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4 Apr 11 | Re: Planet Fayed

Poor Spectator. They could not have picked a worse week to commission Mohammed Al Fayed to contribute a piece to their style supplement entitled Good taste? A guide to panache. Look what the tastemaker extraordinaire has gone and done:

BBC News: Michael Jackson Fulham FC statue

I’m not going to bang on about this for too long, because it is so unhingedly hilarious that everyone on the Internet is probably bringing out their best bons mots for the same purpose. But I do want to say that I have little sympathy for Fulham fans who, for some reason, object to their waxy-surfaced nick-nack. Al Fayed is a British institution (in fact he is unique among British institutions in that part of his mythos centres around his being officially Not British). This kind of bananas statuary is just the sort of thing he does. When you understand that, supporting his bizarro tribute to a dear friend - was he? - seems a perfectly reasonable position.

Opposing it, on the other hand, is a bit like those Man Utd fans who’ve decided they don’t want their club to be used as leverage by football-indifferent moneymen. If they didn’t like that idea they should have spoken up years ago, when the club first chose to sell shares of itself to anyone who wanted to pay for them. It was on that day that the club’s soul evanesced; the Glazer business was just the fruition of that process. So it is with Mohammed Al Fayed, the global style icon who once duetted with Ali G on a version of Ini Kamoze’s Here Comes the Hotstepper. Fulham fans had to know that something like this would happen eventually - they should be glad it isn’t a giant head of an Aztec war god, or Gazza.

There are plenty of clubs around that aren’t owned by Mohammed Al Fayed. If you pick one that is, you ought to take your giant MJ and like it.

Posted by MATHAYUS at 21:12

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