Graeme Le Saux: ‘We have to address the pure dominance of money’

“I went to Newcastle versus Chelsea. That game raised an uncomfortable truth about football, ownership and the way our game is run.”

Back in the day proper football men didn’t talk much about politics and certainly not about uncomfortable truths. Probably, people in football should talk about those things a great deal more, if only because they seem so intent on gatecrashing the main stage. Uncomfortable truths: this is the game now.

Graeme Le Saux spent 11 years at Chelsea in two spells, departing the same summer Roman Abramovich arrived, 2003. He works as a Premier League analyst for NBC and also has a non-executive director role with Real Mallorca, a club owned by the US property billionaire Robert Sarver.

If this gives him a degree of inside track, a locus standi on the current shemozzle around football club ownership, then there are other elements, too. Le Saux has always been engaged and politically nonconformist. These things are relative. In pre-modern football any kind of politics, even the most centrist of Guardian-reading, museum-going engagement with the wider world, seemed pretty radical.

If that quality used to mark Le Saux as an outsider, there are certain advantages in being able to speak with a degree of awareness about the challenges the supercharged game faces, as well as in being prepared to go into the kind of difficult places that make you wish the former left-back was still hanging in there as a face on the Match of the Day sofa.

“Of course Eddie Howe doesn’t want to be asked questions about executions,” he says of that afternoon when Saudi PIF instrument met plaything of a sanctioned Putin associate. “It makes him feel very uncomfortable.

“That’s the dilemma. At what point do you put your