On the commercialization of football

(Global inequality and more 3.0; Peščanik.net)

Readers of my articles on Substack and other short texts have probably noticed that I haven't been posting comments on the topic of football for a few years now. The thing is that I have lost a lot of interest in football, first because of the interruption brought about by the pandemic (and the sad spectacle of empty stands, with sound recordings of cheers that TV producers insert into broadcasts), and then because of its increasingly extreme commercialization. Of course, professional football has never been far from big money and commercial interests. But, in line with the general trend of neoliberal commodification, it is now so brazenly and blatantly commercialized that some of the original features that made it so special compared to all other sports have completely disappeared. A sport that historically (not only in England, the cradle of the game, but also in all the countries it managed to conquer in the twentieth century) has always been based on local and class (bourgeois versus working class; immigrants versus natives; right-wingers versus leftists) has been uprooted. It has lost touch with its local, national and class identities. The question, I would say, is how much longer it can be called "sport". Perhaps a better word would be "variety".

Such criticism of the current state of football, and implicitly of its associations (FIFA and its constellation of regional associations), is nothing new. People have been saying it for years, and it is getting worse. Perhaps only this year's Champions League final made the problem painfully obvious. Without going into the details of the match, I believe it would not be unfair to sum it up as follows: (a) a thoroughly boring game, devoid of any spark of individual genius, (b) football reduced to its physical and tactical aspects. Players whose strength, fitness and endurance are impeccable looked more like characters from some computer game generated by artificial intelligence than the footballers we remember from past eras. There was no Omar Sivori playing without shin guards, no disheveled Maradona after a night of cocaine, no Garrincha dozing on the right wing, no pot-bellied Ferenc Puskás who couldn't run 100 meters and scored hundreds of goals, no fifth Beatles, no memorable individual on the field. There were no unpredictable passes, no incredible dribbles, no solo actions, no bizarre moves. But there was plenty of tactics, with players deployed like a Roman legion performing a complicated maneuver before entering battle, each performing only their own tiny, strictly defined task, practiced to perfection.

To the absence of genius and tactical diversity, one can add the observation that the winning team is largely an artificial creation placed by large supranational capital in one of the largest European capitals - not particularly known for its love of the game. The club has gained many fans and received great support, but that is not what created it; the support was not originally strong and passionate enough to produce a team. On the contrary, the fans only appeared when the club became famous. There was no internal, endogenous growth that builds a great team over the years, step by step. It is as if instead of planting trees yourself, you go to the forest, dig up large trees and transplant them onto the city sidewalks. Both provide shade when the heat starts. But the first avenue of trees was created by a community that will protect and nurture it for years, and the second is an investment backed by developers. Investors believe that this is a good time to invest in football, instead of, for example, in new apartment blocks. That is how winning teams are created today. In terms of social embeddedness, practically from nothing.

And those winning teams are increasingly the same, which is not surprising: from 1958 to the 2000s, an average of 25 teams reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League in each five-year cycle; over time, that number has fallen to around 20, and in the final cycle there will probably be only 15 (see chart and explanation below). The boredom will be at its peak when we see the same eight teams in the quarter-finals every season.

This spectacle - for it is a spectacle now - is taking on the characteristics of a circus, as was clearly visible in this year's final. The affected shouting of players' names, fireworks, huge screens (like at the new Bernabeu in Madrid), the announcements of the players' entrance as if they were gladiators in an arena. All of this reminded me of what American football has become. In a way it is a sport, but only "in a way". It is devoid of all the locality and class features that I have already mentioned. Teams move freely from city to city, and the task of the franchise is only to make money. Club franchises under the auspices of FIFA and UEFA have been transformed into giant companies: the players are showbiz stars, the game is a circus, and the businessmen are there to count the money.

Interpretation of graphs. The number of clubs that have reached the quarter-finals in each of the five-year cycles of the Champions League (or European Champions Cup, as it was previously called), starting with the first cycle from 1958–62, is shown. If the competition were as evenly matched as possible, a new group of eight clubs would play in the quarter-finals each year, so that in the most evenly matched Champions League within a five-year cycle, all 40 teams would change (5 x 8 = 40). The maximum value in the graph is 40. The most "monopolised" or "centralized" competition would always have the same eight clubs in the quarter-finals. Therefore, the lowest value is 8; accordingly, the higher the value shown, the more uniform the quality of the teams. The Champions League has dropped from 25 different clubs in each cycle until the early 2000s to 20, and in the current cycle, 2023-2027, that number will likely be around 15 (the current value, after three years, is 12).

PS This criticism of FIFA and UEFA should not distract from the fact that the association that dominates tennis is even worse. I wrote about this a few years ago (“The Age of Open Financial Imperialism”) in a discussion with Nate Silver. The tennis federation is outrageously commercialized, like football, except that its leadership is not elected by anyone and is monopolized by a few rich individuals from rich countries, which is why tennis “world championships” are always played in the same places. This kind of monopolization has not yet taken root in football, but it could happen too. In that case, the Champions League final would always be played in the same place, with more or less the same clubs participating, and the World Cup would forever be organized in one or two countries.

(Translated by Đorđe Tomic)