Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy, edited by David North, Mehring Books, 2026, 393 pp., $29.95

A Marxist Intervention into a Degraded Political Literature

Over the past decade, an enormous, largely superficial literature on Donald Trump has accumulated. It comprises memoirs by disillusioned staffers, psychological profiles, insider gossip, and endless liberal laments over violated norms. Yet this genre seldom asks the only question that matters to anyone seeking to understand the crisis of American democracy: In whose class interests does Trump rule? The new Mehring Books volume, *Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy*, edited by David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, puts that question at the centre of its analysis and answers it with uncompromising clarity.

North’s foreword opens by rejecting the two dominant bourgeois explanations for Trump’s rise. The first, favoured by the liberal establishment, casts Trump as a monstrous aberration—a freakish intrusion into an otherwise healthy democratic system. The second, its reactionary mirror image, depicts him as a demonic political genius, a singular figure imposing his will on a helpless nation. Both explanations share the same flaw: they reduce a profound social process to one individual's personality, obscuring the class forces that produced Trump and the material interests he serves.

Against these illusions, the volume insists on a historical materialist truth: Trump is not the cause of oligarchic rule but its political instrument. He did not create the conditions for authoritarianism; he emerged from them. His ascent reflects the interests of a financial oligarchy whose wealth and power have grown to grotesque proportions and whose relationship with democratic forms of rule has become openly hostile.

The book uses stark figures to make this reality clear. More than 900 American billionaires now control roughly $8.2 trillion—nearly twice the wealth of the population’s bottom half. Their political interventions are decisive, not symbolic. In 2024, Elon Musk spent more than $250 million to return Trump to the White House. It was rewarded with the Department of Government Efficiency, which he used to dismantle regulatory agencies and social programmes. Musk was not alone: Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos, who had cultivated a liberal image for years, aligned themselves with a would-be dictator. They concluded that authoritarian rule would protect their wealth more reliably than the decaying institutions of bourgeois democracy.

This is the central argument of *Oligarchy*: Trumpism is not a departure from American capitalism, but its logical outcome amid terminal decline. The book places Trump’s rise within a half-century of economic and political degeneration. It examines the end of dollar–gold convertibility in 1971, the collapse of the postwar monetary order, decades of deindustrialisation, the trade union bureaucracy’s suppression of class struggle, the growth of financial parasitism, and the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991, which removed the last external restraint on American militarism. Trump did not create these processes; he is their political crystallisation.

By grounding its analysis in class relations rather than personality cults, the volume cuts through the fog of liberal moralism and reactionary mythmaking. It demonstrates that the crisis of American democracy cannot be understood through psychological speculation or appeals to civic virtue. It must be understood as the political expression of a ruling class that has become irreconcilably hostile to democratic constraints.

In this sense, *Oligarchy* is more than a book about Trump: it examines the social order that produced him and warns that defending democratic rights requires a struggle against the oligarchic power he represents. For workers and young people seeking to understand how American democracy reached its current state, this volume is indispensable.

The Oligarchs Behind the Throne

The book marshals figures that reveal Trumpism’s real social foundation. More than nine hundred American billionaires now control approximately eight point two trillion dollars—nearly twice the wealth held by the bottom half of the population. This concentration of wealth is no incidental feature of contemporary capitalism; it is the essential precondition for the political phenomena the book analyses. Trumpism is rooted in the interests of a ruling class whose fortunes have reached levels incompatible with democratic rule. The oligarchs who dominate American society have concluded that the traditional mechanisms of bourgeois democracy no longer reliably defend their wealth. Their turn toward authoritarianism is not a matter of personal preference, but of class necessity.

The book offers concrete examples of this oligarchic layer’s direct intervention in politics. In 2024, Elon Musk spent more than $250 million to help return Trump to the White House. In return, he gained the Department of Government Efficiency, a new bureaucratic instrument he used to dismantle regulatory bodies, social programmes, and environmental protections. Musk’s actions were not the eccentricities of one billionaire; they formed part of a coordinated movement among the financial elite. Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos, who had cultivated a liberal image for years, also threw their support behind Trump. Bezos’s shift was especially revealing: his earlier image as a socially progressive billionaire collapsed when preserving his wealth required authoritarian rule. The book shows that these figures did not merely support Trump as individuals. They represented a class whose interests were threatened by political instability and growing anger among the working population.

The oligarchs concluded that the decaying institutions of bourgeois democracy could no longer guarantee their dominance. Trump was their solution. He offered a form of rule that dispensed with the constraints of constitutional procedure and replaced them with executive fiat, militarised repression, and the cultivation of a fascist movement. The book argues that Trumpism is not an aberration but the political expression of a ruling class that has exhausted the democratic forms through which it once governed. The oligarchs did not choose Trump because he was charismatic or ideologically aligned with them. They chose him because he was willing to act as the instrument of their interests, and because his contempt for democratic norms made him uniquely suited to the tasks they required.

The book situates this development within a broader historical trajectory. The rise of Trumpism is inseparable from the long decline of American capitalism. The end of dollar–gold convertibility in 1971, the collapse of the postwar monetary order, decades of deindustrialisation, the trade union bureaucracy's suppression of class struggle, and the hypertrophy of financial parasitism created a social landscape defined by inequality, insecurity, and political decay. The dissolution of the USSR in 1991 removed the last external restraint on American militarism and opened a period of unending war. These processes eroded the foundations of democratic governance and produced a ruling class increasingly reliant on coercion rather than consent.

In this context, the oligarchs’ support for Trump appears not as a sudden departure but as the culmination of a long process. The book shows that the financial elite did not merely tolerate Trump’s authoritarian tendencies. They encouraged them, financed them, and integrated them into the machinery of the state. Their actions reveal a ruling class that has abandoned any commitment to democratic principles and embraced a form of governance that protects its wealth through repression and violence.

The book’s analysis is therefore not limited to Trump as an individual. It is a study of the social order that produced him. It demonstrates that the crisis of American democracy cannot be understood through psychological speculation or moral condemnation. It must be understood as the political expression of a ruling class whose interests have become irreconcilable with democratic constraints. Trumpism is the form of rule that emerges when oligarchic wealth reaches a point where democracy becomes an obstacle rather than a mechanism of governance.

 A History Written in Real Time

The book's distinctive value lies in its method. It is not a retrospective reconstruction shaped by hindsight or by the smoothing effects of historical distance. It is a chronicle written as events unfolded, drawn from thousands of articles, statements, and lectures published by the World Socialist Web Site between 2015 and 2026. Each text was produced when the outcome of events was still uncertain, the political crisis was developing in real time, and the broader public had not yet fully recognised the dangers confronting the working class. Read sequentially, these documents form a running record of a political catastrophe. They show how a Marxist analysis, rooted in class relations rather than personality cults, made it possible to identify the emergence of a fascist conspiracy at a time when the media and political establishment dismissed it as bluster or theatrical excess.

The book shows that the WSWS could foresee the trajectory of Trumpism because it treated the phenomenon not as a psychological curiosity but as the political expression of deep historical processes. The rise of Trump is situated within the long decline of American capitalism, a decline that unfolded over half a century and reshaped every aspect of social and political life. The volume traces this decline through several decisive stages. It begins with the end of dollar–gold convertibility in 1971, which shattered the postwar monetary order and inaugurated a period of financial instability. It examines the decades of deindustrialisation that followed, during which entire regions of the United States were stripped of their industrial base and millions of workers were thrown into economic insecurity.

The book also analyses how the trade union bureaucracy suppressed class struggle, transforming unions from defensive working-class organisations into instruments of corporate management. This suppression created a political vacuum that reactionary forces could exploit. The hypertrophy of financial parasitism further intensified the crisis. The growth of speculative capital, Wall Street's dominance over productive industry, and the economy's transformation into a mechanism for enriching a narrow elite produced levels of inequality incompatible with democratic stability.

Finally, the volume emphasises the significance of the Stalinist dissolution of the USSR in 1991. This event removed the last external restraint on American militarism and opened a period of unbroken war. The United States embarked on a global campaign of military interventions, coups, and occupations, and the methods used abroad increasingly shaped domestic political life. The erosion of democratic norms, the expansion of executive power, and the militarisation of the state were not accidental developments. They were the internal consequences of imperialist policy.

This is the historical terrain on which Trump emerged. The book shows that you cannot understand his rise apart from these long-term processes. Trumpism is not an aberration but the political crystallisation of a declining social order. The WSWS recognised this because it analysed events through the lens of class struggle and historical materialism. The book’s method is therefore inseparable from its conclusions. It demonstrates that only a Marxist perspective can make sense of the crisis of American democracy and reveal the forces driving it toward authoritarian rule.

