The Ugly Truth About the Beautiful Game
Peter Craig
20/11/2021
Newcastle United just became the richest club in world football [1]. Like many storied sporting enterprises before it, the 192 year old club now finds itself the plaything of a cashed up regime with a public image problem. While there is an audible gnashing of teeth from the football media as yet another club is snapped up by this or that autocratic Gulf state, most fail to confront one very basic fact – under capitalism, the commodification of the beautiful game will lead inevitably to such outcomes.
After a long saga and much speculation, recently the governing body of the English Premier League waved through the acquisition of Newcastle by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. The EPL claimed (quite spuriously) that the purchase of the club by the sovereign wealth fund of an absolute monarchy, whose chairman is crown prince of Saudi Arabia, was somehow distinct from direct ownership by the Saudi state [2]. Go figure.
The avaricious motivations of the EPL are so obvious as to barely warrant consideration. But what do Mohammad bin Salman and the rest of the Saudi royal family stand to gain? Football is big business, but in pure dollar terms any profits from the purchase of NUFC would be a drop in their vast petrodollar ocean. Pre-pandemic, the top 20 most valuable clubs in world football had an average operating income of 77 million euros, a shade under 90 million US dollars [3]. By contrast, the Saudi royals have a combined net worth estimated at 100 billion USD [4]. Such paltry returns, to a Saudi royal at least, must lead us to conclude there is something else in it for the new owners.
‘Sportswashing’ is a term coined by Amnesty International in 2018, and bourgeois media has been quick to latch onto it, mainly to criticise the intrusion of ‘barbarous’ non-Western capital into an arena liberals would prefer remain dominated by home-grown, more ‘polite’ exploiters.
The term and its one-eyed deployment by bourgeois journalists might be relatively new, but the practice is far older. As long ago as the gladiatorial bouts of ancient Rome, despots understood the importance of circuses, not just bread, when it came to winning hearts and minds, and the Saudis have joined a rich tradition of blood-soaked regimes which have utilised sport to legitimise themselves and nullify ill-feeling about their crimes. The 1934 World Cup in Mussolini’s Italy has been called “fascism’s great global coming out party” [5], and two years later the Olympics were held in Berlin accompanied by all the pomp of the Third Reich – the US Holocaust Memorial Museum calls the 1936 Games “a resounding propaganda success for the Nazis”[6]. The Orban regime has famously linked politics and football, pumping billions into the Hungarian game to whip up a nationalist political base,[7] as well as project influence across the border onto ethnic Hungarian populations of neighbouring countries [8]. World Cups have been held under the right-wing dictatorship in Argentina in 1978 [9]. Putin’s Russia in 2018, and are set to be held in Qatar at the end of next year – at the time of writing, superstar David Beckham has come under heavy fire for taking up an ‘ambassadorship’ role for the Qataris, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars [10].
On the ownership front, Abu Dhabi royal family member Sheikh Mansour has owned Manchester City (and various other clubs under the City Football Group umbrella, including our very own Melbourne City) since 2008. In 2011, the Emir of Qatar bought Paris Saint-Germain through the state-run Qatar Sports Investments. Besides sovereign wealth, unsavoury owners abound, from post-Soviet robber-barons like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, to rapacious American capitalists, such as those in charge at Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal. Manchester City in particular provide a blueprint for the new owners of Newcastle – provide enough success on the pitch, hire the best managers, field teams of the best players, win enough trophies, and sooner or later fans and journalists forget past and present crimes, and focus only on the beautiful football being produced.
The ubiquitous sponsors also play a role in pumping millions into the world game. Sponsorship is surely just sportswashing of the corporate variety, with countless ever opportunistic corporations plastering logos all over stadia, shirts, training gear, and more. Fossil fuel giants, a seemingly endless stream of socially harmful gambling companies, financial institutions, all are welcome on club merchandise – as long as they stump up the cash. There is also an intertwining of corporate and state sportswashing, with Gulf-state airlines such as Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways being long-term sponsors of major clubs. Arsenal have come under fire for a sponsorship deal which sees “visit Rwanda” emblazoned on their sleeves, in light of the decades-long dictatorial rule of Paul Kagame. One journalist has likened the deal to “being sponsored by Pinochet” [11]. And let us not forget, all of this is printed upon millions of items of clothing made through virtual slave labour, by hyper-exploited workers in the global South, for the profit of Nike [12], Adidas [13], and other giant monopolies.
