Don't Mention The League

Prem's full name becomes a no-no

Internet: boom

FA: headquarters

The law: break it at your peril

The Prem ier Leag ue has announced that from today, no-one will be able to use its name in public unless they pay for a license to do so.

The decision to prevent people referring to England's top-flight football league is the latest in a long line of legislative measures that have irritated and frustrated many people around the world. These have gained increasing significance since the internet boom of the mid-1990's, particularly in the last few years where the pastime of blogging has become more widespread.

Reckless disciples

It was once the case that innocent blog writers and webmasters were able to publish details of P remie r Lea gue fixtures on their websites freely, but lawyers acting on behalf of the greatest league in the world outlawed such activity and instructed anyone doing so to remove the fixtures or else suffer a long and particularly hideous torture in the ancient dungeons beneath the FA's headquarters in Soho Square.

Then more recently, the Premie r Leagu e's legal representatives searched out those websites that were flagrantly displaying the logos of its twenty affiliate clubs without gaining permission to do so first. The punishment for continuously committing this particularly heinous crime, it deemed, was shooting by firing squad in front of a specially-invited audience made up of FIFA representatives.

Death to non-believers

Now, the Prem i e r Le a gu e have taken the ultimate step by preventing football fans and web geeks alike publishing its very name online unless an expensive license is acquired. It's even affected us here at The Onion Bag, as you can see by our attempts thus far to obscure the P r e mier Leag u e 's name in this article.

A group of irate bloggers called The Collective for Unified New Technolgy Satisfaction have come together in a bid to find some leniency in the P r em ie r Lea g u e's 'fair use' laws so that web users can mention the English top division without fear of prosecution. Their fight for justice will be watched keenly by bloggers around the world who hope that the Pr em ie r L ea gu e realise what a bunch of in ter f eri ng p en is es they've been all along.

Chris O