Part One (2015–2020): The Social Roots of Trumpism

Part One examines the conditions that produced Trump. It begins from the premise that his rise cannot be understood apart from the social devastation inflicted on the American working class, the bipartisan commitment to imperialist war, and the Democratic Party’s promotion of identity politics as a substitute for any challenge to capitalist power. The book shows that Trump did not emerge from a political vacuum. He arose from a society marked by inequality, militarism, and the systematic suppression of class struggle. These conditions were not created by one party or one administration. They were the cumulative product of decades in which both parties of the ruling class dismantled social protections, enriched the financial elite, and cultivated forms of politics that obscured the real sources of social misery.

A central contribution of the WSWS during this period was its early rejection of the slander, promoted by Democrats and the media, that Trump was the creation of a reactionary white working class. This narrative served two essential purposes. First, it absolved the two-party system of responsibility for the social catastrophe it had produced. By blaming workers for Trump’s rise, the political establishment avoided any examination of the policies that had destroyed jobs, gutted communities, and created the conditions for widespread anger. Second, it redirected popular anger downward, away from the financial elite from which Trump himself emerged. The myth of the reactionary worker transformed legitimate social grievances into a moral failing. It let the ruling class present itself as democracy's defender against the very people it had impoverished.

The book shows that this narrative was not merely false but politically dangerous. It obscured the real class forces behind Trump and prevented any serious analysis of the authoritarian tendencies developing within the state. The WSWS insisted that Trump’s base was not the working class but sections of the petty bourgeoisie, elements of the police and military, and layers of the financial elite who saw in him a vehicle for their interests. This analysis shows the first term not as chaotic improvisation but as the deliberate laying of foundations for a fascist movement.

The first term witnessed the growth of armed militias, the encouragement of vigilante violence, and the cultivation of a political culture defined by resentment and nationalism. Anti-immigrant agitation became a central organising principle of the administration, used to divide workers and legitimise the expansion of state repression. Executive power grew rapidly, with Trump asserting the right to override legal constraints and govern through decree. These developments were not isolated episodes. They formed part of a coherent political strategy to create a movement capable of overturning democratic norms and establishing a form of rule suited to the oligarchy's needs.

Part One therefore provides more than a chronicle of events. It offers a framework for understanding how social decay, political opportunism, and class interests combined to produce a movement that threatened the foundations of American democracy. It shows that Trumpism was not an accident but the expression of a ruling class that had lost confidence in democratic mechanisms and turned toward authoritarian solutions. 

Part Two: The 2020 Coup and Its Cover‑Up

Part Two reconstructs the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and shows that January 6 was not an eruption of spontaneous chaos but the culmination of a coordinated effort to nullify the vote and impose authoritarian rule. The book presents January 6 as the endpoint of a months-long plot involving parts of the Republican Party, layers of the state apparatus, and influential figures in the financial elite. Trump was the figurehead of this operation, but he was not its sole architect. The conspiracy developed through legal challenges, pressure campaigns, the mobilisation of fascist groups, and the deliberate creation of conditions in which violence could be used to achieve political ends.

The WSWS identified this danger early because it analysed the unfolding crisis through the lens of class interests rather than through the personal behaviour of Trump. The book shows that the coup attempt was rooted in the needs of an oligarchy that viewed democratic procedures as an obstacle to its wealth and power. The refusal to accept the election results was not a psychological reaction but a political strategy. It aimed to create a precedent for overturning future elections and to establish a form of rule in which executive authority could override constitutional constraints.

The Biden administration's response is presented as a cover-up. By reducing the conspiracy to the actions of one man and a mob, Biden shielded the network of officials, financiers, and Republican leaders who orchestrated the plot. The administration insisted that the country needed a strong Republican Party, even as that party had just attempted to overturn an election. The January 6 committee spent eighteen months narrowing its investigation until it resembled a criminal case against a single individual rather than an examination of a broad political conspiracy. This approach protected the stability of the two-party system and kept from exposure the class interests that drove the coup attempt.

The book argues that the cover-up was not a failure of political courage but a deliberate act. The Democratic Party shares with the Republicans a commitment to defending oligarchic wealth and American imperialism. To expose the real forces behind January 6 would have required confronting the financial elite, the military and police apparatus, and the political structures that sustain capitalist rule. The Democrats chose instead to present the coup as an aberration, a moment of madness, rather than as the logical outcome of decades of social decay and political reaction.

Eric London’s August 2021 lecture on the social origins of the conspiracy stands out as one of the volume’s most incisive analyses. London traces the roots of the coup attempt to the long decline of American capitalism, rising social inequality, and the ruling class's increasing reliance on authoritarian methods. He shows that January 6 was not an isolated event but part of a broader movement toward oligarchic rule. His lecture provides the theoretical foundation for understanding why the coup occurred and why the political establishment refused to confront its real causes. Part Two therefore offers more than a narrative of January 6. It provides a framework for understanding the breakdown of American democracy and the class forces driving it.

 Part Three: The Second Term and the Open Dictatorship of the Oligarchy

Part Three chronicles the second Trump administration and presents it as the moment when the oligarchy assumed direct command of the state. The book shows that the first term's authoritarian tendencies not only intensified but also became systematised. What had previously been preparatory measures became the foundation of a new form of rule. The administration operated on the premise that democratic norms were obstacles to be circumvented and that preserving oligarchic wealth required using state power in its most coercive form.

One defining feature of the second term was the declaration of a state of exception. Drawn from the theory of authoritarian rule, this concept refers to a situation in which the executive claims the right to suspend legal constraints in the name of national security or public order. The book shows that this declaration did not respond to any genuine emergency. It was a political instrument used to concentrate power in the presidency and create a legal environment in which repression could occur without accountability. The state of exception became the framework through which the administration justified its actions, from domestic deployments to foreign interventions.

The book documents the deployment of ICE paramilitaries and federal troops into American cities. These forces were used not to protect the population but to intimidate it. Their presence in urban centres signalled a shift from traditional policing to militarised occupation. The administration relied on these units to suppress protests, break strikes, and enforce executive directives. The use of paramilitary forces against civilians revealed the extent to which the state had been transformed into an instrument of oligarchic rule.

The killings carried out by federal agents, including the atrocities in Minneapolis in January 2026, are presented as emblematic of this transformation. The book treats these events not as isolated abuses but as expressions of a political strategy that relied on terror to maintain control. The violence in Minneapolis demonstrated the willingness of the administration to use lethal force against the population and the inability of existing institutions to restrain it. The response of the political establishment, which sought to minimise or justify the killings, further exposed the complicity of both parties in the erosion of democratic rights.

The second term also saw the illegal invasion of Venezuela. This action was justified through familiar rhetoric about restoring order and promoting democracy, but the book shows that its real purpose was to secure strategic and economic interests. The invasion marked a new stage in American imperialism, one in which military aggression was carried out without even the pretence of congressional oversight. The war against Iran, launched on February 28, 2026, followed the same pattern. It was an act of aggression driven by geopolitical calculations and carried out solely under the executive's authority.

Part Three presents these developments as the anatomy of an authoritarian regime serving capitalist interests. It shows that the second Trump administration did not merely violate democratic norms. It replaced them with a system of rule designed to protect the oligarchy's wealth and power through repression, militarism, and the dismantling of constitutional constraints.

Accomplices and Enablers: Republicans, Democrats, and the Pseudo‑Left

The book’s most politically significant sections focus not on Trump himself but on the forces that made his rise possible. Trump did not ascend to power through personal magnetism or ideological coherence. A ruling class saw him as a useful instrument, and political institutions that had long abandoned democratic principles elevated him. The book therefore turns its attention to the Republicans, the Democrats, and the pseudo-left, showing how each played an indispensable role in the breakdown of American democracy.

The Republicans are presented as willing accomplices. They embraced Trump as the vehicle for oligarchic rule and recognised that his contempt for democratic norms aligned with their own strategic interests. The party leadership understood that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies could be harnessed to implement policies that enriched the financial elite, expanded military power, and dismantled regulatory constraints. The book shows that Republican support for Trump was not reluctant or tactical. It was enthusiastic and rooted in a shared class outlook. Trump did not cause the party’s transformation into an openly reactionary force. It predated him and made his rise possible.

The book portrays the Democrats as indispensable enablers. The book argues that the Democratic Party is ruthless against opponents on its left but impotent against Trump because it shares his commitment to defending capitalist wealth and American imperialism. The record is damning. After the 2016 election, Barack Obama described the contest as a scrimmage between members of the same team, revealing how both parties operate within a shared ideological framework. Two days after the events of January 6, Joe Biden declared that the country needed a strong Republican Party, even though that party had just attempted to overturn an election. The January 6 committee spent eighteen months reducing a broad conspiracy to the crimes of one man, thereby shielding the network of officials, financiers, and political operatives who orchestrated the plot. The Biden administration served as an interregnum devoted to securing bipartisan support for war in Ukraine and for policies that contributed to the suffering of civilians in Gaza. These actions show that the Democrats’ primary concern was not defending democratic institutions but preserving the stability of the two-party system and protecting the interests of the ruling class.

