Football and Capital Realism: the beautiful game has reached the late stage of capitalism.
In this article, I draw parallels between football and the socio-economic times we find ourselves in. Just as late-stage capitalism is an ubiquitous term to describe our epoch, it feels as if football has finally been engulfed in the necrosis that is our socio-economic model. This article draws extensively on the work of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and other critical scholars.
Football is dying.
Or at least, the football I once knew is dying, or perhaps, it never existed.
When England lost to Spain in the 2024 European Championships, I couldn’t help but notice that most of the fans around me took the loss in their stride. A general matter-of-fact reaction was ubiquitous, rather than a sense of anger or sadness I would usually expect. I therefore began to think about why this was. My answer is that it is symptomatic of the wider change seen in football over the last twenty years, but which has accelerated over the last ten.
The primary relationship between the individual and football has shifted from a stadium-going fan to that of a TV-spectator. The overall experience has slowly developed from an affective, visceral endeavour to a more cognitive experience.
Amongst fans and supporters, the conversation around football has evolved: it now revolves around numbers, stats, or narratives woven by the media (both traditional and social) environment that surrounds the sport.
The cost of attending a game has significantly risen, the football club has been rooted away from the heart of a community into the outskirts, where rich businessmen, who also happen to own a football team, can extend the commercial space and potential of the club.
As football stadiums are rebuilt, sometimes on the very ashes of the old one, the football pitch has become nothing more than another arrow on the bow of mega entertainment that a stadium can offer. What happens on the pitch is merely an addendum of a general experience package sold to the highest bidder.
The football supporter has become the football consumer, and we are now experiencing football as it has reached the late-stage capitalism that the late academic Mark Fisher described as capitalist realism.
Capitalist Realism
The notion of ‘capitalist realism’ was a term popularised by Mark Fisher in the late 2000s, which describes our relationship to capitalism as one where there is now a “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”.
In other words, we are living in a society where our relationships to self and others are dictated by institutions that reinforce and reproduce capitalist values. However, what is capitalism? As described by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) it is
an economic system in which private actors own and control property in accord with their interests, and demand and supply freely set prices in markets in a way that can serve the best interests of society. The essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a profit.
In this description a crucial link emerges, private actors (individual members of society) are seen as rational agents with private interests — that in fact, may or may not align with the greater need of other humans or the planet — within an ideological framework that is driven, or motivated, in making profit. Often, by any means necessary.
This is the mode of function that was once seen as one of many alternatives, but that has, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, become the only way. We are living in Margaret Thatcher’s TINA (there is no alternative). Profit is king.
For a while, it had seemed as if football had somewhat escaped the all-consuming glove of capitalism’s incessant drive for profit, its hyper-rationalisation and quantification of every earthly property to serve linear graphs and digestible quotas and rations.
Of course, football has been a driver for consumerism and marketing for decades, with Pele being arguably the sport’s first marketing superstar.
The Premier League’s creation in 1992 was not some benevolent, fan-passion driven project, but a breakaway corporate takeover of the English football league, sponsored and financed by Rupert Murdoch’s bSkyb empire. In Italy, Berlusconi, the Italian businessman, used football and the great AC Milan team of the late 80s to early 90s to turn his career from media mogul to politician. Florentino Perez might be remembered as the most successful president in Real Madrid’s history but he is first and foremost a ruthless businessman with vast, and ecologically devastating, companies operating throughout the world.
Yet, despite all of this, football and what it meant as an artefact of vast cultural representation and significance, of social weaving and meaning, maintained its ability to provide the wider populace an escape route. For a while, it enabled populations to maintain tribal and communitarian links, and whilst these still exist sporadically, (Athletic Bilbao, Chivas of Guadalajara in Mexico), the reality is that football clubs are shedding their societal skins to reveal the monetary flesh that was perhaps there all along.
As 2024 rolls on, it has become obvious to me that if this has been an illusion, this illusion has been broken, torn apart, and spat back at me.
What broke this illusion? This article will argue that it is the reification of football’s appendages into commodified artefacts and the homogenisation of football as a spectacle.
I call ‘football’s appendages’ the ethereal environment that surrounds football; ethereal because this is an environment that is delicate, that is vulnerable to the human condition. This environment is one of culture, of customs, and tribal significance. It is an environment from which football clubs emerged out of; where they were seen as guardians of specific geographic locations and specific historical and material conditions.
Without going into history lessons on the foundations of football clubs, there is a reason that West Ham are called the Hammers, or that a stadium for a team called Chelsea is located in Fulham, or that a team called Spurs have a grudge against a team called Arsenal for moving from the south to the north of London.
Nothing besides history and geography, both constructed from and around humans, can explain why two teams that play in the North West of England, Manchester United and Liverpool, have a rivalry that dwarfs their respective rivalries with the two teams in blue who play in the same city.
