In The Economist's 2008 guide to the world's finances and politics, the guest columnists are the usual parade of big names.
Head of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, womanizing French President Nicolas Sarkozy and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg are three of those granted column inches to broadcast their take on the planet's fortunes in 2008.
It comes as a pleasant surprise therefore, to see one of the special editorial slots given over to UEFA President Michel Platini.
Time was when a football man would never have kept such august company, but the inescapable financial clout of the world's favourite game has forced even the most ardent soccer-haters, to take notice.
But not everyone's arrival at the party has been welcome.
The marketing men, whose only love is profit, have commercially exploited the game's mass appeal so ruthlessly in recent years that its very soul is now critical.
And let us not forget the opportunist politicians who have attached themselves like parasites to a game they may disdain in order to boost their own popularity.
From Benito Mussolini forcing gli azzurri to don fascist black shirts in 1934 to UK Conservative leader David Cameron sneaking uninvited into David Beckham's house party in 2006, plus ça change...
What these special interest groups have realised at one time or another is that football is of great importance to the people they want to impress or sell to, but have any of them understood why?
It is a game with simple rules which have allowed it to become the world's No.1, but only those who get under the sport's skin and grow to love it can truly understand it.
In Platini's Economist article, the French soccer legend stresses the 'specificity' of football in its modern context – the importance of not treating it like just any other industry but of giving it some leeway to make its own rules.
The UEFA President has wanted to redress the ravages of the free market by trying to introduce quotas on home-grown talent, plans which have yet to get off the ground and whose chances of doing so remain slim.
But the wider issue looms large – how can football's governing bodies govern when international law can overrule them?
The first warning that Brussels, home of the European Union, could trump Nyon, home of UEFA, came in 1995 when Jean-Marc Bosman, a Belgian journeyman footballer, revolutionised European football because his club was stopping him moving to another one, despite his contract having ended.
The consequential application of Article 39(1) of the EC Treaty, the one regarding freedom of movement, was perhaps long overdue when it came to football contracts, but had unforeseen and wider impacts on the game as a whole.
Following Bosman, UEFA found they could no longer impose a quota of three foreigners per team in the Champions League, a rule designed to retain a national identity within clubs and discourage the sort of cavalier spending Roman Abramovich indulges in at Chelsea these days.
The fact EU citizens could now freely ply their trade in any member state increased the number of overseas players in wealthy league's like England's, with the result in 2007 that Arsenal have an overseas coach and routinely field no Englishmen in their lineups.
The Gunners' history and identity, like that of so many great sides, has just been blown away by globalisation.
So much of what was sacred about the sport has withered in the last 15 years, and those same politicians who rush to proclaim their love of the people's game have been so paranoid about tampering with something so apparently popular, that they have not lifted a finger to stop the takeover.
While the suits are sucking the blood out of from football but giving nothing back, it is refreshing to see a UEFA and a FIFA President raging concurrently against the dying of the light.
Sepp Blatter cut a somewhat desperate figure welcoming Brazil as World Cup 2014 hosts in October, by berating them for exporting so many players around the world.
More recently, he has blasted the Football Association for appointing an Italian to coach England, claiming they have broken "a sacrosanct law" and adding that he couldn't remember other major footballing nations committing such a soccer heresy.
Actually, more than a dozen Brits have coached the Netherlands, Hungarian-Romanian Stefan Kovacs coached France in the 1970s, Englishman George Raynor took Sweden to a World Cup final in 1958 and only a long clearance from FIFA HQ, the Swiss national team qualified for USA 1994 under the aegis of Croydon-born Roy Hodgson.
Even Germany would have had a foreign coach in Englishman Jack Reynolds, had World War One not intervened. Of course, the bigger and richer the football nation is, the less likely it needs to import players or coaches, which makes England look ever more impoverished football-wise in 2007.
But Blatter had a point. Football has captivated communities of every colour and creed across the globe and as such, any attempt to dilute or radically change its core values risks ruining it, whatever the market says about 'commercial necessities'.
Take competitiveness, a core tenet of the football faith. If the final score is too predictable, a game loses its shine before it has even kicked off.
The free market demands no regulation, but an unrestricted and unmanaged flow of capital wrecks the idea of competition in sport.
That same influx of serious dough which prompted The Economist to take notice has reduced the ability of teams in the top European countries to rise to the top of the soccer pyramid. Get used to the Coca-Cola Championship, guys, 'cos that's all you're ever going to know, unless you can tempt passing billionaires into your chamber, like modest Queens Park Rangers appear to have done recently.
The irresistible lure of TV millions precipitated the creation in 1993 of the UEFA Champions League, handing the majority of clubs participating an insuperable cash advantage over their domestic rivals and tilting the playing field unfairly.
The days when a Steaua Bucharest or Red Star Belgrade could bag the continent's top trophy are as good as over. The winners' enclosure, which now holds around 15 teams, is bolted shut to incomers so despite all the money, we are poorer in footballing terms.
Football demands not a completely level playing-field, but only the reasonable possibility of an upset. Yet every year Goliath grows so much fatter that David's little sling hardly stands a chance.
The local character of teams is also under real threat, when 90 minutes costs a fan in London as much as a return flight to Milan and corporate sponsors in their ghastly hospitality suites can snap up tickets, especially for the big games.
The sport began on a local scale and is now throwing off its protectionist and insular past in favour of open trade and a global presence, but that does not mean it should be treated the same as any other business.
This is not another multinational product we are talking about, but a form of religion, a multi-faceted tribal and cultural identity, carefully assembled over decades and which cannot be satisfactorily valued in financial terms alone.
Those who misunderstand or dismiss the game's roots should not be making the rules which govern it. Forget the 'needs' of the market; soccer's special characteristics make it different.
If the arguments of Platini and Blatter are just the last hurrahs of an old faith refusing to move with the times, then at least hear them out, for to paraphrase Pelé and Ernest Hemingway, football is a beautiful game, and worth fighting for.
Editorials 2006 | Editorials 2007