The book also examines the role of the pseudo-left. Figures such as Bernie Sanders denounced the billionaire class in rhetoric but ultimately reinforced the Democratic Party’s authority. Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and later offered to work with Trump, signalling his willingness to subordinate social opposition to the needs of the political establishment. Jacobin, the magazine associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, avoided the coup almost entirely. Its silence reflected a political orientation that prioritised access to the Democratic Party over any serious confrontation with the forces threatening democratic rights. The pseudo-left is presented as a political tendency that channels social anger back into bourgeois political structures and prevents the emergence of an independent working-class movement.

By analysing these forces together, the book shows that Trumpism was not an isolated phenomenon. It expressed a political system in which both major parties and their ideological satellites had abandoned any commitment to democratic principles. The Republicans acted as the architects of authoritarian rule. The Democrats provided the cover that allowed it to develop—the pseudo-left neutralised opposition from below. Trump benefited from this alignment, but the forces that sustained him were far larger and far more dangerous than any individual.

The Social Opposition and the Question of Leadership

Against this record of capitulation from the political establishment, the book documents a continuous and determined opposition from below. It begins with the mass protests that erupted on Trump’s first day in office, demonstrations that revealed a broad social revulsion toward authoritarianism and inequality. It continues through the multiracial uprising that followed the murder of George Floyd, an eruption of anger that exposed the brutality of the American state and the depth of social injustice. The book then turns to the No Kings demonstrations of 2025 and 2026, the largest single-day protests in American history, in which millions rejected attempts to impose monarchical or dictatorial rule. These movements were spontaneous, diverse, and often politically inchoate, but they expressed a profound social reality. The objective basis for a mass socialist movement exists. What is missing is conscious revolutionary leadership.

The programme advanced by the volume is therefore clear and uncompromising. It calls for forming rank-and-file committees independent of the union bureaucracy, which has long served as an instrument of corporate management and a barrier to genuine working-class struggle. It insists on the working class's political independence from both capitalist parties, rejecting the illusion that the Democratic Party can serve as a vehicle for social reform or democratic renewal. It advocates the international unification of workers in the struggle against war and fascism on a socialist programme, recognising that the crisis of American democracy is inseparable from the global crisis of capitalism and cannot be resolved within national boundaries.

The book situates this programme within a broader historical framework. It appears on the eve of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Revolution, a moment that invites reflection on the democratic principles that shaped the nation’s origins. The volume argues that a ruling class openly contemptuous of 1776's egalitarian ideals now governs the country. The commitment to popular sovereignty, equality, and resistance to tyranny that animated the first American Revolution has been replaced by a political order defined by oligarchic wealth, militarism, and authoritarianism.

The book connects this contempt to the WSWS’s polemic against the New York Times’ 1619 Project. That project sought to recast the American Revolution and the Civil War as episodes in an eternal racial conflict, stripping them of their democratic content and obscuring their significance as revolutionary struggles. The volume argues that such interpretations serve the interests of a ruling class that wishes to sever the working class from its own revolutionary heritage. By reducing the past to racial antagonism, the 1619 Project denies the possibility of universal emancipation and undermines the historical foundations of a socialist movement.

The democratic principles of the first two American revolutions can be defended and extended only by a third. The book insists that the working class must conquer political power and reorganise economic life on socialist foundations. This is not a rhetorical flourish but a historical conclusion drawn from the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. The concentration of wealth, the militarisation of society, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the descent into perpetual war have created conditions in which democratic rights cannot survive without a fundamental transformation of the social order. The working class must complete the unfinished tasks of American history by establishing a society based on equality, rational planning, and collective ownership.

The book closes with a fictional Letter from Afar by Abraham Lincoln. This device allows the authors to draw a direct line between the moral and political struggles of the nineteenth century and those of the present. In the letter, Lincoln argues that capitalism today is as intolerable as slavery was in his time. He insists that Trump is a symptom, not the disease, and that the real enemy is a social system that produces inequality, violence, and authoritarianism. The letter reminds us that the fight for democracy has always required revolutionary action and that the working class must assume the role once played by the abolitionists and the soldiers of the Union Army.

The book's conclusion is stark and unambiguous. Humanity faces a choice between fascism and socialism. Reforms, appeals to civility, and reliance on existing political institutions cannot resolve the crisis of American democracy. It requires a conscious working-class movement, armed with a socialist programme and guided by historical understanding. Oligarchy is essential reading for every worker and young person seeking to understand how American democracy reached this point and what must be done to prevent catastrophe. It calls for action and warns that today's choices will determine the future.

Bibliography

North, David, ed. Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy. Mehring Books, 2026.

North, David. “Foreword.” In Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy. Mehring Books, 2026.

London, Eric. “The Social Origins of the January 6 Conspiracy.” Lecture delivered August 2021. World Socialist Web Site.

International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site. Articles, statements, and analyses published between 2015 and 2026. World Socialist Web Site. https://www.wsws.org

World Socialist Web Site. Coverage of the 2020 election crisis, the January 6 coup attempt, and the second Trump administration. https://www.wsws.org

World Socialist Web Site. “The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Falsification of History.” Series of articles and critiques, 2019–2020.

North, David. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. Mehring Books, 2021.

North, David. The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political and Social Roots of the Breakdown. Mehring Books, 2024.

Mehring Books. Publications on American politics, imperialism, and the crisis of capitalism, 2015–2026. https://mehring.com

Federal Reserve Data. Wealth distribution statistics for American billionaires and the bottom half of the population, 2024–2026.

Public campaign finance records. Documentation of political contributions by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and Jeff Bezos, 2023–2024.

United States Department of Defence. Public statements and records relating to military operations in Venezuela and Iran, 2025–2026.

United States Department of Homeland Security. Public records concerning ICE deployments and federal paramilitary actions, 2025–2026.

Historical sources on the American Revolution and Civil War—primary documents from 1776 and 1861, including speeches, letters, and constitutional debates.

Lincoln, Abraham. “Letter from Afar.” Fictional reconstruction in Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy. Mehring Books, 2026.

 

Bread, Circuses and Balance Sheets: The IFR’s State of the Game and the Crisis of Capitalist Football

The Independent Football Regulator’s State of the Game report presents itself as a sober, technocratic assessment of English football’s financial health. In reality, it is an extraordinary document: a 244-page anatomy of a social institution hollowed out by capitalist irrationality—and an unwitting indictment of the very economic system the regulator exists to stabilise. Its authors describe a “paradox” at the heart of the sport: unprecedented wealth alongside systemic insolvency. A Marxist analysis shows there is no paradox at all. What the IFR calls a puzzle is simply capitalism’s logic asserting itself with brutal clarity.

English football today is the clearest example of competitive accumulation. Clubs are compelled to spend beyond their means—not because they are reckless or poorly managed, but because the industry’s structure leaves them little choice. Since 1992, Premier League revenue has grown thirty-fold, far outpacing the wider economy, while costs have risen even faster. Ninety-four per cent of clubs in the top five divisions lose money. This is not a departure from capitalist norms; it is their fulfilment. The IFR cannot acknowledge this, because doing so would mean admitting that the crisis is systemic, not accidental.

The report’s own data show how sport has been transformed into a financial asset class. Labour-power is converted into amortised capital, future transfer fees are sold off as fictitious capital, grounds and badges are pledged as collateral, and a handful of lenders extract value regardless of sporting outcomes. Football has become a site of financialisation, governed not by sporting logic but by the imperatives of debt, leverage and speculative investment. The IFR documents this process in forensic detail while refusing to confront its implications.

Ownership patterns point to the same reality: global capital, multi-club networks, and North American investment groups dominate the game. Returns are overwhelmingly negative, yet capital keeps flowing in—not for sporting reasons, but because football offers global reach, cultural legitimacy, and opportunities for speculation, soft power, and, as the report notes, money laundering.

The regulator’s role is not to challenge this system, but to preserve it. Its proposals amount to managerial tinkering that keeps the Premier League dominant and the pyramid intact, while leaving the underlying relations of ownership, finance, and exploitation untouched. Rather than resolve football’s contradictions, the IFR merely catalogues them, revealing the need for a fundamentally different model.

The so‑called paradox: wealth without stability

David Kogan’s foreword presents English football as both the world’s richest, most competitive league system and one on the verge of collapse. The figures are stark: clubs generated £9 billion in revenue last season, yet 94 per cent of those in the top five divisions lost money. No other major industry could report such figures without prompting immediate questions about systemic failure. Yet the IFR treats this as a managerial problem: poor governance, inadequate oversight, and clubs failing to “live within their means.” This is the ideological reflex of bourgeois regulation: to blame crises on individual actors’ behaviour rather than on the system's structure.

