to the point where a protruding nostril-hair renders a player offside; or the allowing of five substitutes to assist the clubs that have vast underused stables of players, turning football into a pale copy of American gridiron, erasing the essential ingredient of luck – good or bad – from the sport and rendering appearance statistics and records redundant; or the pedantic added time that now extends the duration of games towards two hours making it more difficult for a smaller club to win as the power of money is given endless extra time to prevail
■The egotistical referees with their vanity, Instagram-ready gym-muscles and massive self-importance
■The vile goal celebrations of contrived reactions (knee-slide to corner flag, heart mime, finger tip to lips, hand cupped around ear, ball under shirt pregnancy, kiss-the-badge, group orgy, etc, etc) that are all tired cliches as well as the antithesis of sportsmanship with their over-the-top triumphalism
…I could go on a lot longer, but that will suffice for now.

In Wales, with one of the poorest football pyramids in the world, blacklisted and ignored by the English media that dominates Wales, and home to five English cuckoos in the nest being plied with money to make sure they stay English and never contribute to the Welsh game, the position is very different – and paradoxically in some ways much healthier, since the truly Welsh football clubs all have an overwhelming majority of Welsh footballers. If only the people of Wales would open their blinkered eyes and their colonised minds and begin to appreciate what we’ve got. Nevertheless, even in this completely unfinanced state of affairs, money prevails – here it just takes paltry amounts to make a difference rather than billions. For instance, The New Saints, the only full-time professional club and the only club owned by a wealthy benefactor, have won the Cymru Premier 12 times in the last 14 years.

The problem is the people who run Welsh football: the FAW. Rather than tackle the issue of the five clubs undermining, traducing and crippling the Welsh game, the FAW panders to them. This was shown last season when clueless Englishman Jack Sharp, an ex MK Dons pen-pusher who specialises in unctuous marketing-speak (“make memories” is a favourite of his) and who somehow or other got himself put in charge of Welsh domestic football, attempted to kill the only advantage Welsh pyramid clubs have over the English scabs by surrendering a European place to them in the hope of artificially boosting the Welsh co-efficient – the equivalent of, say, Luxembourg borrowing a Belgian club for European competitions to get better results and shoot up the rankings. Amazingly UEFA had no objections to what amounts to brazen cheating and it took the English FA to nip the atrocious idea in the bud – pointing out that if Swansea City, Wrexham, Cardiff City etc want to represent Wales in Europe then they could always shift to the Welsh pyramid and try to win the Cymru Premier or the Welsh Cup rather than be the only clubs on the planet operating simultaneously in two different national pyramids. Of course the whole farce exposed not just the FAW’s ineptitude and cowardice, but also the big lie behind the position of the ‘Anglo’ clubs located in Wales. That’s the lie that says they are Welsh. They are not: the nationality of a football club is determined (by FIFA and UEFA) by the nationality of the league they play in, not their ground’s postcode. And all other clubs who play in another country’s league are proud of the fact. So, for instance, Berwick Rangers, located in England playing in Scotland, proudly define themselves as Scottish; Derry City, located in Northern Ireland playing in Ireland, proudly define themselves as Irish; The New Saints, located in England playing in Wales, proudly define themselves as Welsh, and so on. But the five traitor clubs are so twisted and dysfunctional they have the insolence, duplicity and malice to posture as ‘Welsh’ – and the pathetic FAW perpetuate that calculated con. One wonders why they are so coy about their inarguable English identity – ashamed perhaps? The FAW has become a classic example of the enshittification process: when Irishman Noel Mooney took over as Chief Executive in 2021, he talked the talk with impressive conviction; four years later his FAW is no more than the same old craven English stooge it has been since the 1920s.

Cymru’s 1-0 win in Kazakhstan in World Cup qualifying last week was a good result that just about keeps alive the hope of getting to next year’s triple-hosted tournament in Canada/Mexico/USA. Saying that, I would be very surprised if Cymru qualified automatically – probably we would have to win our last three games (Home to Belgium, Away to Liechtenstein, Home to North Macedonia), and even then the likelihood is second place and entry into the play-offs. I actually don’t think Cymru will qualify at all – regardless of the near certainty of getting a wild card place in the play-offs thanks to winning our Nations League group last year. The reason for this pessimism is simple: we are nowhere near good enough.

Admittedly, Cymru were without Ampadu and Rodon, had to cope with a ridiculous 7,000 mile round trip to deepest Asia because FIFA say Kazakhstan can count as being in Europe, and the pitch in Kazakh capital Astana was a real disadvantage being one of the few entirely artificial pitches permitted by those geniuses at FIFA – but still this win over the side ranked 114th in the world should not have been so jammy (they hit the woodwork three times, dominated the second half and were unlucky not to get at least a draw). There’s no escaping the fact that Bellamy’s squad is workmanlike, competent – and low calibre (no names, no pack-drill). The head to head against Kazakhstan has reached P2, W2, D0, L0, Goals F4-A1. The land-locked, petroleum-rich, authoritarian autocracy can now brace itself for the thrilling arrival of a Cardiff University outstation while back in Wales whole departments are closed down. Vice Chancellor Wendy Larner, a globalisation fundamentalist zealot from New Zealand who previously wrecked Wellington University, is gambling on her not-Welsh-anymore bankrupt Uni acquiring an ‘international’ profile and raking in some easy money, while the nation it was founded to serve can go to hell.

Four days later Cymru lost 1-0 to Canada in a friendly at the – shudder, grit teeth – Swansea.com Stadium. Only 15,000 turned up to see the first Cymru game in Swansea for five years, in which Bellamy experimented with untried and fringe players. Having endured the awful game on S4C, all I can say is if this lot are the future then some very lean years lie ahead. Canada, rather unexpectedly, are ranked a highest-ever 28th in the world (Cymru are currently 31st) – but that is just a distortion produced by FIFA’s cock-eyed ranking system after a sequence of wins over the likes of Panama, Suriname, USA, Honduras and El Salvador. Soon the country best known for Ice Hockey and Lacrosse will surely be back in its usual place, struggling to stay in the top 100. However, the Canucks thoroughly merited this win. In every department of the game they were superior to Cymru, looking infinitely stronger, faster and more skilful from start to finish. In fact Cymru were flattered by the narrow margin of the defeat and for long periods Canada didn’t break sweat and just toyed with us. The head-to-head against Canada now stands at P4, W2, D0, L2, Goals F4-A3. All the new and unfamiliar faces given a run-out looked completely out of their depth and not remotely up to the standards required by international football (no names, no pack-drill). It is hard to see what Bellamy learned from this futile exercise – or, for that matter, what the point is of Cymru’s next match before the Belgium game, against our noisy neighbour England.