Competition, Monopoly, and Accumulation in the European Super League
Unacknowledged Contradictions
This piece is based on a longer research article published recently in the journal Soccer & Society, which can be accessed freely here. A previous post in The TransAtlantic on the ESL can be accessed here. I strongly recommend you read it first!
When the ESL project was met with a barrage of criticism back in April ‘21, the focus was on the greed of the oligarchs who brought the project into life. However, that criticism for the most part was followed immediately by reassuring noises about the role of finance, money, and free markets in professional football (the videos in this post give some good examples). The implicit message that emanated from critics in the mainstream media was that it was fine to denounce the greedy, but do not question the system! Examples included Jamie Carragher on Monday Night Football; Micah Richards on Super Sunday; Tim Sherwood on the Kelly & Wrighty Show; as well as Robbie Lyle on the Arsenal fan podcast All Gunz Blazing.
In those videos, you will hear individuals, who have materially benefited a great deal from the football industry, repeating a mantra on how necessary and beneficial money power and market forces are for football. The implication is that any condemnation from them regarding the ESL project must not be taken as a rejection of market ideology, market behaviour, and market competition. What is the problem with these reassurances, you might ask? A fair bit, if the long-term consequence of eulogies to markets is not competitive outcomes, but rather the unhappy establishment of monopoly, oligopoly, and of course oligarchy. Sounds counter-intuitive? Not so fast.
At the heart of the European Super League story we find the merry dance of competition and monopoly in the professional football industry. If we look closely at this dos à dos, we can also see the tendencies, pressures, and contradictions of capital accumulation at work. In the ESL saga, most would accept that competition and monopoly are interconnected with one another in some way, but we do not usually see how the imperatives of capital accumulation – the driving logic in capitalism’s continuity – interact with competition and monopoly. It is not discussed in establishment media organs. But if we’re going to understand the motions of competition and monopoly in the ESL agenda, we’ll have to delve a little into the role of accumulation.
Briefly, capital accumulation is the process in which profits or surplus product in an economic system are reinvested into that economic system with the aim of increasing the total quantity of capital in that system through production processes.
The ongoing accumulation of surpluses is so vital, because it’s only by the reinvestment of surplus in rounds of production that capitalist organization is able to generate the awesome expansion in material productive forces that has legitimized the capitalist mode of production, and which has captivated the imagination of its cheerleaders for two centuries.
The capitalist logic is about ongoing and continuous capital accumulation. Without it the capitalist system dies, as 2008 nearly taught us. The implication is that we have to get away from the romantic ideal of free market exchange as the defining feature of capitalism. While markets are a very common feature, they are not the essence of capitalism, but a ‘secondary characteristic’.1 You could have forms of capitalism in which markets are not central, but there can be no capitalism where continued and ongoing accumulation has ended.2
With that said, we can now get back to monopoly and competition. The key thesis in this Part 2 is that, in the capitalist logic, monopoly is the end and object of market competition, not its straightforward opposite or negation. Without regulation or intervention of some sort, the operation of the market will lead toward monopoly and oligopoly because of the logic of capital accumulation.
The idea that monopoly is not the antithesis of competition, but its complimentary, will be met with a fair degree of skepticism for the simple reason that we have been schooled for a long time in the neoliberal doctrines of free-market fundamentalism. There is a lot of talk nowadays, and not just in football, about free-markets and the untouchable autonomy of free-market competition, as if it were a totalizing, enclosed, and self-correcting system. It is this way of thinking that prevents us from understanding monopoly and competition in a way that maps onto what we are seeing in industries like professional football.
So how does the endless drive to accumulate draw competition toward monopoly in the absence of intervening action?