A Marxist analysis begins from the opposite premise. When nearly every firm in an industry fails in the same way, the cause lies not in management but in the structure of accumulation. Marx explained long ago that competition forces capitalists to expand, invest and outspend their rivals to survive. The capitalist does not accumulate because he is greedy or irrational; the system compels him to. English football clearly illustrates this dynamic. Clubs spend beyond their means not because they are reckless, but because they have to. Falling behind in the competitive arms race risks relegation, lost broadcast income, collapsing commercial revenue and, ultimately, extinction.

The IFR’s own data confirm this. Since 1992, Premier League revenue has grown thirty-fold, far outpacing the wider economy, while costs have risen even faster. Wage bills, transfer amortisation, agent fees, stadium financing, and debt servicing have all increased alongside revenue. The report presents this as a failure of “financial management,” as if clubs could spend less without jeopardising their competitive position. But in a system driven by accumulation, restraint is punished. A club that refuses to overspend isn’t prudent; it gets relegated.

This is why the IFR cannot acknowledge the crisis’s real nature. To do so would mean admitting that the contradictions it describes are not deviations from normal capitalist functioning, but its inevitable outcome. The regulator must therefore frame the crisis as a technical problem—liquidity, governance, and risk—rather than a structural one. It must pretend that stress tests, action plans, and “enhanced oversight” can correct football's financial instability, rather than fundamentally transforming ownership, finance, and distribution.

The report’s language reflects this ideological constraint. Kogan describes a “paradox”: unprecedented wealth alongside systemic insolvency, as though the two were unrelated phenomena that mysteriously coexist. But there is no paradox: wealth and insolvency are two sides of the same process. The more revenue the game generates, the more capital flows in. The more capital flows in, the sharper the competitive pressures become. As those pressures intensify, clubs must spend more, and their losses deepen. The IFR describes the symptoms while refusing to name the disease. 

The Political Economy of Football’s Financialisation

To understand the IFR’s findings, we should place English football within the broader political economy of late capitalism. Over the past three decades, it has undergone the same transformation as other major sectors of the global economy: a shift from production to financialisation, from profits generated through activity to profits extracted through ownership, leverage and speculation. Once a commercial entertainment industry, football has become a financial asset class, governed less by sporting logic than by the imperatives of capital accumulation.

This transformation did not happen overnight. Football’s first metamorphosis—from a working-class pastime to a commercial commodity—came in the early twentieth century. Its second, from commodity to global media product, gathered pace with television and culminated in the Premier League’s 1992 reorganisation. But the decisive shift came after the 2008 financial crisis, when the collapse of productive investment across advanced capitalist economies pushed capital into new fields of speculation. With its global reach, predictable revenue streams and intense brand loyalty, football became an ideal arena for financial expansion.

Financialisation means that profit comes less from producing goods or services and more from manipulating financial instruments. In football, it turns every aspect of the sport into a tradable asset. Player contracts are amortised like industrial machinery; future transfer fees are sold as receivables; and stadiums, training grounds and even club badges are used as collateral. Multi-club ownership groups operate like private equity portfolios, moving players, revenues and liabilities across borders to maximise returns. Debt is no longer a temporary burden but a permanent operating condition.

The IFR’s own data show the scale of this transformation. Transfer factoring has increased fourteen-fold in four years, and £1.2 billion in future transfer receipts has already been monetised. Interest payments have quadrupled as borrowing costs have surged, while five lenders now control almost the entire transfer finance market. This is no marginal development; it is a structural reorganisation of the sport, driven by the dominance of finance capital.

Marx, Hilferding and Lenin all described how, once dominant, financial capital subordinates productive activity to its own logic. That logic now governs English football. Clubs borrow not to invest in long-term development, but to keep pace with the competitive arms race. They sell future transfer fees not out of prudence, but because the system compels them. Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it, creating fragility, dependency and exposure to shocks. Relegation clauses mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure, reducing clubs to shells through which capital circulates.

Why football? Because it offers what late capitalism craves: scarcity, global visibility, emotional attachment and cultural legitimacy. It is one of the few sectors where losses can be tolerated for years because the club retains symbolic value as an asset. As the IFR notes, the sector is also vulnerable to money laundering, offshore structures, and opaque sponsorship arrangements. Distressed clubs become conduits for capital flows unrelated to sport.

The IFR documents this transformation with forensic detail while refusing to confront its implications. It describes the symptoms of financialisation, debt dependency, factoring, and multi‑club networks, but treats them as technical problems rather than structural ones. It cannot admit that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalist functioning but its fulfilment. To do so would be to question the very model the regulator exists to preserve.

From commodity to media product to financial instrument

Football’s first transformation from a working-class pastime into a commercial commodity occurred in the early 20th century, as clubs evolved from voluntary associations into businesses selling gate receipts, advertising space, and professional players’ labour-power. Its second transformation from commodity to media product followed the rise of television and culminated in the Premier League’s 1992 reorganisation. Broadcasting turned football into a mass-produced cultural product, shaped by scheduling, advertising, and global distribution. But the decisive shift came after the 2008 financial crisis, when football became a financial instrument.

This is not a metaphor; it is literal. Clubs borrow against future transfer fees. Contracts are amortised like industrial machinery. Clubs pledge grounds and badges as collateral. Revenues are securitised. Multi-club groups operate like private equity portfolios. Every component of the sport- labour, infrastructure, intellectual property, and future income- is converted into an asset that can be traded, leveraged, or used as security. The IFR’s data show the scale of this transformation with forensic clarity: transfer factoring has risen fourteen-fold in four years, £1.2 billion of future receipts have already been sold, interest payments have quadrupled as the cost of debt has surged, and five lenders control almost the entire market for transfer finance. This is not a marginal development; it is the sport's structural reorganisation under the dominance of finance capital.

What Hilferding described in *Finance Capital*- the fusion of banking and industrial capital into a financial oligarchy that extracts value regardless of productive outcomes- is now evident on the balance sheets of English football clubs. Lenin’s analysis of how these oligarchies dominate entire sectors and turn them into instruments of speculation applies with almost uncanny precision. English football has become one of those sectors.

Financialisation means profit comes less from producing goods or services and more from manipulating financial instruments. In football, this shows up in the conversion of every aspect of the sport into tradable assets: player contracts become depreciating capital goods, transfer fees become receivables, stadiums become collateral, clubs become vehicles for debt-fuelled expansion, and multi-club networks become platforms for arbitrage, talent extraction, and regulatory evasion.

The consequences are profound. Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it, creating fragility, dependency and exposure to shocks. Relegation clauses mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure, while clubs become shells through which capital circulates. The IFR documents this fragility but cannot explain it, because doing so would require acknowledging that the instability is structural, not accidental.

Why football? Because it offers exactly what late capitalism craves: scarcity, global visibility, emotional attachment and cultural legitimacy. Few sectors can absorb years of losses while their core asset- the club- retains symbolic value. As the IFR itself notes, football is also vulnerable to money laundering, offshore structures and opaque sponsorship arrangements. Distressed clubs can become conduits for capital flows unrelated to sport.

Financialisation also helps explain why capital continues to flow into football despite negative returns. The IFR reports an average indicative return of minus 41 per cent across clubs, yet ownership is becoming more global, institutional and concentrated. This is not irrational; it reflects financial capital’s pursuit of control over assets it can leverage, securitise, or use to anchor broader commercial ecosystems. A Premier League club is more than a football team: it is a content engine, a data-harvesting platform, a global brand, a political instrument and a financial vehicle.

The IFR describes the symptoms of this transformation- debt dependency, factoring, and multi-club networks- but treats them as technical rather than structural problems. It cannot admit that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but its fulfilment. Doing so would mean questioning the very model the regulator exists to preserve.

Why football?

Football is uniquely suited to financialisation because it possesses characteristics that make it a coveted prize for capital. Few industries offer such a potent combination of global reach, emotional intensity, predictable revenue, scarcity and cultural legitimacy. These features are not incidental; they are precisely what make football attractive to finance capital in an era of stagnation, falling productive investment and the search for new fields of extraction.

Its global reach is unmatched. The Premier League reaches hundreds of millions of homes, giving capital access to a ready-made global consumer base. In a world of saturated traditional markets, football offers immediate access to audiences on every continent. Its emotional connection is even more valuable. Football clubs command a level of brand loyalty that no commercial product can replicate. Supporters do not switch allegiances based on price or quality. Their loyalty is inherited, irrational and lifelong. For capital, this is ideal: a captive market whose consumption is driven by identity rather than choice.

