FOOTBALL AND CAPITALISM
An odd marriage?
Eagleton, Football a dear friend of
capitalism
• Armchair left approach to football?
• “If every rightwing thinktank came up with a
scheme to distract the populace from political
injustice and compensate them for lives of hard
labour, the solution in each case would be the
same: football”.
• “No finer way of resolving the problems of
capitalism”
• “Modern societies deny men and women the
experience of solidarity, which football provides
to the point of collective delirium”
• Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced
(individual talents+ selfless teamwork)
• Players are hero-worshipped, but one reason you
revere them is because they are alter egos, who could
easily be you
• Football is a matter of spectacle but one that also
invites the intense participation of its onlookers.
• Football combines tradition, postmodernism attitude to
amnesia, the characteristics of a religious faith and a
carnival, providing the common people with a safety
valve for subversive feelings.
• Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that
age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should
we do with them when they're not working?
• CONCLUSION: ABOLISH FOOTBALL
D.Zirin, Football is not just about
capitalism
• Eagleton’sabsence of understanding on the relationship between
sport and modern society.
• Are football fans just addicts permanently distracted from what
"really matters" as we engage in a pastime with no redeeming
value?
• We love it because it's exciting, interesting and at its best, rises to
the level of art.
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• Like all art, sport at its essence – what attracts us to it in the first
place – holds within it a view of human potential unshackled
• We now know that as soon as human beings
could clothe and feed themselves, they
played. Sports is as human an act as music,
dance, or organising resistance. As sports such
as football reflect our society, they also
reflects struggle.
• For instance in Port Said, Egypt recently. A
football match became a killing field, with at
least 74 spectators dead, and as many as
1,000 injured. “The shock of Port Said hasn't
produced a political coma but instead acted as
a defibrillator, bringing a revolutionary
impatience back to life” (D.Zirin).
Football in Tahir Square
• Lots of Egyptian activists argue that in 2011- and maybe today as
well - the ultras have been key protectors of the revolution, both
physically and structurally, in the sense that they keep intense
pressure on the state to listen to popular demands.
• The Al-Ahly ultras - after being a leading street fighting force during
the revolution, have become a leading target of the military. The AlAhly ultras wear that target proudly, chanting games Oh you
MPs You turned out to be more rotten than the police Raise the
prison walls higher and higher Tomorrow the revolution with lay
them to waste Oh brother, write on the cell wall Junta rule is
shameful and treasonous Down Down with Junta rule!
• Now not only are many Egyptians coming to the defense of the
ultras but, remarkably, ultra groups from opposing clubs have
pledged to join forces, seeing the attack on Al-Ahly as an attack on
all of them.
J.Barnes, Football's debt to socialism
• The best football teams are socialist in nature. They play
for each other, and individual brilliance is often
subservient to the common good. Even the language of
team sport is socialist – solidarity, unite, goal, come
together.
• Barcelona, possibly the world's most successful club, are
the living embodiment of this idea as they are owned by
the supporters for the supporters.
• England players and the Premier League. Never has there
been a more pure and banal example of the cult of the
individual: a Premier League in which everything is
measured by money and the success that that money has
bought, and the money that that success will then
generate: the supreme hydra-headed monster.
• Is playing for England as important as playing for Chelsea,
Manchester United or Liverpool? No, because the monetary
rewards don't compare.
• Brian Clough, who gave tickets for Derby's games to striking
miners and agitated for a player walkout (admittedly after he
had walked out on Derby), was once asked by the former
Labour MP, Austin Mitchell, whether he was a superstitious
man? "No, Austin, I'm not," he answered. "I'm a socialist."
Sure he drove a Mercedes, but he wanted everybody to be
able to drive a Mercedes.
• When asked if the coming World Cup would help the poor of
Brazil, Socrates said, "There will be lots of public money
disappearing into people's pockets. Stadiums will be built and
they will stay there for the rest of their lives without anyone
using them. It's all about money. What we need to do is keep
up public pressure for improvements in infrastructure,
transport, sewerage, but I reckon it will be difficult."
• Bill Shankly (Liverpool Manager
- 3 league Title -2 FA CUPS -1 UEFA cup)
• "The socialism I believe in is everybody working
for the same goal and everybody having a share
in the rewards. That's how I see football, that's
how I see life"
• Socrates, Death of a Legend
Socrates may be the only professional athlete to ever organize a
socialist cell among his fellow players. He helped assemble
Corinthians, a club team from Sao Paolo built on a radical political
foundation. Corinthians proceeded to become a focal point for
national discontent with Brazil's military dictatorship. The
military had ruled Brazil since 1964, when it overthrew the leftwing president, João Goulart, who promised land redistribution
and nationalisation of industry. By the early 1980s, as the
dictatorship was beginning to strain under the weight of mass
repression and economic stagnation, Socrates and his teammate
Wladimir organised and played for Corinthians, known as the
"Time do Povo" or "Team for the People", to demonstrate the
power of democracy.
“What needs to change here is the focus on development. We need to
prioritise the human being. Sadly, in the globalised world, people
don't think about individuals as much as they think about money,
the economy, et cetera."
Going Capitalistic in UK football?