Without getting too bogged down in the arcana of political economy, there is a tendency in free-market competition for capitals to centralize and concentrate over time into ever fewer hands via the pressure of inter-capitalist competition.3
The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, all other circumstances remaining the same, on the productivity of labour, and this depends in turn on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which large-scale industry has taken control of only sporadically or incompletely. Here competition rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitude, of the rival capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, and partly vanish completely.4
The commodification of association football has expanded, intensified, and deepened exponentially over recent decades. Many aspects of the game that were public and not previously commodified have been commodified and turned into private property, that is to say that they have been capitalized. Whether players themselves or historic club stadia, badge-brands and TV rights, we have seen a steady trend in the direction of ever larger capitals pushing out smaller ones into lower domestic leagues, smaller leagues, more peripheral leagues, and foreign leagues. In the ruthless jungle of the football industry, we have witnessed smaller capital entities marginalized and getting forced into ‘spheres of production which large-scale industry has taken control of only sporadically or incompletely’, with bankruptcy waiting at the end of the road in a number of cases.
Obviously this process cannot go on indefinitely, because the concentration of capital would become so great as to break down the ongoing circuit of capital accumulation that is so vital to the capital system. When capitals concentrate in fewer and fewer hands, it will reach a point where it becomes unsustainable. There will be a crisis. (Also, in the case of football, there would be nobody left to play against!). So there is a long-term contradiction between this concentration of capital through competition and the survival of the system itself. This contradiction is one of the reasons why capitalism can be so unstable, crisis-ridden, and unsustainable within its own dynamic. Something has to intervene in this long-term contradiction, given that the tendency is in one direction – toward monopolization.
The system of capital accumulation therefore demands exogenous intervention from time to time, in order to secure its survival, and this intervention has to come from without the economic system.5 If it didn’t, it would be trapped by the logic into which it is an exogenous intervention. We saw this in the 2008 system collapse and government bailouts, just as we did in the 1929 Crash, Great Depression, and subsequent New Deal. The contradictions in unfettered market forces reach a point that requires intervention to save the system of capital accumulation from its own dynamic. Istvan Mészáros has indicated how this was even true back in the late 19th century.
The big difference in the second half of the 19th century with regard to ‘commercial revulsions’ and crises was that the established production and political order was increasingly being challenged by the organized socialist movement which dared to put forward the ‘extra-economic’ proposition that economic crises are not due to cyclic extra-terrestrial disturbances, nor to the unalterable determinations of ‘human nature’, but to the fundamental structural defects of the capital system.6
This brings us back to football.
Understanding the tendency toward monopoly through unfettered competition, as well as the need for exogenous intervention in that process, is important for understanding how the reaction of critics to the ESL is caught in a contradiction of its own. They think that they can have unfettered competition without it leading to monopoly. They are mistaken, because they have confused economic competition with sporting competition
Professional footballers, commentators, pundits, and even fans tend to muddle together the reality of market competition and the ethical/cultural ideal of competition that is part of their lives as sportsmen. They don’t recognize the fundamental contradiction between competition in the game of football and capitalist competition in the economic sphere. The first is something shaped and determined historically by collectively accepted norms and legally established rules of the game. It is regulated ethically and culturally, so as to secure, perpetuate, reproduce properly competitive conditions into the indefinite future. The second is contained by no laws other than those of accumulation and the drive toward monopoly.
The two views of competition are set on a collision course. Those who tout free-market economic competition in football in the same breath as they defend the ethical competition typical of football culture, will find themselves mired in a deeply contradictory position. That is what you find in these videos of ESL critics.
Take a look at this exchange between the presenter for the April 19th Monday Night Football program and the former Manchester United right-back Gary Neville. The crucial part of the YouTube clip below starts at about 07:42, where the discussion gets to the matter of competition.
Gary Neville makes an impassioned call for action, but the decisive point in the discussion is perhaps when they get to this bit.
Presenter: But why is it different this time, Gary? Why could it destroy football as we know it?
Neville: They’re creating a monopoly, a closed shop, a tournament where you’re guaranteed to be in it. West Ham and Leicester are in Champions’ League places. Forget it! They don’t get into the Champions’ League anymore. It doesn’t matter where they finish in the league. What’s the point? They take away everything in this country: the Pyramid, the sincerity of competition, the honesty and integrity of competition that we value, and they’re taking it away…
Gary Neville is mounting a social and ethical defence of an ideal of competition that many hold to be essential to football culture with its feudal-like norms of restrained and honorable combat. To this, he contrasts the ESL project (rightly) as an underhand attempt to produce monopoly out of that competition. However, Gary Neville goes on…
… Yeah, we know that Manchester United have got more money, we know Liverpool have got more money, we know that Arsenal have got more money. We can live with that. There’ll always be top clubs who have more money, but they can be beaten by Sheffield United at home, they can draw with Fulham, and they are trying to take that away to create franchise football. Never! It can never happen!