Football also offers predictable revenue streams. Broadcast rights, sponsorships, merchandise, digital content and hospitality packages bring in recurring income that can be securitised, borrowed against and bundled into financial products. Predictability is the lifeblood of financialisation. Then there is scarcity. Only a handful of elite clubs exist, and there is just one Premier League. Scarcity drives valuations, intensifies competition among investors and ensures that even failing clubs retain symbolic and financial value.

Finally, football enjoys cultural legitimacy. It presents itself as tradition, community, and heritage, masking the extraction taking place beneath the surface. This legitimacy gives political cover to private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, and multinational corporations. In a low-growth economy, football offers something rare: an asset class with global visibility and political utility. It serves as a vehicle for surplus capital, a platform for soft power, and, as the IFR itself notes, a conduit for money laundering through offshore structures, opaque transfers, and sponsorship. Football’s financialisation is no accident. It is structural, and the IFR merely catalogues its symptoms.

Financialisation as crisis

Financialisation does not stabilise football; it destabilises it. The IFR’s own data reveal a sport whose financial architecture has been reshaped around debt, leverage and speculative instruments. Debt dependency, transfer factoring, leveraged ownership and sprawling multi-club networks do not build resilience; they create fragility. They tie clubs to financial obligations that become more burdensome precisely when sporting performance declines. Relegation clauses now embedded in most Premier League loans mean sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure when a club is at its weakest. A bad season becomes not just a sporting setback but a financial catastrophe. Clubs stop being community institutions and become shells through which capital circulates.

Factoring shows this dynamic with brutal clarity. When a club sells future transfer receipts to raise cash now, it mortgages tomorrow’s income to cope with today’s pressures. This is fictitious capital in Marx’s strict sense: value that does not yet exist, monetised and traded as if it were already real. The IFR reports that factoring has increased fourteen-fold in four years, with £1.2 billion in future receipts already sold. This is not prudent financial management; it is a symptom of systemic desperation. Clubs are not planning for the future; they are consuming it.

Leveraged ownership compounds the instability. Owners buy clubs with borrowed money, load the debt onto the club, and extract returns through management fees, refinancing, and asset sales. Multi‑club networks extend this logic across borders, treating clubs as nodes in a financial ecosystem rather than as sporting entities. Players move to meet balance‑sheet needs rather than tactical ones. Revenues are shifted to optimise tax and regulatory arbitrage. The club becomes a financial vehicle first and a football team second.

The IFR’s report is, unintentionally, a catalogue of these contradictions. It describes a sport that generates enormous wealth but cannot sustain itself, because financial channels siphon that wealth away before it can stabilise the system. The crisis is not accidental; it is structural. Football’s financial instability is not caused by mismanagement, incompetence or isolated excess. It is the predictable result of reorganising the sport around the imperatives of financial capital. The regulator documents the symptoms but cannot name the cause. Doing so would mean acknowledging that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but an expression of it and that no amount of technocratic oversight can resolve contradictions rooted in the system itself.

Labour as a cost, labour as an asset, labour as a battleground

The report’s treatment of labour is revealing. The report presents players almost exclusively as a cost, a liability to manage, rather than as the producers of the commodity behind the game’s enormous revenues. Wage bills have risen 33 per cent across the Premier League pyramid, 32 per cent in the Championship, 71 per cent in League One, and 63 per cent in League Two. Twenty clubs spend more than 80 per cent of their revenue on salaries. The regulator’s response is predictable: cost control, wage restraint, “responsible spending.” In other words, disciplining labour.

First, players are not simply workers; they are labour-power converted into financial assets. Modern football treats labour not just as a production cost but as a capitalised resource. Contracts are amortised like industrial machinery: depreciated over time, securitised, borrowed against and used as collateral in complex financial arrangements. Agent fees, now £584 million, are part of this same machinery, serving as transaction costs in a financialised market for labour-power. The doubling of amortisation to £2.6 billion is no accounting quirk; it marks the conversion of labour into fictitious capital: value that exists only on balance sheets, yet is traded and leveraged as if it were real.

This transformation is central to football’s financialisation: labour-power becomes a financial instrument, with its value fluctuating according to market conditions, performance metrics, and speculative expectations. The IFR describes this process without understanding it, treating amortisation as a technical matter rather than as a structural reorganisation of labour under finance capital.

Second, wage restraint is class struggle. The PFA’s successful challenge to salary caps in 2020, and its current High Court action, are not “governance friction.” They are organised workers resisting an attempt to fix their share of the surplus. The IFR cannot admit this because it would require acknowledging that labour has interests irreconcilable with capital. The regulator’s framework assumes harmony among stakeholders, owners, leagues, players, and fans, and treats conflict as a managerial problem. But wage restraint is not a governance issue. It is a matter of class power.

The report’s language exposes this ideological blind spot. It describes wage inflation as a “risk,” a “pressure,” and a “threat to sustainability.” Nowhere does the IFR consider that rising wages reflect labour’s bargaining strength in a sector where workers create enormous value. The regulator’s job is to protect clubs’ financial stability, not workers’ living standards or bargaining power. As a result, it frames wage growth as a pathology rather than as a sign of labour asserting itself.

Third, the category “player wages” masks profound stratification. A Premier League star earning £300,000 a week has little in common with a League Two professional on a precarious one-year deal. Yet the IFR treats “player wages” as a single category, obscuring class divisions across the labour force. The report focuses on elite wage inflation while overlooking the conditions most football workers face: academy staff, cleaners, stewards, groundskeepers, analysts, youth coaches, and hospitality workers. The analysis renders these workers invisible. The IFR’s framework counts their labour only where it intersects with financial risk.

This invisibility is ideological. It reflects the regulator’s assumption that players perform the “real” labour of football, and that the “real” costs are those that affect balance sheets. The thousands of workers who make football possible maintaining stadiums, training youth players, cleaning facilities, managing logistics, providing security, and running matchday operations are treated as background noise. Their exploitation goes unanalysed because it is not financialised.

The most devastating statistic is the one the IFR buries: seventeen EFL and National League clubs would lose money even if they paid their players nothing. That fact alone undermines the report’s central claim that wage inflation is the root problem. If clubs cannot break even without paying a single player, wages are not driving insolvency; the business model is. Ownership structure, reliance on debt, value extraction through financial channels, volatile revenue streams, and the competitive arms race drive the crisis.

But the IFR cannot say so. To do so would mean admitting that labour is not the problem; capital is. It would mean acknowledging that the financialisation of football has created a system that blames workers for a crisis caused by owners, lenders, and speculative investors. It would also mean recognising that wage restraint is not a solution but an attack on labour. The report thus treats labour as a cost to be controlled rather than a source of value. It documents the symptoms of exploitation but refuses to name the exploiters. It catalogues the contradictions in football’s labour market while defending the system that creates them. In doing so, it reveals regulation's limits under capitalism: labour can be disciplined, but capital cannot be challenged.

Finance capital takes control.

The report’s most explosive revelations concern finance capital’s penetration into every pore of the sport. What the IFR documents, often without grasping its significance, is English football’s near-total subordination to the logic of financialisation. Transfer factoring has increased fourteen-fold in just four years. £1.2 billion in future transfer receipts has already been sold- income that does not yet exist, monetised and spent before a single pound has been earned. Interest payments have surged from £97 million to £455 million as the cost of debt has tripled. Five lenders control 93.6 per cent of transfer finance, with one lender alone controlling nearly half. This is not a competitive market. It is an oligopoly.

None of this is accidental. It is the predictable outcome of reorganising football according to the imperatives of finance capital. Hilferding, writing more than a century ago, described how banking and industrial capital fuse into a single financial oligarchy that extracts value regardless of productive outcomes. Lenin showed how such oligarchies dominate entire sectors, turning them into instruments of speculation. English football is now one of those sectors. The IFR’s data could have been lifted directly from Finance Capital or Imperialism.

Factoring future fees is fictitious capital in Marx’s strict sense: money raised today against value that does not yet exist. Clubs sell tomorrow’s transfer income to survive today’s pressures, mortgaging their future to remain competitive in the present. This is not prudent financial management. It is systemic desperation. The club consumes its future to survive its present.

The collateralisation of heritage assets is equally revealing. Grounds, badges, and training facilities, the physical and symbolic infrastructure of the people’s game, are increasingly pledged as security for loans. The IFR notes that 60 per cent of Premier League clubs have relegation‑triggered repayment clauses. This means sporting failure can trigger creditor seizure. A bad season is no longer merely a sporting setback; it is a financial catastrophe. The club’s identity, history and community assets become bargaining chips in negotiations with lenders.

