Football is hyper-capitalism

Soccer is hyper-capitalism. It is the space that a free market would ultimately expand in to. The money that moves between clubs, and between owners, is nothing short of ridiculous, mind-bending, even.

PSG, currently feeling the effects of a Middle-Eastern sugar daddy, spent nearly $200 million over the summer on player transfers alone. They bought three players.

A few weeks ago, berk (and former footballer), Robbie Savage stated that be believed Lionel Messi alone was worth £100 million for his services.

Until the recent attempts of Michael Platini to implement his financial fair play (FFP) rules, football did not have the monitory constraints that many other international markets have. The FFP rules are intended to reign in the spending of clubs, ensuring that they do not spend more than their means, and that they give due concern to their existing debts. It also limits the number of years which a club can record a financial loss. The richest teams have continued undeterred, as you might have guessed would happen. The record debts and record fees continue to spiral upwards, one propping the other up.

It’s within this context that I read Rudi Batzell’s shortanalysis for the NFL referee strike, and a plea to nationalise football. Until I read the article, I had no idea of this strike, and, as someone who doesn’t follow American football, I have no idea of the surrounding context.

But the basic facts are that, for an entire season, NFL referees have been out on strike. The unionised referees were locked out by the owners over a dispute concerning pensions and secure working conditions. In American sporting lingo, they are on ‘lockout’ – the combined might of the owners of the NFL teams have barred them, and hired scabs in their place. The problem with scabbing in this context is that, to be a referee, you need years of training and practise, and the ability to make decisions based on obscure, garbled evidence. The scab referees do not have this, and since the start of the season there have been wrongly-given penalties, confusion and inconsistency. Batzell points out that his team, the Green Bay Packers, lost a game to Seattle because of the inability of the scab referees to police the game.

Batzell goes on to argue for a non-profit NFL, one without owners, played for the good of the game. The community-owned Green Bay Packers follow this example, but they are the only team to do so.

“Imagine the NFL as a factory. The production line workers are the players. It is a beautiful game, but playing football is brutal and violent work—most players have short careers and sacrifice their bodies for their vocation. The coaches, scouts, and trainers are the engineers, production planners, and shopfloor managers in the factory. Their schemes, strategies, and training prepare and coordinate the production process. Combined with the skills of the athletes, they engineer schemes and tactics that keep the game evolving and competitive.

The refs could easily be overlooked, but they play a crucial part in the valuation process. They are the quality control specialists, ensuring that working conditions are uniform and safe, and that a quality product is turned out, play-by-play and week-by-week. But the scabs can’t tell a touchdown from an interception, and the quality of the product—play-by-play and week-by-week—has deteriorated. If we want to keep this factory running, change has to start at the top.

What do owners do? They sit in luxury boxes, monocles, cigars, and brandy in hand, sucking their bloody profits from the bodies and minds of the players, coaches and refs. Much like the super-wealthy in other sectors, at their best they provide story lines for the tabloids. But now the football capitalists are destroying their own industry.”

 

In comparing the mechanisms of football – both in the American and European contexts – as a whole to a traditional production-line factory, Batzell raises the important question of whether football can be seen to function like the rest of capitalism. The workers may be vastly overpaid, but they still sell their labour to the capitalist owners, who proceed to make vast profits from them. Work is still unpaid labour, no matter what the scale. The reliance on scabs, brought in to replace skilled workers, has had a similarly detrimental effect that it would have if you brought in random members of the public and asked them to start buying cars for you.*

 

The capitalist mechanisms of football are the same as the workings of the wider economy, but this particular industry has bloated to a scale which is uncontrollable. Like the banking industry, football exists on a cloud of speculation and money which flows unstoppably between a select few capitalists. The idea of football as a working class sport is dead, or dying, pricing people out at the bottom, and alienating them at the top.

But is the nationalisation and community ownership model truly the way forward? Or, a more accurate question – is it viable? Like the example of the Green Bay Packers, community-owned clubs do exist, but in isolation. The most famous example is Barcelona, which benefits from being one of the most iconic clubs in the world to draw in money. Yet it is mired in hundreds of millions of debt, and is another club using Qatar oil as a leaning post. On the other end of the financial scale, Stirling Albion, a Scottish third division club bought by the local community after a conflict with the previous owner. They reached the first division, before falling apart financially and falling to the very bottom league position of Scottish football.

There are, however, examples where community ownership, and therefore community benefit, works. The German Bundesliga dictates that fans must own at least 51% of every club. The Bundesliga is regarded as the most fan-friendly league in Europe, as well as one of the more competitive ones. Similar rules exist in Turkey and Sweden.

Most countries have smattering of fan-owned clubs, but in England community clubs have emerged as a form of protest, as much as a community activity. F.C. United of Manchester were started as a protest again the Glazer ownership of Manchester United, A.F.C. Liverpool give fans who have been priced out of Premier League matches a chance to watch league football, and AFC Wimbledon were started by fans of the old Wimbledon team after it was bought over and forcibly moved to Milton Keynes (to become MK Dons). All play in the lower leagues, on tiny budgets compared to their professional rivals, but all operate on a community-first basis, attempting to wrestle control of football away from money.

This is ultimately a more viable option. Fans have the necessary passion to drive these projects forward. They can take back control of clubs and give them back to the community. Some clubs won't be as successful, but it would stop the death-spiral of increasing debt and output. Of course, this is a significant upheaval - a revolution in the way that football is run. It would have to happen globally. But these smaller clubs give hope to the bigger ones. Change can start from the ground up.

 

*Scottish football was hit by a similar referee strike in the 2010/2011 season, when referees withdrew their labour, forcing the SFA to bring in scabs from around Europe, and anywhere else they could find them. These scabs were in fact professionals, which differs to the NFL story above, and, as far as I know, there were no major controversies over decisions. The referees went on strike over a number of reasons, but it was mainly the way they had been treated by the media, the fans, and members of the football clubs. I imagine pay comes into it as well - referees are paid £800 per game, which sounds like a lot, but this only comes to a maximum of £10,000 per year. Most will probably make less.