All of this has been enabled by a decades-long process which has led to the total commodification of what used to be a predominantly working-class game.
Football as we know it grew out of the Industrial Revolution. While the game’s basic format was largely synthesised in the same English grammar schools which gave us rugby, it was picked up rapidly as a leisure activity for the newly formed English working class, ever more concentrated in factory towns. Teams sprang up, formed by workers from factories, rail yards, churches, and so on. In an article entitled The Making of a Working-Class Football Culture in Victorian England, W. J. Baker writes: “[Sports in Victorian England] resulted from a class-divided society and tended to accentuate rather than to heal those divisions.” By the 1880s, the workers had seemingly won the class war over football, with a northern working-class team winning every F.A Cup Final bar one between 1883 and 1914 [14].
A fan’s relationship with their club is now almost completely that of a passive consumer, albeit one who also adds value to the final product.
It didn’t take long, however, for capitalists to take note of the business opportunities presented by the nascent sport. Part of the reason for the dominance of those northern teams was the ushering in of the era of professionalism, with the best players selling their services for meagre sums. Local capitalists, rich with industrial profits, invested in these players, as well as stadia, equipment, and playing kits. As well as a business investment, the money pumped in by these magnates could be seen as proto-sportwashing – as Baker points out: “A winning football team became a badge of honour in Lancashire and Yorkshire; civic pride and entrepreneurial savvy went hand in hand” [15]. These businessmen also surely expected a public image boost for all their investment in local teams.
The game spread around the world, growing in popularity and thus profitability and the advent of television created nationwide or even global audiences, attracting corporate sponsors and even more money to the game. Then in 1992, the arrival of the English Premiership (now the English Premier League) put the commodification of football into overdrive. After decades of crowd trouble, a conscious choice was made to tidy up the image of football, and attract a new sort of fan. The deaths of 97 people caused by the gross negligence of the police at the 1989 Hillsborough disaster [16] was pinned on the victims for decades and football authorities pounced on the chance to clean up the image of the game. They succeeded in attracting a new audience – lawyers, stockbrokers, and financiers, and other cashed-up professionals who just a few years earlier wouldn’t have been caught dead at what the Sunday Times called in 1985 a “slum sport watched by slum people”. The young, working-class crowds which had been a feature on the terraces for a century were slowly pushed out by ever-increasing ticket and concessions prices. The average age of a Premier League spectator is 41 [17] – the young simply can’t afford to attend.
The change in the class character of football crowds has been palpable. What used to be a gathering place of the local working-class community has become a destination for tourists and a venue for schmoozing in corporate boxes. Former Manchester United captain Roy Keane famously coined the term “prawn sandwich brigade” 20 years ago regarding the changing nature of crowds at the club’s home ground, in reference to the canapés on offer to those who fill such exorbitantly-priced boxes [18]. A fan’s relationship with their club is now almost completely that of a passive consumer, albeit one who also adds value to the final product. Countless observers pointed out that televised football just “wasn’t the same” in empty stadiums throughout the pandemic. The lack of full terraces was so damaging to the product that broadcasters started mixing in fake crowd noise alongside the TV commentary.
Even the players on the field, once part-timers who worked during the week and lived amongst those who worshipped them from the terraces, are now aloof millionaires. As working-class people have watched their wages fall in real terms over the last half-century, the remuneration of footballers has increased exponentially. At the start of the 1960s the maximum wage at Manchester United was 50 pounds a week – around $1800 in our money [19]. Today, however, the average weekly wage for a player in the Premier League is over $110,000, with top players earning many times that [20].
As well as the slow drift of the game from its working class roots, there have been more blatant thefts. In 2001, Wimbledon F.C., nicknamed “The Dons”, was torn from the community it had represented for over a century and moved to Milton Keynes, almost 100 kilometres away. The change of cities was financially motivated – Milton Keynes lacked a team playing at a high tier of the English football pyramid, which meant there was money to be made from an untapped market by relocating an established, but financially struggling, club to the city. The move was so derided that the relocated club, now known as MK Dons, is still considered persona non grata by many English fans 20 years on. Meanwhile, the supporters abandoned by the owners of MK Dons formed their own team, AFC Wimbledon. In little over a decade, this ‘phoenix club’ rose through the English league system and now plays at the same level as the Milton Keynes-based team [21]. Supporters consider AFC to be the legitimate continuation of the pre-existing club and after a sustained campaign by fans around the country and the Football Supporters Trust, MK were forced to relinquish any claim to the history or honours of the old Wimbledon F.C., which were returned to their rightful home [22].