Leveraged ownership compounds the instability. Owners acquire clubs with borrowed money, load the debt onto the club itself, and extract returns through refinancing, management fees and asset sales. Multi‑club networks extend this logic across borders, treating clubs as nodes in a financial ecosystem rather than as sporting institutions. Players move to meet balance‑sheet needs rather than tactical ones. Revenues are shifted to optimise tax and regulatory arbitrage. Clubs become shells through which capital circulates.

The IFR’s report is, unintentionally, a catalogue of these contradictions. It shows a sport that generates enormous wealth yet cannot sustain itself because financial channels siphon that wealth off before it can stabilise the system. The crisis is not accidental. It is structural. Football’s financial instability is not the result of mismanagement, incompetence or isolated excess. It is the predictable outcome of reorganising the sport according to the imperatives of financial capital.

The regulator documents the symptoms but cannot name the cause. To do so would be to acknowledge that English football’s crisis is not a deviation from capitalism but its expression and that no amount of technocratic oversight can resolve contradictions rooted in the system itself.

Ownership without roots, capital without loyalty

The IFR’s ownership data show a sport transformed into a global asset class. English football is no longer a national game but a marketplace for international capital. Non‑domestic owners now control 75 per cent of Premier League revenue. North American capital controls nearly half of the entire pyramid. Eighty‑five per cent of Premier League clubs belong to multi‑club or multi‑sport groups, integrated into sprawling corporate networks that treat football teams as interchangeable units within a global portfolio. This is not cosmopolitan modernisation. It is the sport's financial colonisation.

The most striking fact is that returns are overwhelmingly negative. The IFR reports an average indicative return of minus 41 per cent across clubs, with only 21 of 76 making a positive return. Yet capital continues to flow in. The report cannot explain this. It treats negative returns as a puzzle, as though investors were behaving irrationally. But a Marxist analysis can. Capital does not enter football to earn conventional profits. It enters because football offers value extraction, political leverage, and speculative opportunity unavailable in the productive sectors of a low‑growth economy.

Football offers speculative opportunities. Promotion windfalls can transform a club’s valuation overnight. Leveraged buyouts let owners acquire clubs with borrowed money and load the debt onto the club. Asset stripping selling stadium land, training facilities, or intellectual property can generate returns even when the club loses money. The IFR notes that distressed clubs are particularly vulnerable: their financial weakness makes them easy targets for acquisition, refinancing and exploitation. The “community club” becomes a conduit through which capital passes, its heritage assets collateralised, its future income securitised, its identity commodified.

Football also offers soft power. Sovereign wealth funds, oligarchs, and politically connected investors use clubs to project influence, launder reputations, and embed themselves in Western cultural institutions. Ownership becomes a diplomatic tool. The club becomes a platform for geopolitical branding. The IFR acknowledges this obliquely, noting concerns about “suitability” and “integrity,” but it cannot confront the political reality: English football has become a theatre for state power.

Then there is the laundering of surplus capital. In a low‑growth economy, productive investment yields diminishing returns. Capital seeks outlets to move, disguise, or recycle money through complex financial structures. Football provides precisely this. As the IFR itself notes, the sport is exposed to money laundering through offshore ownership, opaque sponsorship deals, and transfer arrangements routed through tax havens. Transfers often involve multiple intermediaries, shell companies, and inflated valuations, providing ideal mechanisms for moving capital across borders. Sponsorship deals from offshore entities allow funds to enter clubs with minimal scrutiny. Distressed clubs, desperate for liquidity, are the easiest entry points.

Multi‑club ownership networks intensify these dynamics. They let capital move players, revenues, and liabilities across borders, exploiting regulatory differences and arbitrage opportunities. Clubs become nodes in a global financial ecosystem, with their sporting identity secondary to their role in the network. The IFR describes this trend but cannot analyse it. It treats multi‑club ownership as a governance challenge rather than a structural expression of financial imperialism.

The regulator’s data reveal a sport whose ownership model is not merely globalised but financialised. Clubs are not owned to win matches. They are owned to extract value, launder capital, project influence and anchor wider commercial ecosystems. The IFR catalogues these realities but cannot name them. To do so would be to admit that English football is no longer a sport governed by sporting logic but an asset class governed by the imperatives of global capital.

The regulator as the ideal collective capitalist

Engels described the capitalist state as the “ideal collective capitalist”: an institution that manages the bourgeoisie's common affairs, sometimes against individual capitalists, to preserve the system as a whole. The IFR fits this description precisely. Its first goal is to protect the hierarchy. The report’s distribution aims begin with preserving the Premier League as the world’s leading league and the Championship as the leading second tier. Inequality is to be eased, not ended. The top club earns 605 times the revenue of the smallest National League club.

The industry welcomes the regulator. The Premier League endorsed the report and claims its own proposals already meet the IFR’s objectives. A regulator embraced by the dominant firms is not a regulator that threatens them. Its tools are mild: action plans, stress tests, risk assessments. No hard liquidity floors until 2028–2030. No limits on transfer‑finance exposure. No challenge to debt dependency, multi‑club ownership or the private model itself. Fans receive a voice, not power. Clubs must “consider” supporters’ views. The model allows no mutual ownership, 50+1, or public stakes. Supporters remain consultees, not owners. Even Kogan’s stated fear that the supply of owners and media money may dry up reveals the limits of the IFR’s worldview. The worry is that capital might stop flowing in. No one ever asks whether capital should run the game at all.

The IFR has produced the most detailed evidence yet of how English football has been transformed into a financial asset class. Its data, often presented with bureaucratic neutrality, amount to a devastating indictment of the system the regulator exists to preserve. But its prescriptions aim only to make the commodity sustainable, not to liberate the sport from the market. The IFR’s task is not to challenge capital’s domination of football but to ensure that domination continues in a more orderly, less visibly chaotic form.

A Marxist programme begins where the report ends. To reclaim football as a social institution rather than a financial instrument, we must dismantle the foundations of the current model. That means pooling broadcast income across the entire pyramid to end the grotesque inequality that makes competitive overspending inevitable. It means capping debt and banning factoring so clubs can't mortgage their future to survive the present. It means supporter and worker ownership on a 50+1 basis or stronger, ensuring that those who produce and sustain the game control it. It also means public or community ownership of grounds, removing heritage assets from finance capital’s collateral chains. Finally, it means recognising all club workers—not only players—as producers of the game, with rights, protections, and democratic power.

These measures are not utopian. They are the minimum required to reverse the financialisation documented in the IFR’s own report. They would transform football from an asset class back into a public good. They would replace extraction with stewardship, speculation with solidarity, and debt dependency with democratic control. The regulator can manage symptoms. It cannot cure the disease. It can stabilise insolvency, not prevent it. It can discipline labour, not restrain capital. It can protect heritage assets as collateral, not as community property. It can preserve the hierarchy, not democratise it.

The IFR’s State of the Game is therefore more than a report. It is a mirror held up to a decaying system. It shows a sport that generates extraordinary wealth yet cannot sustain itself because financial channels siphon it off. It shows a regulator tasked with preserving a model that produces crisis. And it shows, unintentionally, that the only real alternative lies outside market logic. Football must be reclaimed as a social institution, not a financial instrument. Only then can the contradictions the IFR describes be resolved, not through technocratic oversight, but through democratic control, collective ownership and the abolition of football’s subordination to capital.

Bibliography

Marxist Theory and Political Economy

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Football Governance, Economics and Financialisation

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Money Laundering, Offshore Capital and Sport

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Arsenal’s Redundancies and the Real Face of Football Under the Billionaires

 The announcement that Arsenal Football Club intends to axe up to 60 jobs just months after winning its first league title in 22 years and posting record revenues is a devastating exposure of the class logic governing modern football. It reveals, with clinical clarity, billionaire ownership's priorities and the ruthless mechanisms through which capital restructures every sphere of social life, including the world’s most popular sport.

On October 14, chief executive Richard Garlick informed staff that dozens of commercial, administrative and operational workers would be made redundant. The coaching staff, first‑team performance departments, academy, Arsenal Foundation, security teams and the women’s football set‑up were exempt. Instead, the axe falls on the ordinary workers who keep the club functioning: ticketing staff, retail workers, office administrators, and back‑office personnel. These are not high‑earning executives or elite athletes. They are workers on modest wages in one of the world's most expensive cities, facing a cost‑of‑living crisis that has already pushed millions to the brink.

The timing of the announcement is no coincidence. It clearly reflects the priorities of Kroenke Sports & Entertainment (KSE ), the American conglomerate that owns Arsenal. The club has just completed one of the most successful seasons in its modern history, recording record revenues of £691 million for 2024/25 and an overall loss of just £1.4 million, effectively breaking even. A week before the redundancies were announced, manager Mikel Arteta signed a new contract reportedly worth £20 million a year, making him the Premier League’s highest-paid coach. Over the summer, Arsenal spent £150 million on Christos Tzolis, Bruno Guimarães and Ezri Konsa.