Yet, the increase in match-day prices threatens to sever the link between club and community and the ethereal nature of football clubs is in danger of being lost.
In August 2024, the Football Supporters Association undertook a comparison of the rise in prices of everyday commodities (bread, pint of milk and beer) and the price of a ticket in the Kop at Anfield, from 1990 to today. Liverpool was picked because it is considered a working-class city, with passionate fans who themselves are vocally proud of their working class roots. They have called it the Football Price Index (FPI), and it “tracks a product’s price at the same percentage increase as a football ticket”. What they found is summarised here:
- The Bank of England’s inflation calculator says that a ticket costing £4 in 1990 would be £9.59 in 2024. The cheapest ticket on the Kop in 2024 is £39.
- The cheapest football tickets have increased astronomically compared to other “products” and are now 875% higher, using Liverpool FC as a data point.
- If shops followed football’s pricing model your loaf of bread would cost £4.88 and a pint of lager would set you back £11.80.
In the summary above, there is a key set of words: pricing model. According to Google, this “refers to the methods you can use to determine the right price for your products. Price models take into consideration factors such as cost of producing an item, the customer’s perception of its value and type of product”.
Within this set of words, there is a key concept — the customer’s perception of its value. It is the perceived value of the product, and the demand for this product that renders price ticket raises as an inevitable consequence of the financialisation of football.
In fact, as academic Kieran Maguire of the University of Liverpool shared with The Guardian, in an article reporting on the increase in ticket prices across all Premier League clubs — except Crystal Palace — for the season 2024/2025, “[Clubs] will raise prices because they know people are willing to pay it.”
In fact, as Maguire continued, not doing so would be going against “economics and business 101” which “says that if you can sell out of a product at a certain price, then it’s too cheap”.
Thus, the cost of going to a game has sky-rocketed, but does this stop the majority of fans from attending the game? According to a fan-survey carried out in 2023, just 9% of fans go to every live match, while only 19% go regularly, and 28% attend games occasionally. More telling, is that 44% of football fans rarely or never attend a game. The most commonly cited factor? Cost.
What does this mean when almost 50% of your fan-base living in the same country never attends a game? It means two things; firstly, that the very ontology of the football fan is morphing into that of a consumer-spectator. An evolution most aptly represented by this bar in Los Angeles that immerses the punter into a virtual stand of Old Trafford.
Of course, this ‘fan experience’, where the hyperreal is embodied by the faux-reality simulation of supporting your team in the stadium but from the comfort of a bar half-way across the world, was taking place in Los Angeles. The capital city of the make believe.
Secondly, it means that as the economic might of the Premier League increases, the hyper-local context of each club, what constitutes their particular identity, is being lost. A phenomenon that is particularly well described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, who said that capital “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation”. This icy water of egotistical calculation has led to what Mark Fisher describes as “the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history.” In the process, this submerging of football into capital leads to the “conversion of practices and rituals into aesthetic objects” and “the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironised, transformed into artefacts”.
In this context, the ‘previous cultures’ is that of match-going fans, of those communities from which the club emerges from. Capitalism’s grip on football is leading to an observable diminishing of local context, of particular cultural mores, in the match day experience. As a result, we are seeing an increase in the commodification of football fan culture.
This is typified by the rise of companies such as Classic Football Shirts, Art of Football, or the numerous collaborations between football clubs and the fashion industry. These are brands that lean heavily on the aesthetic of football, particularly its working class culture, profiteering on its commercial appeal just as the individuals of that culture are increasingly unable to attend the games themselves.
These brands also represent the increasingly important role that nostalgia plays in modern football. None so more than Classic Football Shirt, a company whose whole raison d’etre is rehashing the past into the present by selling old replica shirts of football days gone by.
Now, even nostalgia has been commodified; a continuation of the logic of capitalist realism, one in which Fisher describes as having successfully “installed a ‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society… should be run as a business”.
What was once a niche community for football enthusiasts has now turned into a global phenomenon and Classic Football Shirts are the main culprits. They have sold over six million jerseys to fans across 100 territories in the past 18 years and it has received £30.4million ($38.5million) of growth equity investment from the United States investment firm The Chernin Group (TCG), which values the company at approaching £50 million.
Where once upon a time, a Fiorentina shirt meant that you were from, or had connections to, Florence, it can now mean that you have no idea who Batistuta is but you love the retro feel of Nintendo.
Wherever you look on the Instagram page of Classic Football Shirts, nostalgia is everywhere, it leans on the memories of a world gone-by, it utilises the aesthetic appeal of football, the emotional connection, to drive sales. The fact that this yearning for nostalgia is becoming more ubiquitous, has a lot to do with the deeper disconnection that most fans have, or are, experiencing with their teams.