There have been other acts of defiance in the face of the new football. There was an explosion of outrage earlier this year, when several of the wealthiest clubs in Europe announced their intention to form a breakaway “Super League”, intending to cut smaller clubs out of the current TV deals. Amid a furore from the football-going public at large, the deal was scrapped – at least for now [23]. There have been many clubs started by disillusioned supporters, essentially co-operatives formed in an attempt to reclaim ownership of their local teams [24]. Fans around the country have also made clear their opposition to the Saudi takeover at Newcastle [25].
Despite such resistance, however, buyouts remain tempting to some fans because of knock-on economic boosts to communities often long-neglected by the British bourgeois state [26], as well as the on-field success big-money takeovers can bring. On top of this, many fans feel powerless to change anything, faced with a vast chasm of indifference that separates them from the people who control the game they love [27] - and love it they do, despite everything.
It is thanks to that perpetual affection that the machine rolls on. The hyper-saturation of football media increases year-on-year. Since its inception, the Premier League has always been a media product first and a sporting competition second with the primary function being the raking in of millions by the biggest clubs [28]. It is no coincidence that the rise of modern football came alongside the rise of satellite TV, and the internet has only accelerated the process. While the English game may have been first cab off the rank, it is far from alone in this experience. All this money has created a pool of global superstar players, an unrelenting 24-hour hype machine and a prestigious stage onto which any sovereign nation with blood on its hands and infinite cash reserves may strut. Under capitalism, football – like everything else – will inevitably be commodified and sold back to the very people who created it for profit. Sportswashing and the exploitation of the system of private ownership by despotic regimes is a symptom of the wider contradiction: the fact that a football club is essentially a privately owned and operated community organisation. Faced with all this ugliness, one thing is clear: only by ending capitalist commodification of football, sport, and every other aspect of life, can we ever hope to see a truly beautiful game.
References:
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-08/newcastle-united-sold-to-saudi-arabia-sovereign-wealth-fund/100523064
[2] https://www.premierleague.com/news/2283712
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2019/05/29/the-worlds-most-valuable-soccer-teams-2019/?sh=d9888a140d64
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/richest-families-in-the-world/
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/feb/15/sportswashing-europes-biggest-clubs-champions-league-owners-sponsors-uefa
[6] https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-olympics-berlin-1936
[7] https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/power-hungary-how-viktor-orban-used-football-to-score-political-goals-49952
[8] http://hungarianmoney.eu/cins-religion-politics-and-football/
[9] https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a21454856/argentina-1978-world-cup/
[10] https://au.sports.yahoo.com/football-david-beckham-qatar-world-cup-deal-controversy-002256489.html
[11] https://www.football.london/arsenal-fc/news/arsenal-sponsorship-visit-rwanda-allegations-21622652
[12] https://waronwant.org/sites/default/files/Adidas%20briefing.pdf
[13] https://www.newsweek.com/nike-factory-workers-still-work-long-days-low-wages-asia-1110129
[14] Baker, W. J. (1979). The Making of a Working-Class Football Culture in Victorian England. Journal of Social History, 13(2), 241–251. doi:10.1353/jsh/13.2.241
[15] Baker (1979)
[16] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36138337
[17] https://www.joe.co.uk/sport/the-way-we-were-the-story-of-terraces-and-english-football-91298
[18] http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/champions_league/1014868.stm
[19] https://spartacus-educational.com/Fwages.htm
[20] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/dec/23/premier-league-salaries-manchester-city-nba-barcelona
[21] https://howtheyplay.com/team-sports/AFC-Wimbledon-born-from-the-ashes-of-Wimbledon-FC
[22] https://web.archive.org/web/20120220102010/http://www.wisa.org.uk/cgi/l/articles/index.cgi?action=show&id=558
[23] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/apr/24/the-week-english-football-fans-bit-back-against-super-league-the-billionaire-owners
[24] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/05/englands-fan-owned-clubs-show-that-another-football-is-possible
[25] https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/lgbt-fan-groups-alliance-criticises-newcastle-takeover-2021-10-09/; https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/oct/23/callum-wilson-is-the-best-natural-finisher-ive-worked-with
[26] https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/manchester-city-show-how-football-clubs-investment-can-boost-local-economies-1.717814
[27] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/may/02/act-of-desperation-is-ultimate-expression-of-fan-powerlessness
[28] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2004/nov/14/sport.comment