Now we have something a bit different. Now Gary Neville is drawn into a much more contradictory position. Apparently unaware of the logic of accumulation in capitalist competition, he assumes that capitalist market competition and the humanist ethos of sporting competition share the same logic. He seems to think that the two can coexist indefinitely and unproblematically in a harmonious, stable, equilibrating, and contained relationship into the long-term, when they are actually in contradiction with each other over the long term.
Gary Neville does not seem to recognize that the ‘free market’ competition he is so quick to reaffirm in football, is bound into an inexorable tendency toward monopoly via the concentration of accumulated surpluses. There is little awareness that unfettered free markets have drawn football toward monopolizing oligarchy over the last three decades (from the Premier League in '92 through Project Big Picture in '20 to the ESL Project of '21) and have thus placed the power of ownership into the hands of ever fewer people (club owners).
To be fair to Gary, he is not alone. There are many others who are caught in this trap when they discuss football, especially those who have benefited significantly from the capitalization and financialization of the sport. There are also innumerable fans who act as naïve spreaders of the discourse, steeped as they are in neoliberal ideology.
Gary Neville does seem to have some consciousness of the bind that he is in. However, without the fundamental insight into how the accumulation of capital affects the relationship of competition to monopoly over time, he cannot escape the contradiction, and he is condemned to a set of assumptions about the autonomous working of the market mechanism that in reality is not indefinitely workable. Once again, he says in the video above…
I feel slightly complicit. I’ve stayed pretty quiet in terms of the Glazer family over the years, stayed pretty quiet, because I’ve thought when the club [ManU] was taken over as a PLC that you knew it could be bought and it was out of the control of players, of fans, of everybody. I believe in a free market, generally in life, and I’ve always thought that.
If critics persist in this kind of contradiction, the spectre of monopolization will not go away anytime soon in professional football. Critics have to understand the contradictions of capital, just as they have to think beyond football as merely an industry made up of businesses. As long as football remains an arena of capital accumulation, such as it is, crises of accumulation will be a recurrent feature. This means that further crises in accumulation through competition will mean further coup attempts to transform English (and European) football into a more secure monopoly power over accumulation until the contradiction is resolved.
Having said all this, Gary Neville is absolutely right to be disgusted at the individual and collective malfeasance of the oligarchs, and his strident criticism is fairly courageous. Along with the other critics, he just needs to expand his position to include the bigger picture. To foreground the political economy of football does not mean we have to sideline the greed of corporate oligarchs. It simply means that we have to add to that view an analysis of what is happening at a structural level in corporate football. We have to keep reminding ourselves that the greed and opportunism of oligarchs are only possible when there are oligarchs in the first place. This makes it a matter of political economy and social structure, and democratic political control over social entities is the surest way to neutralize the megalomania and greed of oligarchs. Raging about the greed of individuals is not enough.
To summarize. If we accept that the autonomous, homeostatic, free market is a myth, and that intervention of some sort from without the economic sphere is going to be necessary to stop the cycle of crisis and monopolization, the next step is to ask ourselves what this intervention will be and from where will it come. To do this, we have to understand: 1) how the autonomous market is a utopian idea; 2) what it is juxtaposed against; 3) why it is in another contradiction with Society; and 4) why that contradiction requires regulation from the social sphere.
This brings us to Karl Polanyi, the notion of social embeddedness, and the so-called ‘double movement’. But Karl will have to wait for the next article in the series.
The argument continues in another article called Market Society and the European Super League, which can be reached here.
Endnotes
Paul Sweezy, Four Lectures on Marxism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), p. 65.
Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), pp. 229-230.
Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 6.
Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 777.
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001, p. 73.
Istvan Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), p. 81.
Did not Adam Smith, the commiesymp, teach us that, when you get two competing businessmen alone in a room, what they talk about is how they can carve up the market, fix prices, and eliminate upstart competitors?