Deep down we know that football has been overtaken by greed, financialisation and corruption, yet, we consume more of it than ever before. This antagonism feeds the wider “fantasy”, Mark Fisher said, “that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products”. As long as you wear the right aesthetics then you cannot be part of the problem.
Alain Badiou, the French philosopher, described ‘modernisation’, as “making impossible what used to be practicable (for the largest number), and making profitable (for the dominant oligarchy) what did not used to be so”. Hence, the commodification of football culture is the byproduct of turning what was once practicable (attending football games live) impossible (cost of attending games too high) and making profitable what once wasn’t (turning niche retro football culture into a multi-billion industry).
Furthermore, the proliferation of these brands — Classic Football Shirts, Art of Football — is a logical consequence of the wider liberalisation of football: liberal mores are rapidly effacing the working class roots and proletarian nature of football.
What these brands represent is the coming to maturity of the Professional Managerial Class (PMCs), a term first coined by Barbara Einreich in the 1970s, which highlighted a new strata in the old binary of bourgeois v proletariat classes. According to Einreich, the PMCs consist of “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function . . . [is] the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”
There are two notable terms in this definition: a) PMCs are mental workers and b) their major function is to reproduce capitalist culture. Of course, the capitalist culture is consumerism, and hence why fashion has become so intertwined with football in recent years.
This commercialisation of football exists to cater to the ravenous nature of capitalism, and its consumer-class, which seeks new frontiers, new lands to commodify. This is obvious when looking at any fashion website, such as High Snobiety, which hail the influence of football on wider ‘culture’. A nebulous term used to describe youth or alternative culture, which unsurprisingly seems to be more concerned with topics that involve consuming (music, fashion, travel) than any other truly liberating concern (cost of living, climate change, corruption etc.).
Indeed, in an article describing this growing confluence between football and fashion, a High Snobiety contributor shared this: “football jerseys are a big deal right now. They’ve transcended the realm of being strictly match-day attire. Wearing a jersey ‘just because’ has become the norm”.
This norm is however a danger; once football shirts no longer represent a projection of cultural association, a short-cut for belonging, but something to be ‘worn just because’, we arrive at a wider destruction of the communitarian base of football.
In the High Snobiety article, the ‘just because’ is a short-cut for what capitalism achieves when it confronts tribal or communitarian entities. As Baudrillard said “tribal, communitarian, pre-capitalist structures; every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organisation, that is what must be abolished”.
Moreover, what we are seeing with the popularity of retro shirts is a mirroring of the societal craving for nostalgia. As Baudrillard said, “when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning”, and clearly this full meaning is that nostalgia is profitable.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, nostalgia is: ”a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations”. In this era of late stage capitalism, where crises have become permacrisis, nostalgia has captured all facets of society.
Rather than creating anything new, we seem to be rehashing what is perceived to have been a better world, mostly by people who were too young or not even alive at the time.
Of course, if nostalgia is affective, then money can be extracted from this. It is marketing 101. Hence, we also have brands or companies that have latched onto this, from Mundial Magazine, to Copa90, to football clubs themselves, nostalgia is a vehicle for profit.
Copa90, a media platform that began with YouTube videos before spreading across other social media, is an allegedly fan-centred production company that seeks to promote the culture of fandom across the globe. According to its own website, Copa90 are “a global football media brand with unrivalled relevance in the lives of Gen-Z and Millennial fans, endorsed by the world’s biggest brands, platforms and creators”.
The company’s mission statement denotes the evolving nature of football, where fandom requires the endorsement of capitalism and vice-versa. Indeed, despite its pretence, consumers are the audience and football is the product; in an interview, a copa90 executive (whose function is irrelevant) said that: “partnering with relevant brands is a core part of our strategy”, and that whilst they are excited to engage with fans, they were also excited about “offering innovative new platforms for advertisers”.
Copa90’s strategy is to create a media product that immerses the viewer into the life of a fan, it weaves a narrative in which fandom is celebrated. However, often, the fans in question are from teams abroad, from places where football-capitalism hasn’t entrenched itself quite as much as in the big clubs.
Through its depiction of ‘authentic’ fan culture, it produces a phantasmagoric effect, deceiving the audience into thinking that football fandom remains anchored in the local; it maintains this illusion, this dream, which helps stabilise the magic of football. When in reality, when one wakes-up from this dream, one realises that this authenticity is quickly disappearing.
Of course, Copa90 are not alone in this; there is Versus, a football-culture media entity that describes itself as “the platform championing the future of football and its rising influence on new music and culture”.
According to Versus, the future of football is converging various factions of capitalism together, promoting collaboration between previously unrelated markets — music and fashion for example — or vouching for WAG culture to “rise up from its Tom Ford-scented ashes”.
