This series of posts on the ESL is based on a 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!
We are in an age of world football/soccer, where the game seems to swirl around the globe. Our relationship to it is mediated by various kinds of screen. It seems so real, but how real is it really? It might seem that this world football will go on indefinitely in a global digital void increasingly disconnected from the life of people that is bound to time and place. However, this is far from certain. There is a global football/soccer market, and it is something that will not indefinitely expand.
Markets might have stimulated the commodification of football, but markets are not its source of value. Value comes from somewhere else, somewhere anthropologically more real, somewhere that must be maintained lest the very life blood of the thing is to wither and die.
Football cannot long survive in a purely symbolic superstructure, and the more the marketization of football removes it from its social context, the more it will disintegrate.
Even though it is mediated through digital technology, we have to grasp how ‘consumers’ of the football ‘product’ are sucked into football by the visceral atmosphere of the sport, the emotional register, the cultural connections that surround it and the meaning that is made through it. It is not merely about the technical quality of the football. People don’t buy the jerseys just because they enjoy seeing the ball kept on the deck. It is something in which we invest psychologically and thus feel alive. Our primary relationship to football might be established via intermediating devices, but that vicarious experience has to be anchored in lived life at the other end of the digital stream. Football games have atmosphere, atmosphere comes from passionate crowds, and passionate crowds are composed of people who live in the social and cultural reality around the football club.
If the ESL severs a link in this chain, in order to sustain the marketization of the sport, it will set itself on a course for self-destruction.
The monopolizing thrust of the ESL project will immiserate the domestic leagues that are left behind by the founding clubs. They might deny it, but that would be the reality of their gambit to push further expansion of the global football market. Why is this important?
Firstly, because the craftwork and skill of footballing artisans, to whom TV viewers are drawn, have been acquired and honed in the vocational training made possible by the football ‘pyramid’ and its surrounding social stock of tradition, experience, and knowledge. Top flight footballers are not spawned in laboratories, but represent the final outcome of a much bigger production process.
Secondly, the football product is more than just players. The thing that culminates on your screen comes from the deep layers of social football: the participants, players, supporters, crowds, schools, parks, parents, groundkeepers, teachers, pubs, local businesses, municipal authorities, players’ families and friends, volunteer officials, and the small army of personnel that staff the hundreds of clubs in England. This society around football goes right down through the league ‘pyramid’, drawing on the surrounding culture. This social amniotic fluid is where the English football ‘product’ comes from, which is then commodified and marketed across the world.
Monopolizing clubs have constructed revenue-securing enclosures around these commodity-constituting value streams by securing property rights over the principal ways of packaging, monetizing, and marketing that value – principally through branding and privatized TV rights at the professional tip of the pyramid.
Put simply, the big clubs have accumulated massive surpluses for decades now out of the value that is produced in the wider society that surrounds football.
Shifting over to an exclusive and monopolized European Super League would almost inevitably entail the eventual departure of those clubs from their respective domestic leagues. This would end the recycling of accumulated surpluses back into the societal soil of the football league pyramid, a recycling mechanism that has watered and fertilized the pyramid for decades will be cut off with disastrous consequences for the financial organization and prospective surplus re-investment into those domestic leagues.
In Part 2, we saw how unfettered capital accumulation stimulates attempts to formalize the monopolizing tendency in corporate football. Now we can see how the market competition that leads to monopoly will itself bring disintegrative pressure on the ‘people’s game’ by tearing it out from the society in which it is embedded. A reaction from society will be forthcoming. This brings us to Karl Polanyi.
In his famous work on the Industrial Revolution in Britain – The Great Transformation1 (1944) – Polanyi paid particular attention to how the highly productive Market Society emerged through the 19th century.
Within the concept of Market Society, Polanyi distinguished two spheres. The coexistence of these spheres has been essential to the growth and then survival of modern capitalism, though they are in a constant state of contradiction with each other. When that contradictory tension increases through time, crises of capitalism (large and small) come into being. These two dimensions are Market Economy and Society, which together make up Market Society.
Market Economy implies a self-regulating system of markets, and an economy directed by market prices and nothing but market prices that are capable of organizing the whole of economic life without outside help or interference. The motive of subsistence is replaced by that of gain, all transactions become money transactions, all incomes must be derived from a sale of some sort. In short, it is the abstract and autonomous market mechanism.
Society refers to the encompassing web of sustained and enduring relations by which human life exists in a natural environment among other people. As a social being, humans are concerned with their social standing, social claims, and social assets. In society, belonging is not just a frustration to rational calculation that gets in the way of market forces. It is something of immense importance. It is the relations of reciprocity and redistribution that temper the impersonal relations of the market economy through longstanding kinship, familial, identity, regional and communal relations. Social relations are governed by behavioral principles not primarily associated with economics, but culture, custom, and spiritual life, which not only ensure stability, order, continuity, harmony in production and distribution, but meaningful existence for the human as a complicated social, emotional, and even hormonal animal.
Market Society entails both Market Economy and Society, because there can be no stable and long-term development in modern capitalism without both terms of the equation. The first provides the motor of productive organization, while the second provides stability, meaning, sustainability, and the primary source of value.
