Oligarchs, Monopoly, the Car Industry, and Alfa Romeo

[bqf]

This rambling will get to cars eventually, so stick with it.

I was reading about football finance this morning, and it struck me thatthis is one industry that is essentially becoming an Oligarchs plaything. 11 out of 20 premier league teams are foreign-owned, often by single individuals who have unimaginable personal wealth - Mansour, Abramovich, Kroenke, Short. Then I started thinking about the car industry - Ratan Tata owning JLR, Fernandes with Caterham, VW and Porsche being essentially family-owned....

Which got me thinking about playing Monopoly as a kid. I know the games title says it all, but no matter how you played it, one person ending up owning almost everything, gradually driving the other players into bankruptcy and often enormous family arguments

Then I read the post about the Giulietta. I think it looks great, has plenty of power and it's different to a Golf. Yet post after post assume it will fail because everybody will buy a Golf or Focus.

In other European countries they are loyal to their domestic products, no matter how ste they are. Witness legions of French families stuck by the roadside because their comically assembled PSA product has gone kaput.

So anyway, stirring all this up in my feeble brain, I'm thinking: Is this just the start of a journey towards one organisation owning everything? In 50 years time will all our cars be VW Group products? Will all our football clubs be owned by the UAE? Will we end up in a world (like in Wall-E) where one organisation owns everything?

Sounds like a nightmare to me. I'm off to look at Giuliettas.