Finally, another prominent nostalgia merchant is the online/print magazine, Mundial. In its very own mission statement, Mundial describes itself as containing: “the greatest football stories from every corner of the planet, all of them reminding you why you love football. It’s long form writing you can’t find anywhere else, it’s non-league and Champions League, grassroots and fashion, culture and travel, cult heroes and nostalgia.”
The magazine reminds yourself why you love football, through essential (liberal) features such as fashion, culture, travel, and of course, nostalgia. It is the PMCs magazine par excellence. Nostalgia is Mundial’s modus operandi, from the conspicuous presence of ex-footballers and retro football shirts plastered across its website, to its very product.
When describing its newsletter, Mundial shares that fans (consumers) who subscribe to the newsletter “will get a mix of nostalgia (think deep dives into football cult heroes) and hot takes on current events”.
In fact, if one ventures on Mundial’s Instagram, nostalgia is used as a smoke screen to infiltrate advertising and hooks in the ‘fan’ to consume another product.
The photos below are taken from a regular Instagram post on Mundial’s page, entitled ‘Mundial Moodboard’, which on the face of it is just a collection of photos that capture the mood of the week, a sort of masculine-presenting Pinterest board.
At its core, however, it is a smokescreen that leans on nostalgia and its power to arouse emotions and produce a longing feeling that often drives people to associate themselves with this feeling in a material way. The Moodboard will pair retro-themed photos with inconspicuous advertising for a brand, often related to football, and a lot of the time not.
For every photo of Eric Cantona you get a tag for a shopping link.
Amongst other services that Mundial offer, one particularly caught my attention as a representation of how capitalism is able to capture the ‘real’, simulate it, and sell it back to the audience. Whilst, at the same time, the ‘real’ that has been captured slowly crumbles under the pressures of that same capitalist machine.
They have created a Discord channel that invites football ‘aficionados’ to come together virtually; it is modelled on a Twitter space that had one Mundial worker describe it as “the best pub in the world where you could find the people you want to talk to and have a great conversation with them”.
Of course, joining a Discord channel is free (I think), but there’s a capitalist logic which entices individuals to stay at home, and create relationships through a third-party whose intention is to be able to sell more things to you directly, or to capture your attention long enough to sell it to advertisers.
Indeed, an article about the Discord channel, reveals that “Mundial gives people an added incentive to join their space: rewards. People who come to the Discord channel will earn points for posting and commenting there”.
Interaction, conversation and opinions have been gamified, stratified into tokens that unlock ‘rewards’, which — similarly to a casino — are simply rewards that enable the house to make more money. It reminds me of what Marcello Tari, an Italian Marxist philosopher, said about the West, which he described as a world that “lacks the sense of reality” due to its “hypertrophic ability to sell and consume everything beginning with ourselves.”
Frederic Jameson, the late American philosopher, described our society as living through the late stage of capitalism, one in which the dominant cultural trend could be described as postmodern. If the culture of the early 20th century was modern, then our society is postmodern in the way that it “means the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke”.
Jameson described the collapse of individualism as an inability to exist in a moment in time, because the very fabrics of historicism — our communities, social ties, senses of belonging — have been submerged by the proliferation of imagery and a commodification of all facets of our existence.
This has led to ”the producers of culture [having] nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles”. Hence, this fascination with the old, the nostalgic, the retro. Hence why we are seeing football clubs churning out new football kits, that are merely re-issues of older styles. It is zombified modernism.
Aesthetics of football
The evolution of football-fan culture into a participant-to-observer industry is happening in conjunction with the imprinting of late stage capitalism, and its values, into the way football is being played. As the years go-by, there seems to be an increasing homogenisation of the tactics and style of play on football pitches across the elite leagues.
There has been a prioritisation of a football ideology that promotes a formulaic, top-down, highly systems-based understanding of how the game should be played. The quality of the football on display has deteriorated as a result; slalom goals, 40 yard screamers, or Ronaldinho-esque flair, have been drowned out by set-piece coaches, positional play and efficiency metrics.
It appears that the soul of football is turning nihilistic, it may even be experiencing a terminal decline. Luckily, there remains a few chaplains and bastions of football as more than a product, who are speaking up and above the PR and marketing to raise the alarm.
One of these individuals is ex-Leeds, Chile and Argentina manager, Marcelo Bielsa, who shared his concern about the state of football during a press conference for the Copa America. He said “more people watch football but across time it is less attractive. Only business is benefiting, because all they care about is the number of viewers”.
He goes on to say, “what made this game the number one of all games is not being prioritised… football is becoming absolutely predictable, and as we accelerate towards this the less attractive football will be. I am certain that football is in a decreasing spiral”.
During this press conference, Bielsa articulates the very reasoning behind this article and behind the widespread disillusionment that football fans are feeling, whether overtly or covertly. His concern can be summarised as a warning against the infiltration of a business-first mentality in the sport.