Although it is a handy mechanism that enables capital accumulation and expansion of the productive forces, Polanyi noticed how the self-regulating market is actually ‘utopian’ and ‘unsustainable on its own terms’. It is one of the ‘economic superstitions of the nineteenth century’, and cannot exist without the constantly intruding reality of society (p. 59).
Polanyi’s basic thesis is that the utopian agenda of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system through the 1800s-1900s, ran up against the perpetual need for markets to be embedded in the social, familial, communal, ecological, physical lives of people that sustain the market economy, supply it with economic value, and provide the meaningful and real world in which humans actually live as sensuous mammals and emotional beings (p. 31). Without social restraint, the market mechanism will quantify and use up the lifeworld of people. As a wise man once said, it knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it (p. 44).
So this is the contradiction between Market Economy and Society, between what Polanyi labelled ‘improvement’ and ‘habitation’ (p. 36). On the one hand, the transformation of everything into quantifiable objects digestible by the impersonal workings of the market system, its all-powerful price mechanism, and the huge unleashing of productive force and accumulation. On the other hand, the resistance from society to this alienating tendency and its devastating effect upon our social relations, our ecological habitation, and our places of belonging.
The two spheres had to be combined and reconciled in the framework of the Market Society, which is precisely the framework in which professional football exists today.
The ex-footballer and BBC pundit Danny Murphy hit the nail on the head (see video above), when he used the word ‘soulless’ to describe the ESL project. He went on to contrast it with ‘the supporters, or the tradition, or the history, or the passion of the fans and the clubs and the cities that we know’. He specifically alluded to ‘four fantastic divisions in our league that we have – what? – over a hundred years created, this wonderful pyramid that we’ve got in our country we’re proud of. I mean that could capitulate overnight, couldn’t it, if this was to happen?’
Of course, the tendency he describes has been underway for some decades now (the founding of the Premier League being just one instance). The social damage wrought upon social football by marketization is a consistent feature of the endless compulsion to emplace Market Economy into the Society of football. Consider…
The historic football grounds in lived neighbourhoods that have been destroyed and the clubs uprooted from the social lifeworld described by Murphy for transplantation to huge out-of-town car parks next to motorways.
The labour that is lived in passionate crowds of supporters is disintegrated as participation rights become unaffordable through a price mechanism that replaces supporters with tepid connoisseurs and dispassionate observers from the four corners of the planet.
The replacement of supporter-stewards with contracted private security personnel, as has been the case at West Ham’s new London Stadium. Community spirit as suffered there as a consequence.
The increasing semiotic strain placed upon club symbols (shirts, logos, badges) as they are disseminated across the global market and appropriated by individuals whose connection to those symbols is exclusively mediated through that market.
The shift of football coverage from public broadcasting to private TV rights, the proliferation of more and more matches to be broadcast, more ‘content’ to be sold, irrespective of the effect upon players, supporters, clubs, and communities.
The scattered restructuring of match fixtures from weekend afternoon’s to midweek and evening fixtures, so as to maximize broadcasting surface area, but which can only be disintegrative of the immediate communal experience at the heart of social football on the ground.
These are just some instantly recognizable developments, where we can see long term damage to football’s ‘habitation’ through the ‘improving’ process of unfettered marketization. Remember, these are the societal bonds and relations that produce the value appropriated by markets. Destroy one in the long-run and you don’t get the other.
The general labour that contributes to the football ‘product’ becomes alienated by the ‘soulless’ tendency toward market economy in football. The affective and symbolic meanings are lessened and the connection of lived life to football is weakened.
In short, the constant commodification, monetization, and marketization of football is destroying the source of value in its own ‘product’, as well as the social ‘habitation’ of all those who live through football culture and who depressingly sense its gradual dissolution. Think of it like soil erosion from over-faming. Without Society, there will be no Market Society. The Market Economy will disintegrate itself, unless there is pushback.
The take away in this ‘globalization’ type of analysis is that football’s market economy must be more effectively ‘embedded’ in the social sphere and regulated in relation to that sphere. Although the market mechanism might drive certain productive enhancements in the organization of capital accumulation and expanding markets, the dis-embedding of the economy from society is a utopian illusion doomed to failure. The short- and long-run effect of attempts to create a self-regulating market is that it ‘must disjoint Man’s relationships and threaten his natural [and socio-cultural] habitat with annihilation’ (p. 44), and this is what we have been witnessing in English football culture for years now.
Without any regulation or overview, social control shifts from responsible human actors immersed in communal relations to a soulless, irresponsible, and abstract market mechanism. This is not a matter of mere nostalgia, but a practical one in the terms of capitalist football itself. This is because ‘even capitalist business itself’ has to be ‘sheltered from the unrestricted working of the market mechanism’ (p. 201), in order for it to survive. What happened to the market mechanism in the bailouts of 2008? Regulation is not just about safeguarding human ‘habitation’, nor restoring democratic control over the impersonal mechanism of the market, but about saving the market economy itself from itself.
This brings us to the actual countermovements that emerge from Society, and to the question of what social ‘regulation’ of football/soccer might actually look like. This will be the topic of the next (and final) article in the series. Subscribe now and you won’t have to come looking for it…
Endnotes
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).