I wrote an article for The Mag recently, ‘Has the game gone’, in which I posed the question whether modern football is losing its emotional working class soul to a clinical technocratic elite who prioritise over-complicated VAR checks and cold spreadsheets over the raw, imperfect joy of the stadium fan experience.
In the wake of the news concerning Manchester City being found guilty of 114 of the 115 charges it faced, I felt the need for a follow up.
You see, the game we fell in love with was not invented by venture capitalists.
It was forged in the heat of Britain’s industrial heartlands, built by railway workers, miners, and shipbuilders who sought a collective escape from the gruelling monotony of capitalist exploitation. For well over a century, a football club was not a business; it was a democratic civic institution, a sacred piece of working-class heritage passed down through generations.
I think that hundred-year-old legacy is facing an existential threat but would argue it’s been coming for some time.
Recently, a technocratic, corporate elite, armed with private equity capital, sovereign wealth, and a clinical obsession with algorithmic optimisation has been systematically asset-stripping football of its soul.
Driven by the pursuit of maximum revenue, ticket prices have skyrocketed to exorbitant levels and the modern ticket pricing structure is nothing short of social cleansing.
Football clubs are aggressively pricing out the local community, with generational bonds severed in real time, grandfathers, fathers and sons replaced by the affluent tourist or corporate hospitality clients who view a football match as a bucket list photo opportunity or passive content to be consumed between appetisers and the obligatory prawn sandwich.
The corporate elite view the traditional, match-going working-class fan as a liability who is too loud, too demanding, and too unprofitable and with that, the terraces have been gentrified.
Kick-off times are mangled and disrupted, completely disregarding the traveling fan, purely to satisfy international broadcasting markets.
On the pitch, the triumph of data analytics has resulted in a joyless, mechanical style of play in which players are no longer encouraged to express themselves; the mercurial maverick and intuitive genius have been weeded out by algorithms, because creative risk-taking is an analytical sin. Retaining possession is favoured over running at a defender, whilst shots from long-range are effectively banned because they are statistically inefficient.
Player recruitment has been outsourced to cold, unfeeling algorithmic databases that have replaced human intuition with mountains of data, all of this done in pursuit of capital gains, with the same motive existing when it comes to stadium rebuilds; this isn’t being done to accommodate the community, but to provide multi-use entertainment hubs optimised for corporate extraction.
Perhaps the most insidious transformation is happening in the structure of the clubs themselves. The corporate elite have detached clubs from their geographic roots, turning historic community assets into global corporate franchises.
Here’s the thing though, if you look beneath the sterile, modern veneer of the game today, you will find that the blueprint for this heist is decades old.
Long before the Glazer family saddled Manchester United with hundreds of millions of pounds of toxic debt, the Edwards family pioneered the art of turning working class loyalty into private capital, successfully lobbying the Football Association to dismantle historical regulations that prohibited directors from drawing large salaries and stripping club profits via dividends.
The heist continued to be nurtured by Margaret Thatcher whose ideological crusade against the working class didn’t just lead to football fans being fenced in, policed by horses, and brought to heel, it was her free-market policies that primed football for a hostile corporate takeover, otherwise known as the formation of the Premier League, something that allowed elite clubs to shed their social obligations to their local communities.
Of course, this saw the death of the Saturday ritual, the national sport locked behind an expensive satellite paywall, and following the Hillsborough disaster, stadium redevelopments that were used to eradicate cheap standing areas, replacing them with executive boxes, corporate lounges, and high-priced seating designed to court an affluent, corporate audience.
So, when we look at the modern game, where fans are priced out by hyper-inflated tickets, games are sterilised by tech-room VAR checks, and historic clubs are traded like tech stocks by global private equity firms, I’m afraid to say, this has been coming for some time.
These technocrats haven’t reinvented the wheel, they have just optimised the machinery that Louis Edwards, Margaret Thatcher, and Rupert Murdoch built in the late 20th century.