The European Super League: Football’s Reckoning with Capitalism
By Jonathan Alingu of The Banter Pub FC
Let me say this very clearly: wealthy professional football clubs do not care about you. The 12 richest European clubs this week that announced their plan to start a breakaway “Super League” have no interest in honoring your desires or the fervent wishes of millions of fans counted across the world. They have not for quite some time.
It might be difficult to come to terms with that contradiction, as clubs for decades promoted the notion that by association with the club on any level: as a multigenerational season ticket holder, or a casual fan that signed up for the email updates randomly, it means that you are part of a family. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in Liverpool, “Mes Que Un Club” in Barcelona, “Fino Alla Fine” in Turin (the motto of Juventus) are a few of the mantras that clubs charmed supporters with, which then become the words they lived by. It is etched in memory and expressed through banners, tattoos, and on gravestones. We as supporters are then cast in a spell that the club’s ambitions on and off the pitch center around us, and thus, decisions should be made in consideration of us.
I am sorry to say that this is not the case.
Professional soccer is a business-first institution, and decisions are made only if it accumulates profit. The football clubs you were born to love are no longer grassroot and organic, they are business enterprises and brands. The crisis of capitalism (here’s a very simple abridged version if you haven’t read Das Kapital), is predicated on the fact that under capitalism, everyone is in competition and you have to accumulate more profit by any means or else your business will go bust. In an economic system whose function is to boom, bust, consolidate, and boom again, this well-planned split — JP Morgan funding your project to the hundreds of billions required years of planning — is the result of global capital, the ruling class of billionaires, gravitating to what is profitable at the expense of everyone else. These 12 club owners reached the logical conclusion that they could just accumulate more if they started a new league with players that everyone wants to watch.
This is not a new phenomenon. The Super League theoretically has been in formation for over 30 years. Many English, and Welsh fans can remember the transition from the Football League First Division to the Premier League. Nothing about that transition had to do with “integrity” nor did it consider the feelings of supporters, who had been supporting the First Division for 102 years prior. There was no plebiscite or country-wide consultation. Club owners agreed to do it because to their calculations, a move to create a new domestic league would generate more money for them, which under capitalist economics, was a necessity in order to compete with the Italian Serie A, arguably the most popular and richest league at the time, and the Spanish La Liga.
It’s no surprise that after 30 years of continued neoliberal economic policies (i.e. deregulation, privatization of industries, globalization of multinational corporations, just to name a few) by Conservative and Labour political parties alike, the English Premier League became the most profitable football institution in the world bar none. We as fans have until now accepted all the perks that came with that. We, like many others believed this high would never end, even though the cracks (Leeds in 2001, Portsmouth in 2012, Bolton in 2019) were there for all to witness. Of course, global capital saw it happening from the beginning. They were the architects of it, and knew for years this would not be sustainable and that they had to consolidate to secure their own wealth.
Everything the big clubs have done and are doing now to export the brand — that’s what our favorite football clubs are, a brand — across the world was in preparation for this moment. All the historic moments that your club has had were commodified in service to this happening. All the memories that pull on our emotions: The Class of 92, the Treble for Manchester United; Aguero in the 93rd minute for Manchester City; The Invincibles for Arsenal; Istanbul for Liverpool; Decima for Real Madrid were experiences seen, packaged, and sold like a mortgage-backed security so that they could sell this league on our joy as fans. The International Champions Cup tournament, or those friendlies in Bangkok or Durban that we knew were meaningless and all for money was an exercise in brand appeal. The Amazon-produced series whose clips go viral on social media, and the football documentaries on Netflix are all efforts by club ownership groups, and mass media executives to expand profit, and now, with the leadership structure of the “Super League” announced, and the bidding for TV deals underway, many are understanding that this is very much coordinated.
Really all we had to do was follow the money of these football club owners to understand why this new formation is not shocking. Stan Kroenke is connected to the Walmart family, which consolidated wealth by shutting down small businesses. Roman Abramovich consolidated wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union. Sheikh Mansour owns all the wealth in the UAE. The Glazers buy up real estate. John Henry Jr. that owns Liverpool and Paul Singer that owns AC Milan made their money on Wall Street. These people are billionaires because they’ve engaged in ruthless practices that shut businesses down and put people in poverty. It was our love for the game that brought them, but they did not see love, they saw profit and they saw exploitation.
The dominant football institutions such as UEFA, European football’s governing body, FIFA, world football’s governing body, and the Premier League, will appeal to our emotions as football supporters about the integrity of the game. They are not on our side. The media companies that have major investments in keeping things the way they are and pushing their employees to appeal to us about how greedy the game is *now* are also not on our side. They are toxic institutions that are now having to compete or face a rapid decline and bust. Don’t forget that it is their desire for profit accumulation that football is even being played during a global pandemic. These are the same institutions that would sanction slave labor as they are doing in Qatar, or undermine a country’s laws (Brazil’s drinking law) in order to satisfy a sponsor. We don’t need to discuss their inactions on racism and sexism. Their decades-long greed has set up the conditions for this to even happen.
There’s a lot that can change between now and 2023–2024, the Super League’s official launch. This isn’t the first time we’ve been threatened by a Super League but it is the realest threat to football in Europe. Nevertheless, the reality is that football, just like any other institution in the world goes through a crisis of capitalism. The Super League and the desperate attempts of the institutions that preceded it has shown us how it manifests. Global capital consolidates its wealth at our expense. Look no further than the economic crisis of the COVID pandemic. Millions of jobs that have been lost are not returning, and a small amount of people have profited in the billions. Those same people are in charge of your favorite football club, and in time, a new crisis will emerge and something else will replace the Super League. That’s just how the capitalist system behaves.
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