He went on to say “essentially, football is the property of the people, because the poor have few accesses to joy, because they do not have the money to pay for it”. Indeed, “football is one of the few things that they do have, but not anymore”.
Bielsa laments the fact that football is becoming less attractive, that the footballers worth watching are becoming more sparse, and that the increase in football fandom is artificial; it’s driven by business, by monetary purposes, and this will lead to a cut in the upward spiral of football as the most popular sport in the world.
In these few sentences alone, Bielsa undertook what is known as parrhesia; a term first found in Plato’s Apology, where Socrates says “the cause of my unpopularity was my parrhesia, my fearless speech, my frank speech, my plain speech, my unintimidated speech”. Bielsa spoke truth to the spin doctors.
No team represents this decline in quality better than the Brazilian national team. In the early 2000s, Nike had produced a series of adverts based on the Brazilian term ‘joga bonito’ or the beautiful game, which spoke less of the sport in general but more towards an ideology of how the game should be played.
It was a celebration of the favela, street-football inspired skills of Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Kaka, Rivaldo and Roberto Carlos. It was a conception of football in which the visceral, the creative, was a superior conception of football, one which contrasted with the mechanical, flat-lined football of a West German world cup winning team, or a British 4–4–2 formation.
The Brazilian national team and its players have been for several generations (from Pele, to Socrates, to Zico, to Romario, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Kaka and Neymar) the epitome of free-flowing, creative, joyful football. Their best teams and best players live on in the memories and hearts of millions of fans across the world.
It is symptomatic of the decreasing quality of football that the current Brazilian team feels so void of any creative talent; none of the current Brazilian footballers excite fans in quite the same way — with perhaps the exception of Vinicius, but again, his play reminds you more of a peak Cristiano Ronaldo than the magical flair of O Fenomeno Ronaldo. The best Brazilian players in recent years have been goalkeepers, centre backs and centre midfielders; no one is safe from the mechanisation of football.
There is a growing sense that football has lost its artists and that the flair represented by the joga bonito crew is disappearing. Internet trends such as ‘Barclays Era’, ‘The Streets Will Never Forget’, speak to a longing for a football that no longer seems to exist. Nostalgia seems to be dominating the football landscape. Football fandom is gazing backwards.
Why so much nostalgia? Precisely because, just like the music enthusiast, the cinema fanatic, or the traveller, the football fan craves the unknown, the new, the element of magic that makes you forget everything else. Mark Fisher said that
The most powerful forms of desire are precisely cravings for the strange, the unexpected, the weird. These can only be supplied by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk.
So, where have all the artists gone? One possible answer can be found in the notion of aesthetics — and unfortunately, football is losing its aesthetics.
What is aesthetics? According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is “a set of principles concerned with the nature and appreciation of beauty”. Norwegian philosopher Borge, speaks of the Kantian notion of ‘aesthetics’ to describe the popularity of sport, but particularly of football. It is this aesthetic judgement that sits at the centre of Bielsa’s warning.
Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, believed that to have an aesthetic appreciation of something is having an “appreciation of the phenomenon as it appears to the subject, independent and regardless of its ontological status. What something is or is not — its ontological status — plays no role in the aesthetic appreciation of the phenomenon in question.”
Again, leaning on Borge’s work, “the Kantian line is that by aesthetically appreciating a phenomenon, one disengages from the context or the embeddedness of the phenomenon, and instead opens up a space where one can dwell on the phenomenon’s pure perceptual qualities”.
In other words, one can argue that the power of football is its ability to open a space in which the ‘beautiful’, the ‘ethereal’ can be appreciated by an audience, whose access to such quality is often barred by the economic reality they find themselves in.
Indeed, according to Kant, pure aesthetic appreciation is when “the sublime threatens to overwhelm us”, and the beautiful is what “brings with it a feeling of the promotion of life”.
This sounds a lot like what football brings to millions of fans across the world, from grass-roots to the World Cup, it is the aesthetic beauty of football, its subliminal qualities that has brought the world together.
This is what capitalism and the wider commodification of football-as-a-product fails to account for. Thiat perceptual beauty is non-quantifiable; it cannot be put into an Excel spreadsheet, or in a set of accounts for shareholders. This is what the data-nerds and the Guardiolas of the football world fail to understand (or choose not to), that the essence of football is what Borge aptly describes as the agon aesthetics.
The agon aesthetics is “where the aesthetic experience is found within the engagement in the football drama of competition”, but what we are increasingly seeing is an aesthetics of agon, where “the aesthetic experiences takes you away from the engagement in the football drama”.
This is the crucial distinction that sets football apart from most other sports, particularly US sports, where the game itself is almost of a second nature. Football is the aesthetic experience, and everything emerges out of this, there is no need for the entertainment, the music, the cheerleaders, or the fluff of US-centric sports.