Football Capitalism
• Definition: free movement of labour free
movement of capital
• Compare:
• Football Social Democracy- free movement of
labour but controls on capital mobility (most of
Europe)
• Football Socialism – restraints on capital and
labour mobility (NFL’s style)
• Socialism in the US sport?!?!?!?!? Yes they can
• As a matter of fact the new American owners
of Liverpool stated that they were lured into
buying a stake of the “Reds” cause: "EPL" –
the English Premier League – was that they
get to keep all the money they make, rather
than having to share it as they would have to
under the – their phrase – "very socialistic"
rules that operate in US sport. In other words,
England has become a magnet for those
drawn to behave in a way they couldn't get
away with at home.
For the current state of our football sheds a rather
revealing light on the current state of both our politics
and our economy. Or, as one sage of the sport puts it:
"As ever, the national game reflects the nation's times.”
If capitalism is often described metaphorically as a race in
which the richest always win, football has turned that
metaphor into an all too literal reality.
• Two types of stability in football economics
• Long run- Growth trends and volatility over time:
attendance, revenues, club identity
• Short run-Sensitivity to economic shocks (recession
and economic crisis)
The long run stability of English
Football
• In 1923 the Football League consisted of 88
teams organized in four divisions of 22 teams.
• In the 2007/08 season: 85 still existed (97%)
• 75 remained in the top four divisions (85%)
• 48 were in the same division as they were in
1923 (54%)
• Only 9 teams (10%) remaining in the top four
divisions were two or more divisions away from
where they were in 1923
Compare stability in other industries
• • What happened to the top 100 companies
of 1912? By 1995:
• Only 20 remained in the top one hundred
• Only 50 survived
• 7 liquidated
• 6 nationalised
• 37 had been acquired by other firms
The Financial Crisis and English
Football
• Since September 2008:
• Loss of sponsorship income (e.g. Manchester United
and AIG)
• Several clubs up for sale (e.g. Newcastle United)
• Questions asked about debt finance of US owners
(Glazers, Hicks)
• Control of West Ham decided by Icelandic bankruptcy
court
• Clubs entering insolvency proceedings (Southampton,
Darlington, Chester City, Stockport County)
OCCUPY FOOTBALL?
• Inequality is built into sport: some people are simply
stronger or faster than others….BUT…a different kind
of inequality matters too: money. A rich club can buy
up all the best players and win every time.
• It means the half-dozen top sides, already at a different
level from the rest, soared even higher towards the
stratosphere and out of reach – in just the same way
that the super-rich float ever further away from
everyone else, the 1% in a different league from the
99%, as the Occupy protesters would put it.
IS IT THE MARKET STUPID?
• According to dogmatic capitalism there is
nothing we can do to stop the richest teams
dominating football than you can prevent the
fastest sprinter winning gold. That's the force
of the market, all but a law of nature.
• American sport to show us another way….
• 1. there are those rules on revenue-sharing that so
frustrated Liverpool's new owners. All the money
that, say, a baseball team makes – from tickets, TV
rights and merchandise – is taxed by the major
league that runs the sport and spread around the
other clubs, so that the richest cannot dwarf the
rest. WHY? Because they understand that their
sport is worth nothing if it stops being a real
competition, if only a handful of the wealthiest
teams ever have a chance of winning.
Redistributing the wealth around the league
ensures their sport doesn't become boring. It does
not level the playing field, but it comes very close.
• Over the past 19 seasons, 12 different teams
have won baseball's biggest prize. In the 19
seasons since the Premier League was
created, only four teams have won;
Manchester United alone have won the title
12 of those 19 times.
2. In American football and basketball a salary cap
applies, limiting how much each club can pay in
wages and thereby preventing the richest teams
making their domination permanent by snapping
up all the best players.
3. In the same spirit, teams in all major US sports
submit to a "draft", in which they take turns picking
from a pool of newly eligible players, so that the
equivalent of Chelsea or Manchester City can't
gobble up all the fresh talent, but instead have to
let the Blackburns or Wigans have a go.
Is this a dream in Europe? Let’s have a look back in
time…
When the founders of the Football League gathered in
a Manchester hotel in 1888, they pound upon how
they might ensure that a fixture between, say,
Derby County and Everton remained a real contest.
They agreed the home side should give a proportion
of its takings to the visitors, a system that held firm
till 1983.
After that…….
• Clubs shared the TV money when it came too,
spreading it around all 92 league clubs. But the big
teams always resented subsidising the minors;
indeed, the Premier League was formed out of the
biggest 20 clubs' express desire to keep Rupert
Murdoch's millions for themselves.
• Upcoming Uefa "financial fair play" rules will
require teams to live within their earnings, which
should put an end to the sugar daddy handouts of
Man City and Chelsea. But that 2014 change will
push clubs to maximize their revenue, which is
bound, in turn, to mean even less sharing. Football
will still be a game determined by who has most
CONSEQUENCES
• 1. Football's most storied clubs have become attractive
to foreign tycoons who are allowed to make money,
unrestricted (Liverpool, Chelsea, Man Utd, Man City…..)
• 2. A model was established that is inherently
unsustainable, involving colossal debts that cripple all
those without a billionaire to bail them out. Since 1992,
league clubs and one Premier League team –
Portsmouth – have fallen insolvent 55 times.
• 3. We risk killing the golden goose, turning an activity
that should be thrilling into a non-contest whose
outcome is all but preordained.
Galeano, Football in Sun and Shadow,
p. 1
• History of Football is a sad voyage from beauty to
duty. When the sport became an industry the
beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got
turn out by its very roots […] Play has become a
spectacle […]with few protagonists and many
spectators: football for watching […] The
technocracy of professional sport has managed to
impose a football of lightning speed and brute
strength, a football that negates joy and kills
fantasy and outlaws daring.