‘Up against a UAE-owned club in the Premier League and a Qatar-owned one in the Champions League final, Arsenal stand out as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of football.’
I do not recognise my club."
Thierry Henry, expressing dismay over modern, soulless,
capitalist football and club management.
"Politically, I am for efficiency. Economically first.
Until the 1980s, the world was divided into two... The capitalist model in the
modern world also looks to be unsustainable."
Arsène Wenger, on individual interests and balancing maximum
earnings with a "minimum amount of money for everybody".
The Financial Times article on Arsenal’s influence in
both the streets and among elites is a remarkable example of journalism. It bizarrely
depicts Arsenal as an outsider challenging the status quo of elite football,
where ownership by the UAE of Manchester City and by Qatar of PSG is viewed as
typical. In contrast, Arsenal is portrayed as a fanatical menace. The reference
to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is intentional, mirroring Western
imperialist language that depicts Iran as a rogue state, defying the
"rules-based international order." That the FT, a publication aligned
with global finance, uses this language to discuss a football club underscores
the political symbolism embedded in the metaphor.
The initial point to highlight is the normalisation of
ownership by Gulf states. The UAE and Qatar are absolute monarchies that
harshly suppress their own populations, exploit migrant labour under conditions
nearly akin to indentured servitude, and act as major tools of US and British
imperialism in the Middle East. There is a well-documented history of
repression and torture in these Gulf countries that the Western media
consistently overlooks. However, according to the FT's perspective, the
presence of Emirati and Qatari sovereign wealth funds at the top of European
football exemplifies how sport operates in the 21st century, sleek, modern, and
globalised. Meanwhile, Arsenal is portrayed as the odd, intimidating entity.
The second point to examine is the political
significance of comparing Iran in this context. The United States designates
the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation because they oppose
American imperial influence in the Middle East. Regardless of one's opinion of
the Iranian bourgeois clerical regime, the FT's label isn’t meant to serve
as a strong political argument. Instead, it seeks to evoke emotion: Arsenal
fans are depicted as zealots, irrational, and potentially dangerous. This
language reflects the rhetoric of the ruling class, which views the
working-class cultural phenomenon with suspicion. North London has a
long-standing working-class history, and Arsenal supporters are numerous,
vocal, and deeply passionate about a club that predates both billionaire and
sovereign-fund ownership. The FT appears unable to interpret this
passionate support except as a threat.
The third and most profound irony is that Arsenal is
owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke, an American whose family also owns the Los
Angeles Rams and various other sports teams. There is no real alternative
ownership model to compare with those in Abu Dhabi or Doha. The FT's true
concern seems to stem from the cultural resistance of fans, the
feeling among some supporters that football remains more than just a commercial
spectacle. Even their lingering connection to community and place is enough to
earn the City of London's newspaper a comparison to the Revolutionary Guard.
The core political message suggests that football reveals a
broader truth about capitalism: it appropriates the labour of the working
class, strips away its authentic social meaning. It turns it into a means for
profit and societal control. Additionally, sport serves an ideological purpose
for the ruling class, channelling working-class passion, energy, and collective
identity into tribal loyalties tightly managed by billionaire owners. This
prevents those energies from fostering political or class consciousness.
The protests by fans against the Super League revealed that
working-class people have an instinctive sense that something is being taken
from them. However, this instinct must be linked to a broader political
outlook. The core issue isn't just about "greedy owners' needing tighter
regulation but about the capitalist system itself, which relegates all facets of
social life, including culture and sports, to the pursuit of private profit.
The solution isn't reforming UEFA or creating fan-ownership schemes within
capitalism, but rather pursuing a socialist transformation of society, in which
cultural institutions truly serve the working class that creates them.
The Financial Times article highlights how imperialist
geopolitical language effortlessly influences its coverage of culture and
sport. Gulf petrostates sanitising their global image via football clubs are
depicted as part of the landscape, while mass fan culture rooted in
working-class communities is portrayed as a militia. The biases of finance
capital are quite evident.
This leads us to Alex Callinicos, who retweeted the FT
article. Known as an Arsenal supporter, his fandom adds an interesting
political irony. Callinicos is a prominent theorist of the
British Socialist Workers Party, a pseudo-left group. Under Callinicos's
guidance, the SWP has often placed working-class politics behind reformist
pressure groups that support Scottish nationalism, ignored Trump's coup
attempt, and praised Syriza's concessions in Greece. The SWP is not a
revolutionary force; rather, it is a faction rooted in the upper-middle class
that redirects working-class unrest,
The Arsenal connection may seem minor at first glance, but
it highlights a fundamental contradiction at the core of the SWP and the
broader pseudo-left. Here is a man who claims to be a Marxist anti-capitalist
theorist. Yet, as noted in the FT article, his club is owned by
billionaire Stan Kroenke, an American sports franchise magnate who has faced
ongoing protests from Arsenal's working-class fans. These fans oppose Kroenke's
asset-stripping of the club and his view of it merely as a financial asset.
Their protests—rooted in opposition to billionaire ownership of a community
institution—carry more authentic class sentiment than anything the SWP has
articulated in years.
To our knowledge, Callinicos has not seriously addressed the
political economy of football ownership or what it indicates about modern
capitalism. This gap is notable because issues such as football's
commodification, Gulf sovereign wealth funds' role in sportswashing
authoritarian regimes, and the erosion of working-class fan culture through
financialisation offer valuable subjects for Marxist critique. The pseudo-left
largely overlooks these topics, as engaging deeply with the cultural
experiences of the working class would require moving beyond abstract seminar
discussions and NGO-like activism typical of groups such as the SWP.
The FT's comparison of Arsenal fans to the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards, and the SWP's deliberate indifference to what this
comparison uncovers, reflect two aspects of the same issue: one a voice of
financial capital dismissing working-class cultural bonds as fanaticism, and
the other a pseudo-left that has long lost touch with the real nature of
working-class life.
