― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch
“In football, everything is complicated by the presence of
the opposite team."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
“I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love
with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain
or disruption it would bring with it.”
― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch
“Football has become one of the most profitable businesses
in the world, organised not for play but rather to impede it. […] Luckily, on
the field you can still see some insolent rascal, who sets aside the script and
commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee and
the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden
adventure of freedom.”
- Eduardo Galeano, in Football in Sun and Shadow
At the heart of Football, the world’s most popular sport, there's
a conundrum. On the one hand, you have a
grasping global capitalist elite that owns the game who will stop at nothing to
make more money out of the beautiful game(See Robert Stevens ’ Billionaires’
European Super League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from football fans),
on the other, you have fans who still retain a love of the game in its purest
and non-capitalist form.[1]
Stevens's article shows that workers and youth, who still
make up the bulk of football's audience, are not a passive body that, in the
words of Mickaël Correia, bends to “logic of the market” but, time and again,
have sought to “shake itself free” of greedy capitalist control of the game. It
is still a “crucible of resistance to this control.
As an addition to Correia’s book, it is well worth the
reader having a look at Gavin Kitching’s article, The Origins of Football:
History, Ideology and the Making of the People’s Game. In this article, he examines
how the modern sport emerged not as a neutral cultural pastime but as a social
product shaped by class relations, schooling, institutions and ideology.
Kitching traces the transition from medieval “folk” games to codified,
organised association football. It shows how the game’s form, meanings and
social functions were transformed by industrialisation, urbanisation, public
schooling and the rise of mass spectatorship. He exposes the ideological work
of institutions—schools, the press, the FA—in turning a variety of popular
practices into a “people’s game” whose apparent spontaneity masks specific
class origins and power relations.[2]
Having said this, one critique of Correia’s book is that it
offers too little space to the working class and its historical struggles against
capitalism. Roger Domeneghetti, writing in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS),
makes this succinct point. “Correia’s history is epic in its scope, taking us
from the origins of modern football in the late nineteenth century to the
present day, from the playing fields of England’s public schools to the streets
of Senegal. But this breadth is also the book’s weakness: in barely twenty
pages, for example, we are taken on a whistle-stop tour of football in
Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain and Stalin’s Soviet Union. The antagonisms
between the respective dictatorships’ co-option of the sport for political ends
and fans’ use of stadiums as a means of resistance are discussed but never
afforded the space they deserve.
Correia acknowledges that the path he treads through
football’s past is “meandering and fragmentary”, but this too is a weakness.
Did the British football hooligans of the 1980s really have the same concerns
and motivations as Palestinians trying to express a sense of national identity
through football, or as the avowedly left-wing fan base of FC St Pauli of
Hamburg? Beyond some loose notion of resistance to whatever form the mainstream
(football) establishment in each country takes, the book never really makes a
coherent argument as to how, or even whether, they did.”[3]
Even a cursory look at Correia’s A People’s History of
Football would tell the reader that this is not a neutral “sports book”. Rather,
it should be seen as a social-scientific document: a history of a mass cultural
form shaped by capitalist property relations, class struggle and the politics
of the state. Correia’s history explains why an episode like the Super League is
not an aberration but an expression of capitalist accumulation in sport, how
leagues are now nodes of global finance, vulnerable to crises and subject to
speculative pressures. This explains recurring conflicts over ticket prices,
gentrification of stadium areas, and players' labour conditions. It should be
noted that not all footballers are multi-millionaires.
Correia’s book has a very contemporary relevance; he relates
how football’s commercialisation and financialisation flow from capitalist
accumulation and the demands of global markets. However briefly, he explains why
fans, workers, and local communities are frequently in conflict with owners and
governing bodies — these are class and social-interest conflicts, not mere
“culture wars.” Also, how periodic crises (financial crises, pandemics) reveal
the systemic contradictions of commodified sport.
Global context
Correia situates football’s transformation from a local,
working‑class
pastime into a global, profit‑driven industry within the same
logic that governs modern imperialism, i.e. the concentration and
internationalisation of capital. The expansion of transnational finance, media
conglomerates and corporate ownership has turned clubs, leagues and broadcast
rights into assets for speculation and surplus extraction. The 2021 European
Super League episode illustrates this dynamic: billionaire owners and Wall
Street financiers sought to “close” competition to guarantee revenue streams
and asset values, treating clubs as franchises rather than social institutions.
Correia’s book addresses the international implications of
this global, profit-driven industry for the future struggles of the working
class and why those struggles must be international in both form and content. Football’s
production chains and revenue flows are transnational: players move across
borders, TV rights are sold worldwide, and merchandise is manufactured in low‑wage
countries. Consequently, struggles are interconnected. When owners seek to
centralise revenue (ESL) or when broadcasters pressure for cost efficiencies,
the consequences reverberate across countries — layoffs in stadium workforces, intensified shift
patterns for broadcast crews, and rising ticket and subscription costs that
drive fans out of the game.
An isolated national struggle cannot stop global capital.
The correct response is international working‑class coordination: rank‑and‑file
committees of stadium workers, broadcast unions organised across borders, and
fan organisations linking campaigns to worker demands. Partial reforms (fan
seats on boards, wage floors) are necessary but insufficient. Correia’s
framework leads to a strategic conclusion: only the socialisation of the
commanding heights of the sporting economy — democratically controlled
international public infrastructures for mass sport and public broadcasting
under workers’ and communities’ control — can root out the capitalist
incentives that create dispossession and commodification. This requires an
international political movement of the working class that moves beyond
national compromises. The strategic response is an international working‑class
organisation that fuses fan resistance with the rank‑and‑file
power of stadium and broadcast workers to reclaim the game as a social, not a
speculative, resource.
[1]
Billionaires’ European Super League proposal shelved amid mass opposition from
football fans- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/24/supe-a24.html
[2]
The Origins of Football History Ideology and the Making of the People's Game- History
Workshop Journal No. 79 (SPRING 2015), pp. 127-153 (27 pages)
[3]
The other football: A Meandering People’s history of the beautiful game.www.the-tls.com/regular-features/in-brief/a-peoples-history-of-football-mickael-correia-book-review-roger-domeneghetti