German philosopher Heidegger believed that art emerges “within the gap between Earth and World”; in other words, that art transformed the meaningless, material nature of our world into an elevated form with meaning, both on an individual and societal level.
This is why, the artists of football, the number 10s, the unconventional 9s, the excentrics, the Brazilian full-backs, are essential, crucial, elements of the beauty of football. Unfortunately, this non-quantifiable element is being lost in modern football, where the increasing usage of cybernetics, technology and the quantifiable is removing the ethereality of football, which is creating a vacuum that nostalgia is only too happy to fill. A nostalgia that the vectors of capitalism are only too happy to commodify.
Indeed, there have been two significant influences on the football of today: data-technology and Guardiola, neither of which need to be introduced in much more detail. The former is simply the ‘Moneyballisation’ of football exemplified by teams such as Brighton and Brentford (but now used by all) in which mass-data is collected to make all footballing decisions. It is also exemplified by the growing-list of coaching appendages seen across teams, including, data-analysts, performance analysers, set-piece coaches and a whole plethora of individuals with a computer-science background. The latter is the Manchester City, ex-Barcelona and Bayern manager, Pep Guardiola. The Lex Luthor of football, the head coach of two clubs embroiled in corruption scandals (Barcelona and Man City).
Indeed, Manchester City and Pep Guardiola epitomise how football has evolved from a sport based on relational, instinctive beauty, to one of mechanical and numerical efficiency. In contemporary football, Rodri, the Man City and Spain midfield metronome, represents the cool-cold efficiency of a dominant style of football.
In an interview discussing Pep’s tactics, he said “when a player tries to adapt to Pep’s football, to a new environment, he needs information, to see things, repeat them, go over them, learn”. He goes on to say “the coach gives you guidelines and then the players have to interpret that. They give you a script, you act it out”.
Pep’s footballers are not given an environment to express themselves, they are cogs that mechanically digest and regurgitate what is wanted by one man. It is a form of top-down authoritarianism that stifles creativity and skill. It is the football ideology that turns Jack Grealish from a number 10 folk hero, to a forgettable left-winger. It is the football that takes Arsenal’s leading goalscorer Thierry Henry and positions him on the wing, far-away from the goal. It is the kind of football that turns full backs into midfielders. It is a football in which the most important player is no longer a number 10 a la Zidane but a number 6 a la Rodri, a player described by his national team coach as “a perfect computer”. An apt description of what footballers are asked to be today. Data-crunching, supercomputers, with all of the inhumanity that it suggests.
Football-coach and part-time philosopher, Jamie Hamilton describes this top-down Guardionalism of football as “the Machine”. It is where “the prioritisation of standardisation, automation and repetition, a flattening out of human creativity through mechanised processes designed to benefit and serve some external non-human entity”.
He quotes Guardiola who said “I don’t believe tactics is you do whatever you want because after that it’s a little bit chaos and in the chaos you don’t know what exactly is going to happen”. The subject of the ‘whatever you want’ is the footballer, the human; therefore, the decision on the pitch is made not by what is happening at the time, but according to what the plan is.
Of course, Guardiola is not alone, Thomas Tuchel said that his job “is to create chances and to create a structure that we can create chances.” It is about creating a structure that supersedes individual will and human creativity, it is a football that exists within a blueprint. When describing his manager at Chelsea, Antonio Conte, Cesc Fabregas said that playing under him was like “going to school. Conte will tell you exactly how he wants it from the goalkeeper until you score a goal, what you have to do, exactly everything”.
This plan is also known as ‘Positionism’, a term populated by Jamie Hamilton, and described as such
The systemic machinations of Positionism dictate where the players must be. They must be in their slots. They can switch and rotate but only ever between these pre-allocated situational locations. If the ball is here, you are here. The human players do not interpret space, rather they learn where to locate themselves within an already defined generalised conceptualisation of space. The Machine has done the thinking for you — the players are cogs in The Man-Machine.
It is a cynical interpretation of football, a cold calculation of what football can offer. It is geared towards the rationalisation of winning, of efficiency, of scoring more than you concede. Yet this isn’t what brings football together. As Irish Times journalist, Ken Early, said after watching a Manchester City vs Chelsea game, “most of us don’t watch football for technical quality or tactical intrigue”. In fact, Early continues, “we’re watching because we want to feel something”.
Guardiola is driven by a concern to abolish the ‘chaotic’, he fears the unpredictable nature of football, he appears to be threatened by the unmaterialistic nature of life in general. Guardiola inspires cynicism and contempt for what cannot be controlled. So much so, that he is happy to look away when the club who pays his salary is embroiled in controversy and corruption. He is the protagonist of a society, once described by Jorge Luis Borges, as one that fears “the contamination of reality by dreams”.