The club’s wage bill through May 2025 was £346.8 million. Even if all 60 workers earned £50,000—a generous assumption—the total savings would be around £3 million: less than 1% of the wage bill and a fraction of a single star player’s annual salary. The cuts are not financially necessary; they are a political and class decision.

The Consultants’ Axe: Manufactured Inevitability

The redundancies did not emerge organically from the club’s internal operations. Arsenal hired management consultants from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to review operations and identify “efficiencies.” BCG is a global firm whose interventions in corporations and governments routinely end in job losses. Its presence is a warning sign in any workplace. It provides owners with a veneer of technocratic legitimacy: the cuts are not the owners’ decision; they are the result of an “audit,” a “review,” a “recommendation.”

This is a familiar tactic. In 2020, during the pandemic, Arsenal made 55 staff redundant, including Jerry Quy, the long-serving employee who played the club mascot Gunnersaurus, even after first-team players took a 12.5 per cent pay cut on the understanding that staff jobs would be protected. The pandemic is long over, revenues have soared, and the club is richer than ever. Yet the same owners are wielding the same axe.

The statutory “consultation” process now under way is a legal formality. It gives management a procedural framework to implement decisions already made. It does not give workers a veto. It does not provide democratic control. It manages dissent and absorbs anger.

Football Under Capital: A System of Extraction

Arsenal is not an isolated case. Under Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Manchester United has cut hundreds of jobs in successive rounds of restructuring. Workers were told the club was facing ruin, even as vast sums continued to flow into transfers and stadium plans. Across the Premier League, revenues from broadcasting rights, sponsorship deals and ticket prices, which increasingly price working-class fans out of the grounds, continue to climb. Yet the workers who sell the shirts, staff the offices, maintain the stadiums and keep the clubs functioning are treated as expendable.

A draft “State of the Game” report from the new Independent Football Regulator found that 94 per cent of clubs in England’s top five divisions lost money last season, despite combined revenues of around £9 billion. Clubs spend this money on transfer fees, star salaries, and servicing debt. Rising player-asset values enrich owners, while ordinary staff bear the risk. “Losses” on paper sit alongside billion-pound valuations. The British state-established regulator does not challenge this arrangement. Its purpose is to stabilise it.

Football is now fully integrated into the global financial system. Clubs are treated as assets whose value is measured not by their social role or community significance, but by their ability to generate revenue streams, attract global sponsorships, and appreciate. Billionaire owners do not view clubs as institutions rooted in working‑class communities. They see them as vehicles for accumulating capital.

The Class Logic of Arsenal’s Cuts

Arsenal’s operating costs have risen sharply from £148 million to £201 million, and wages continue to climb. The club has posted losses for seven consecutive years, despite record revenues. Ownership is using this to justify restructuring. But the cuts target only the lowest‑paid workers, not the structural drivers of cost.

The logic is simple: invest heavily in the asset (the squad), and ruthlessly cut the labour that doesn't directly generate market value. The workers being made redundant do not increase the club’s valuation. They do not attract global sponsorships. They do not produce highlight reels or social media engagement. They are therefore expendable.

This is capital's logic in every industry. It has driven mass layoffs across technology firms, media companies, logistics giants, and public services. It has produced record profits for corporations and record hardship for workers. Football is not immune. It is a microcosm of capitalism's broader crisis.

The Anger of Supporters  and Its Limits

Many supporters reacted with anger. On fan sites, many pointed out that a single top player earns in a week what several of the threatened workers earn in a year. Others asked whether the consultants’ fees cost more than the jobs being cut. The anger is justified. But it cannot be channelled into appeals to the “Arsenal family” or to the goodwill of billionaires.

KSE’s purpose is not to run a community institution. Its purpose is to increase the value of a global sports asset alongside the Kroenke family’s other franchises. It is not accountable to supporters. It is not accountable to workers. It is accountable only to capital.

What Is Needed: Independent Organisation and Democratic Control

The 60 Arsenal workers should not have to fight this alone or rely on a management-controlled consultation process. They need their own independent rank-and-file committee: a democratic body, free from management and trade union bureaucracy, and able to organise collective resistance. The committee should demand: No job cuts. Full pay for all workers. Publication of the BCG report, consultant contracts and ownership finances. Solidarity from matchday staff, stewards, supporters and workers at other clubs facing similar cuts.

Players, staff, and millions of working people who pay for tickets, subscriptions, and merchandise produce football's wealth through their labour. As long as billionaires own the sport and run it for profit, every record revenue figure will be followed by another round of “efficiencies” for those at the bottom.

Defending these jobs is part of a broader struggle: to take football and the economy out of the hands of the financial oligarchy and put them under democratic control. Arsenal’s redundancies are not an isolated event. They are a symptom of a system that prioritises profit over people, valuation over community, and capital over labour.

 

The Witch-Hunt and the Revolution: Class Struggle, Social Crisis, and the Limits of Marion Gibson’s Witchland

Marion Gibson’s Witchland is a humane, meticulously researched, and often moving account of the largest witch-hunt in English history. At its heart is a powerful act of historical restitution: bringing back into view the hundreds of people “wrongly persecuted, wrongly killed, and then largely erased from history” who were hunted down in the 1640s, when Britain was convulsed by civil war, economic breakdown, and the collapse of traditional authority. Gibson’s work to recover their names, families, occupations, and everyday conflicts is both real and substantial. With admirable patience and care, she restores the lives of people who appear in the archive, if at all, as little more than entries in a witch-finder’s tally, drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records.

Yet Gibson's conceptual framework for situating this material does not adequately account for the historical forces at work. The witch-hunt cannot be explained by “moral panic,” free-floating misogyny, or a generalised climate of fear. These categories separate the witch-hunt from the revolutionary crisis in which it unfolded and reduce the political landscape to a timeless tableau of communal anxiety. The 1640s were not merely years of heightened emotion; they were the decisive decade of the English Revolution, a confrontation between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war shattered the machinery of justice, disrupted the assize circuits, empowered local Puritan elites, and created conditions in which freelance interrogators such as Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne could operate with near impunity. Their methods of “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, and template-driven interrogations produced confessions that reflected the interrogators’ own demonological assumptions rather than the accused’s lived experience.

The witch-hunt was no inexplicable eruption of mass hysteria. It was a distorted expression of the English Revolution itself: a class struggle refracted through Puritan providentialism and intensified by the collapse of the old social order. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. To understand why gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-1640s, we must look beyond village frictions to the deeper transformation underway: peasant dispossession, the erosion of customary relief, and a ruling class divided against itself.

The Strength of Gibson’s Reconstruction

Gibson’s method is microhistorical. Each chapter centres on a particular place — Manningtree, Chelmsford, the Suffolk villages, or the Scottish Lowlands — and rests on painstaking archival research. Drawing on fragmentary parish registers, court documents, and scraps of local records, often “incomplete or barely legible,” she reconstructs the lives of the accused. Her portraits of impoverished women, often elderly, widowed, or reliant on neighbours’ charity, give substance to the well-established thesis of Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane: witchcraft accusations arose from the breakdown of traditional obligations of neighbourly charity. As enclosure, inflation, and the land market eroded the old village economy, poor people who still came to the doors of the better-off became objects of resentment and fear. The beggar turned away became the witch blamed for the misfortune that followed.

Gibson’s case studies show how war sharpened these frictions. The 1640s brought requisitioning, free quarter for soldiers, plundering, disrupted trade, harvest failure, and plague. The machinery of justice broke down. “Less qualified men sat in judgment.” Assize circuits collapsed. Local authorities, pressed by fearful parishioners, hired freelance witch-finders like Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne. Their methods — “watching and walking,” enforced sleeplessness, interrogations shaped by template questions — produced confessions that mirrored the interrogators’ own demonological fantasies. Gibson identifies these template questions as a key reason why so many confessions sound alike.

She also incorporates the Scottish dimension, showing how trials under the Covenanting regime in the early 1640s were ideologically—and sometimes personally—connected to the English hunts. The 1604 Witchcraft Act, passed under James VI and I, provided the legal basis for prosecution. Together, these developments formed a transnational witch-hunting movement, shaped by shared religious and political anxieties. Gibson’s reconstruction is humane and conscientious, restoring dignity to people history tried to erase. But the question her book raises—and only partly answers—is a historical one: why did the largest witch-hunt in English history erupt in the midst of the English Revolution?

