It is said by the likes of the Marxist economist Terry Eagleton that football is the new opium of the people. "Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides...Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced. Blind loyalty and internecine rivalry gratify some of our most powerful evolutionary instincts."
As an opiate, it numbs the suffering, distracts people from the dullness of everyday life and promotes competition, individualism and the general values of capitalist society.
Like most things under capitalism, football has become a commodity, measured by its exchange value, its use (or pleasure) value becoming a rather secondary consideration. The sport represents and reinforces capitalism's relations of labour and production. We find a hierarchy of coaches, trainers, assistants, directors and owners. Players are given monetary values and then bought and sold.
Football is a way of making money, lots and lots of money. Unfortunately not for all the clubs, though. The record debts and record fees continue to spiral upwards, one propping the other up. It is a massive market for capitalism. Companies pay millions to become a sponsors because it’s a great investment. All those football fans are a lot of potential buyers of all things saleable, everything from cars to beer. Manchester City's stadium, built with £127 million of public money for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, was renamed the Etihad Stadium, after the Abu Dhabi airline which pays lavishly for the privilege to associate its globally televised triumphs with the image of Abu Dhabi.
Football is a modern-day example of capitalism—where the strong thrive and become ever-more powerful, many just get along, and the weak get left behind. Football needs to be rescued from the clutches of corporate greed and nationalism. Capitalism promotes the idea that return on investment must be made as quickly as possible and so footballers rather than being nurtured and cultivated are being bought and sold as mere commodities across the globe. This concept has been extended to football clubs, and ownership has passed around without discrimination, from exiled and corrupt billionaires to debt-ridden American businessmen, the Premiership has already bankrupted more than a few football clubs with the promise of more to keep financial administrators busy. Since the Premier League was launched in 1992 clubs have become insolvent 56 times. he lowest placed Premier League club now earns around £40 million from television alone, while clubs in the Championship earn around £2 million. Not surprisingly, several insolvencies have been the result of relegation from the Premier League.
Imagine the football as a factory. The production line workers are the players. It is a beautiful game, but playing football is brutal and violent work—most players have short careers and sacrifice their bodies for their vocation. The workers may be vastly overpaid, but they still sell their labour to the capitalist owners, who proceed to make vast profits from them.
The coaches, scouts, and trainers are the engineers, production planners, and shopfloor managers in the factory. Their schemes, strategies, and training prepare and coordinate the production process. Combined with the skills of the athletes, they engineer schemes and tactics that keep the game evolving and competitive.
The referees are easily be overlooked, but they play a crucial part in the valuation process. They are the quality control specialists, ensuring that working conditions are uniform and safe, and that a quality product is turned out, play-by-play and week-by-week. Scottish football was hit by a referee strike in the 2010/2011 season, when referees withdrew their labour, forcing the SFA to bring in scabs from anywhere they could find them. The referees went on strike over a number of reasons, but it was mainly the way they had been treated by the media, the fans, and members of the football clubs. Pay comes into it as well - referees were paid £800 per game, which sounds like a lot, but this only comes to a maximum of £10,000 per year. Most will probably make less.
What do owners do? They sit in luxury boxes, cigars in one hand and brandy in the other, sucking their bloody profits from the bodies and minds of the players, coaches and refs. Much like the super-wealthy in other sectors. But now the football capitalists are destroying their own industry. The capitalist mechanisms of football are the same as the workings of the wider economy. Like the financial and banking industries, football exists on a cloud of speculation and money which flows unstoppably between a select few capitalists.
Monetary obsession and corporate ownership plagues the modern game. It is time for fans to reclaim football from the greed of capitalism and the propaganda of nationalism. Football is about teamwork, of sharing and passing the ball. Capitalism is the direct contrast of this. What really matters is retaining the egalitarian, socialist principles that lie at the core of the world’s favourite sport. The question to ask is what is the single factor that has had the biggest affect in corrupting the "beautiful game." Surely it’s Capitalism – the wanton desire for profits above all else.
In capitalism money is all that matters. As long as the money kept flowing into football clubs it did not matter where it came from or how it was generated. Capitalism (or commercialisation as it is better known today) has corrupted everything it has touched. Football fans believe that a club is a social and cultural institution, and that it only exists because of their support and patronage. Capitalists believe that if they own the club, it’s theirs to do with as they will. Both are right, and in the end irreconcilable. Football's class war. Change can start from (football) ground up.
Capitalism is punctuated by periodic crises that cause great human misery. Financial suffering for workers and their families. Unemployment, and associated increases in health problems, depression and suicide risk. By comparison the problems of football capitalism, the demise of clubs, can be seen as trivial.
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