Again, Marcelo Bielsa stands in great contrast to all of this; in 2017, he spoke at a conference, and said that “I prefer to get no points but having played to win all three points than to get one point without playing for all three…I do this as a tribute to the spectator”. For Bielsa, “if two teams face each other and neither takes risks, there is no football match”.
Guardiola’s mechanisation of football, his risk-aversion is nullifying the beauty of football. Unfortunately, standing as arguably the most successful manager of the 21st century, he has become a pattern to emulate, he has become the blueprint from which all other top-flight managers emerge from.
His influence can be seen in the number of elite managers that have worked with him or under him as players: Mikel Arteta (Arsenal), Enzo Maresca (Chelsea), Erik Ten Hag (Manchester United), Vincent Kompany (Bayern Munich), Xabi Alonso (Bayern Leverkusen), Xavi (ex-Barcelona).
Even current managers such as Hansi Flick (Bayern Munich) and Roberto de Zerbi (Marseille) have praised Guardiola for shaping their conception of football.
This homogenisation of footballing style is reducing the quality of the football we are witnessing, because it is extending itself in a top-down manner. Evidence of this surfaced last weekend when Wolverhampton manager Gary O’Neil (who has neither played under or worked with Guardiola) was criticised by Gary Neville for sticking with his mechanical game plan. Despite trailing by a goal to Liverpool, the Wolves team continued to build from the back. In a passionate rant for Sky Sports, Neville lamented this lack of creativity.
They’ve passed it back to the goalkeeper. It absolutely drives me crazy. You need a goal. Do they know? Stop it. Honestly, it’s so frustrating. I can’t watch this because the reality is you can’t kid football fans. They know exactly what’s going on here. You’ve got to have another idea to try and do something different.
He even acknowledged Pep’s influence.
We always blame it on Pep [Guardiola] but Pep’s teams can do it, so I’ve no problem with Guardiola’s team and the way he plays. He’s been one of the greatest coaches of all time. His teams over 10 years have been some of the best we’ve ever watched. But we’re now watching teams at the lower end of the table playing six passes between the centre-back and goalkeeper needing a goal with four minutes to go and I can’t accept that.
We are witnessing in real time what Mark Fisher had identified as a wider trend in our society of capitalist realism. He said that “the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking or entrepreneurial leaps, they breed conformity and the cult of the minimal variation, the turning out of products which very closely resemble those that are already successful”.
New managers are simply churning paler copies of Guardiolanism, weakening the heterogeneity and uniqueness of football, when it is the culmination of acts and beliefs shaped by a specific time and space that embellishes the sport.
Jamie Hamilton aptly summarised the situation on his Medium page
Given the nature of football’s ultimate reliance on a quantitative scoring mechanism there appears to be no exit from this framework of servitude to the twin pillars of ‘scoring’ and ‘not-conceding’ regardless of one’s stylistic preferences or idealistic musings. The new football romantic then awakens to find themselves trapped inside a horrifying hall of mirrors, beset on all sides by the hideously warped reflections of their own naivety and misplaced hope.
If we are to depersonalise the blame for this, we could focus on the wider data-fication of football. An ontological status perfectly represented by the proliferation and normalisation of the xG value. For non-football fans and data-nerds, xG assigns a difficulty level to any chance created on the pitch. It is a quantity determined by cross-referencing a suite of variables from relevant historical shot data such as:
- shot location (distance/angle)
- height of ball when shot is taken
- direction of assisting pass
- number of defenders between shot location and goal
- degree of pressure being applied to shot taker
- positioning of goalkeeper
In the world of AI and data, it is no longer acceptable to judge a team purely by what one can see with their own eyes, the score, or the number of shots taken or conceded. Even a score isn’t enough to describe ‘the true story of a game’. A player is reduced to his xG, and players whose talents can no longer fit within these narrow parameters are slowly being excluded from the game all together.
An example of this, is how a player like Mesut Ozil’s pedigree was ostracised by an Arsenal team void of any world class talent. However, look at any Arsenal fan page or YouTube compilation in 10 years time, and it will be Mesut Ozil who will be remembered rather than any Declan Rice or Martin Odegaard of the current team.
This obsession with xG speaks also to the rise of ‘Fantasy Football’; in fact, author Joe Kennedy associates the beginning of football’s quantification with the introduction of ‘Fantasy Football’ in the early 90s. The premise is simple, players score points on what they achieve on the pitch, and therefore the value of a player is pinned to their statistical return.
Kennedy says that “the pastime introduced the football-supporting public to the kind of statistical presentation American sports fans have been used to for decades, and, in particular, suggested that creativity was a quality which could be known numerically rather than intuitively”.
‘Fantasy Football’ is the consecration of the imperialism of Sabermetrics — the term for sports analytics, taken from baseball — in which tactics and data are at the forefront of most football coverage. There has been a growing ‘nerdification of football’; where football analysis was once the hot property of ex-footballers and coaches, the field has been opened up to individuals who may not be able to kick the ball in the straight-line, but have a PHD in machine learning.
