How capitalist self-interest took football’s soul

Football is now primarily driven by greed, coming right down from the top. As Miguel Delaney outlines that is the one thing that has trickled down the pyramid, even if the money hasn’t

Manchester City have been banned from the Champions League (Getty)

Amid the ructions of the last few days, one particular narrative has emerged, that deserves significant scrutiny. Sources close to Manchester City have attempted to spin the idea that they have effectively been punished by a process that has been conditioned by a cabal of old-money clubs.

It’s a curious perspective when City have themselves been only too willing to be part of the cabal in other ways. Football Leaks showed they have been involved in discussions for a European super league, a threat has used by the big clubs to leverage almost every discussion in the game towards them. Club officials – particularly CEO Ferran Soriano – have meanwhile led the charge as regards motions to increase resource distribution towards the biggest and wealthiest clubs.

All of this does prove one thing, that is central to the City Financial Fair Play story and its wider context.

Football – that most universal and collective of cultural pursuits – is now primarily driven by capitalist self-interest, coming right down from the top. That is one thing that has trickled down, even if money hasn’t.

It is an issue that has left renowned football historian David Goldblatt aghast.

“I think it’s a really dismal prospect,” he tells The Independent. “Football clubs were really special in that regard, because you couldn’t centralise them. That’s important in this country in particular, where local institutions and governance are so weak. We’re going to lose that – or it’s going to be greatly diminished.

“It’s a consequence of super-unequal, super-centralised global capitalism. The big picture with globalisation is that it always produces winners and losers, but produces a lot more losers than winners, and creates these self-perpetuating spirals in a political and ideological context in which for 40 years people say ‘you can’t intervene, you can’t intervene’. And this is the consequence.”

Man City are set to appeal against their sanction (Getty)

Intervention with the FFP case an City may well split the game, because of the will of the club’s petrostate owners to take this to the end in what is set to be a legal war. It is just another case of cash dictating the game, but to a greater degree than ever before.

“The football market has got bigger and bigger and bigger but, it’s not quite winner takes all, it’s a small number of oligarchs. Football is generating all of this gigantic income through sponsorship or television rights but most of it has been grabbed by the very biggest.

“I think the other thing that’s worth thinking about in this context, in the same way as in the global economy, the rich are able to accumulate and accumulate and accumulate. In the absence of redistributive systems, in the form of taxation on benefits or whatever, the poor are getting poorer, even in the richest countries.

“In terms of inequalities inside European football, the EU and Uefa have enough power between them to regulate football. And i have to say myself, I look at the Liverpools and Barcelonas and their endless desire for money and I just think what’s the f***ing point? It’s not like you’re making a profit here. No one’s doing this to make a profit, so what are you doing it for? You know, in a kind of death spiral of ever-smaller number of clubs fighting it out… well what’s the point? I don’t see the point. I really do think that these people running the clubs are locked into a way of thinking that is sort of self-destructive and they justify themselves by saying we must have more money so we can have better teams so we can put on a better product and it’s like… really? Who wants to watch the European super league anyway? Inter-Chelsea four times a season?

“It’s the mad dynamic of capital accumulation, but without profit, and that seems to me very odd that mindset from a very small number of people should be driving what is a collective experience for millions of people.

“The language that everybody uses is ‘the game’, ‘what’s the meaning of this for the game’, but so many people seem to be looking at this from their own very, very narrow short-term perspective. And that’s a product of our society. Everybody thinks about themselves. Nobody thinks about collective projects in the same way. I think that’s part of the problem. All sorts of change I think it would happen if people took their heads out of their own club’s arse, and looked up around and saw what’s the common good.

“It has crept up. Social media illustrates it. It’s like everybody in this thing is always thinking just about themselves and their own club. Football is obviously a collective, cultural experience, that we all collectively own. What’s the point of being Liverpool if there are no other football clubs? What’s the point of having every single great player in the world in your team if you have no one to play.

“No football club is going to take over. In any other economic sector, people try and take their competitors over, right, but obviously that doesn’t happen in football. People think the unit of analysis is the club, but actually the game as a whole should be the unit of economic analysis and people don’t see this.”

This in itself is most clearly seen with this oncoming battle.