The Limits of “Moral Panic”

The American subtitle of Witchland invokes “a deadly moral panic,” and the publisher’s descriptions speak of polarisation, fanaticism and “a country ripped apart by fear.” This language is not entirely misplaced, but it is fundamentally insufficient. The term “moral panic” is a sociological category developed in the 1970s. It describes a pattern of exaggerated public alarm, but it offers little historical explanation. It treats the witch-hunt as an eruption of mass irrationality, a kind of cultural fever that swept across communities without deeper cause. It reduces the violence of the 1640s to a psychological pattern rather than a historically specific social crisis. Most importantly, it places Royalists and Parliamentarians on the same plane, as two equally hysterical factions locked in a culture war, and it detaches the witch-hunt from the revolutionary transformation of English society that made such persecution possible.

The English Revolution was not a culture war but a historically progressive struggle that destroyed absolutism, executed a king, and opened the way for capitalism to develop in Britain. The conflict between Crown and Parliament reflected a deeper class struggle: an absolutist monarchy rooted in the old landed order opposed a rising commercial gentry, merchants, and yeomanry whose interests required the overthrow of royal prerogative. The war was fought not only over constitutional forms but also over the future of English society—the survival of feudal structures and the emergence of capitalist ones. This revolutionary confrontation created the conditions for witch-hunting to flourish.

The witch-hunt was not an inexplicable eruption of fear. It was the product of a definite social crisis, of a breakdown in the old structures of authority and of a state apparatus temporarily in the hands of local Puritan elites who saw in the war a struggle against the forces of the Antichrist. The collapse of the assize circuits, the absence of central oversight and the ideological fervour of Puritan magistrates created a vacuum. The witch hunters' methods of enforced sleeplessness, “watching and walking,” and interrogations shaped by template questions produced confessions that reflected their own demonological assumptions rather than the lived experience of the accused. The machinery of justice had been fractured by war, and in that fractured space the most vulnerable members of society became targets of state-sanctioned violence.

The witch-hunt must therefore be understood as a distorted expression of the revolution itself. It arose from the collapse of the old social order, mounting class tensions and the ideological weapons of a rising bourgeoisie waging its struggle in the religious guise of Puritanism. Its victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. Most of those accused were women living on the edge of subsistence, dependent on neighbours’ charity and exposed to the resentments and anxieties fueled by enclosure, inflation and the collapse of customary relief. The men accused were likewise poor and dependent. The trials reveal not a timeless misogyny, but the vulnerability of those shut out of property and political power.

To understand why the gallows rose in East Anglia in the mid-seventeenth century, one must attend not only to village frictions but to the deeper social transformation under way. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of communal obligations, the fragmentation of state authority and the ideological fervour of a rising class all converged in the 1640s. The witch-hunt was not a cultural fever. It was a symptom of revolution.

The revolution was led by a bourgeoisie and gentry who fought in the religious garb of Puritanism. Their worldview fused a genuine hostility to arbitrary power with intense providentialism — a belief that God and the Devil intervened directly in human affairs. In the hands of local elites suddenly freed from royal and episcopal oversight, they could turn that ideology against the most defenceless. This is the key to understanding the witch-hunt. The victims were overwhelmingly poor. They were socially marginal, economically dependent, and politically powerless. Misogyny played a role, but it was not the root cause. The victims were not simply women; they were poor women, and the men accused were poor. The contemporary academic tendency to treat gender as a self-standing cause obscures what the trials actually show: the vulnerability of those excluded from property and dependent on others’ goodwill. The witch-hunt was a weapon of class power, wielded by local elites in a moment of revolutionary upheaval.

The same revolution that produced the witch-hunt also produced the age's most advanced political currents. The Levellers demanded manhood suffrage and equality before the law. The Diggers, around Gerrard Winstanley, attacked private land ownership itself. Radical sectarians questioned the existence of a personal Devil. These movements represented the plebeian wing of the revolution — the embryonic political voice of those who would later form the working class.

As the revolution consolidated under the Commonwealth and the propertied classes reasserted control, the witch-hunt subsided. The Restoration of 1660 brought no revival on the same scale, and by 1736 the Witchcraft Act had been repealed. The witch-hunt was not a timeless expression of misogyny or fear. It was a product of a specific revolutionary conjuncture, and it disappeared when that conjuncture passed.

Lessons for Today

Gibson makes it clear that she wrote her book with the present in mind. She warns of a resurgence of political and religious hatreds, misogyny, nationalism, and persecution. She argues that remembering the victims of past injustice helps us recognise and resist such trends. Several reviewers have taken up the same theme.

The warning is justified. Across the world, ruling classes confronted by deepening economic crisis, war, and social inequality are turning to scapegoats: immigrants and refugees, Muslims, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. Governments and media manufacture internal enemies to divert mounting social anger away from those responsible. The mechanisms Gibson documents — suspicion of the outsider, official encouragement of informers, the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety — are recognisable.

But the lesson of the 1640s is not merely that “fear” and “polarisation” are dangerous, or that individuals should refuse to be swept along. Persecution of the vulnerable flourishes when the crisis of an old social order finds no progressive resolution, and when the oppressed are left without an independent political voice of their own. In the seventeenth century, Cromwell's Grandees crushed the plebeian radicals who could have offered such a voice. Today, resisting the modern witch-hunt requires conscious, international political mobilisation of the working class against the social system that breeds it.

Witchland is a humane, carefully researched, and readable book that restores dignity to people history tried to erase. Marion Gibson succeeds in bringing back into view individuals who have survived in the record only as names in indictments or as victims in the ledgers of witch-finders. She reconstructs their lives with sympathy and care, and she shows how accusations grew out of the frictions of everyday existence in a world strained by war, dearth and the collapse of traditional obligations. Her work gives substance to the rural poor of the 1640s, people who lived precariously on the margins of subsistence and whose vulnerability made them targets of suspicion when the social fabric began to tear. For this achievement, the book deserves a wide readership.

Yet Gibson's conceptual framework cannot capture the historical meaning of the witch-hunt. The language of moral panic, fear and fanaticism is not entirely misplaced, but it is too limited to account for the scale and timing of the events she describes. The witch-hunt did not erupt in a vacuum. It unfolded amid the English Revolution, when old structures of authority were breaking down, and new ones had not yet taken stable form. The war between Crown and Parliament expressed a deeper conflict between an absolutist monarchy rooted in the landed order and a rising commercial gentry, merchants and yeomanry whose interests demanded the destruction of royal prerogative. This struggle fractured the machinery of justice. Local Puritan elites, freed from central oversight, exercised powers they had never possessed before

The witch-hunt was therefore not simply a psychological phenomenon. It was a distorted expression of revolutionary crisis. The victims were overwhelmingly poor, socially marginal and economically dependent. Gender shaped their vulnerability, but class determined it. The trials reveal the anxieties of a society in transition, in which the old communal bonds were dissolving, and the emerging capitalist order had not yet established new forms of security. The dispossession of the peasantry, the erosion of customary relief and the intensification of economic pressures created conditions in which the most defenceless members of society could be accused of consorting with the Devil. The witch-hunt was one way a ruling class divided against itself projected its fears onto those who had no means of resistance.

This history is not confined to the seventeenth century. Gibson is right to warn of contemporary scapegoating, of the persecution of immigrants, religious minorities, transgender people, the homeless and the poor. The mechanisms she documents, including suspicion of outsiders, official encouragement of informers and the legitimation of cruelty in the name of public safety, are recognisable today. But the lesson of the 1640s is not only that fear is dangerous. It is that persecution flourishes when a decaying social order confronts crisis without progressive resolution and when the oppressed lack an independent political voice. In the seventeenth century, the plebeian radicals who might have provided such a voice were suppressed. Today, resisting new forms of witch-hunting requires the conscious mobilisation of the working class against the social system that produces them.

Witchland restores its subjects' humanity. To understand why they died, readers must supply the historical analysis that connects their fate to the revolutionary transformation of English society.

Bibliography

Books

Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth-Century Britain. London: Simon & Schuster UK, 2026.

Gibson, Marion. Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain. New York: Scribner, 2026.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971.

Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge, 1970.

Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Edited by Christopher Hill. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.

Articles, Reviews and Media

“Witchland.” Publishers Weekly, starred review, 2026.

“Witchland a Times Top 10 Bestseller.” Hardman & Swainson Literary Agency, 2026.

“Witchland.” Daily Mail, Book of the Week, 2026.

“The Thing About Witch Hunts.” Podcast interview with Marion Gibson, 2026.

“Witchland.” Kirkus Reviews, 2026.

“Witchland.” Witches Mass Bay Review, 2026.

Web Sources

Simon & Schuster UK. “Witchland.” Publisher’s catalogue entry, 2026.

Labyrinth Books. “Witchland.” US edition description, 2026.

Wikipedia contributors. “John Stearne (witch-hunter).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed 2026.

Historical Context and Background

Capp, Bernard. England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750. London: Penguin, 1996.

Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. London: Longman, 1987.