A perfect example of this has been the emergence of hedge-fund-come-news-corp The Athletic and associated podcasts such as Tifo or the Totally Football Show. What one notices, when consuming the articles and podcasts from the Athletic, is the dominant concern for numbers, data and tactics. We also notice how the most popular articles are concerned with the business-side of football, the directors of football, the CEO takeovers, and the LinkedIn-esque strategies that the PMCs of the football world take to run their teams. The football itself, the cultural side of it all is secondary, if not nonexistent.
To non-armchair football fans, this evolution of the football world is startling. Indeed, according to Kennedy
Listening to the most evangelical advocates of Sabermetrics talk about football, it’s hard to believe that they’re discussing the same sport. Their particular mode of scrutiny could lead you to think that nobody had ever sung a song, waved a banner, set off a flare, laughed or cried in a stadium; in fact, it could convince you that football took place in a true vacuum, that it occurred in a genuinely private space, cut off from all sociality.
The ‘evangelical advocates of Sabermetrics’ are plastered all over YouTube, with popular platforms such as Tifo (over 1m subscribers) and James Lawrence Allcott (over 300,000), embodying the ideological conception of football that evaporates once it leaves an excel spreadsheet or a (virtual) white board.
What the rise in data-centric understandings of football achieves, is to elevate the appeal of watching football from home rather than in person. As Kennedy rightly asserts
Those who take an interest in tactics are, unlike other spectators, actually advantaged by not being at the game and instead watching on television, because television allows for camera angles which are holistic and can depict the whole shape of a team. Replay functions can also emphasise tactical subtleties that would go unnoticed by fans watching in real time within the stadium.
Now, on the surface, there is nothing empirically concerning, or nefarious, about the rise of geek culture in football. Yet, just as the true message of the TV show The Big Bang Theory isn’t the normalisation of geek-culture, but rather how the nerdiness of the characters enables a normalisation of misogynistic and sexist tropes in the show (more on this in this brilliant analysis by The Pop Culture Detective), the geekification of football speaks to something much graver.
According to Joe Kennedy, “football can only be fully privatised if it is sealed hermetically against contingency and made subject to the full spectrum of empirical analysis”. Indeed, numbers contribute to diminishing the social aspects of the game, which according to Kennedy, plays “directly into the hands of corporate interests which tend to regard match-going fans at best as a source of pin money and at worst, and more usually, as a nuisance to be subdued”.
Football has grown more concerned with the numbers that represent football, and as a result has grown confused as to what the official goal of the sport is: to make the ordinary human dream, laugh, cry, and to provide members of society a space for communion.
This lack of concern for the individual, for the human, is increasingly creating a rift between the sport and fans. It is omnipresent and becoming harder to ignore. From the human rights abuses in Qatar ahead of the World Cup, the corruption at FIFA/UEFA, the 130 plus financial fair play charges against Manchester CIty, alongside a whole host of criminal activity, football may indeed be in terminal decline, as prophesied by Bielsa.
Nonetheless, in business, as Fisher said, “the way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance”. This is why nostalgia and football-fandom is becoming ever increasingly commodified and sold back to us. This is why the Premier League is more of a marketing behemoth than a football league. It tells us that it is the best league in the world without ever telling us how we got to this conclusion.
As hedge funds and state entities pour billions into the game, teams like Bury are liquidated, and as Manchester United break revenue records, the percentage of Mancunians in the stands plummets.
Nostalgia, PR and marketing act as a trident in charge of maintaining the illusion of football’s morality, of its concern for the common man. They create a ‘Real’ that French psychoanalyst (and Zizek favourite) Jacques Lacan has described as “what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X”.
According to Lacan, the real is “a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality”. In other words, the scandals and the dark sides of football reveal to us the ‘Real’ that a reality created by advertising attempts to conceal. Football fans are living in a world where Neo took the blue pill.
To push the Matrix reference further, it is pertinent to refer to how Baudrillard (whose book ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ greatly inspired the movie) described the function of Disneyland in America.
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.
The explosion of nostalgia, PR and marketing within football represents the fact that elite football is now the hyperreal of what we once knew as football. The teams are still represented as community clubs even though the ownerships hold match-going fans with contempt, as seen by the continuous rise in prices for match-tickets, merchandise, and the prioritisation of hospitality boxes over general public seating. Football is still presented as an arena in which the morality of sport is ever present, where meritocracy and morality stand-above all other values, just as Manchester City are yet to face any punishment for breaking over 130 financial rules.
Nonetheless, there is always hope, pockets of resistance exist. Hopelessness is futile, but the only thing worse is negation, or ignorance.
I will end this article with a quote by Mark Fisher, who greatly inspired this article. He said
The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibilities under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.