Marxist Soccer

This is an old essay I wrote as a Facebook post back during the last World Cup. I thought I’d reshare it here

With the World Cup Final this Sunday there will be billions with eyes on their televisions. The world’s game. The beautiful game. The most proletarian sport there is, football. Football has for its entire existence been the sport of the working class. Everywhere from the favelas of Brazil, working class neighborhoods of Britain, immigrant communities of the United States, and so many more the proletarians of the world have played and watched this wonderful sport. Yet there is a crisis in the current state of world football. The bourgeoisie have slowly been appropriating it for their own and transforming this proletarian past time into another play thing for the rich and powerful. Professional football is no longer a job for the most talented athletes, but it is an ad campaign for private capital. Smaller countries see their greatest talent poahced in imperial raids every season, and youth soccer is run as a business, requiring players to pay to play while the owners of the clubs become wealthy.
Turn on the television to watch the World Cup or any football match, and you will inevitably see hundreds, if not thousands of advertisements for products. These range from food, beer, cars, and, very often, male enhancement products. This isn't limited to commercial breaks. The match itself, the players’ uniforms, and even the stadiums are advertisements to produce more profits. Long gone are the days of stadiums with famous names such as Old Trafford, Anfield, Camp Nou, and more. Now, we have Emirates Stadium, Pizza Hut Park, Mercedes Benz Arena, and so on. We have teams which double as brands, such as Red Bull's teams in New York, Salzburg, etc. The sidelines of stadiums all have walls right next to the field which display multiple advertisements for products as the game is being played. The score icon in the upper corner of your television usually has a product placement as well. The players’ jerseys almost always have not only the largest portion of the jersey on the front for advertising, but on the back and sleeves as well. This doesn’t even begin to get into the deals companies make with individual athletes or teams to wear their products on and off the pitch. Instead of just watching football your eyes are instead inundated with a panoply of advertisements, demanding you spend your money to keep the capitalist system going and the bourgeoisie’s profits soaring. This is a distraction from why we love the game. We love it because we don’t need a million products to play it. We only need a ball and maybe shoes. We cannot allow commodity fetishism to take over our game.
It may not seem like it today, but in many ways football used to be completely dominated by South America. The first ever World Cup Champions were Uruguay. South American countries can collectively claim 9 total World Cup titles. In club football the South American leagues also used to be not only competitive against the European leagues, but in many ways superior. The old Intercontinental Cup, which is played between the South American Champion and the European Champion, used to be largely dominated by South American teams. This wasn’t exclusive to Argentina and Brazil. Teams from Uruguay and Paraguay also lifted the cup against their European rivals. Recently, in the newly created Club world, this has changed. Steadily the Europeans have started to dominate this competition. It’s been several years since the last South American victory by Brazil’s Corinthians against England’s Chelsea in 2012. Why is this the case? Well, it can quite simply be explained through what Vladimir Lenin called “imperialism.” It’s a looting of the best and most talented South American talents in football and bringing them to European clubs. The best South American players like Messi, Neymar, Di Maria, Falcao, and more now play in European leagues, not the leagues of their birth countries. Every season you see the best teams in the South American leagues lose their top players. It’s especially common to see the champions of a league or the continental tournaments(Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana) sell multiple players immediately after winning the title. This is exactly what happened to Neymar as he was sold to Barcelona in Spain not long after his Brazilian club Santos won the Copa Libertadores. Santos, for all its efforts, did not have the resources to keep Neymar in Brazil. This imperial poaching of talent isn’t exclusive to South America. It happens in Africa, Asia, and North America as well. It’s preventing these countries from ever building up their leagues to a level to be competitive against the top European leagues. If they are destined to lose their top talents after every successful season it’s very difficult to build and improve the team.
Youth soccer should have two priorities: fun and player development. The problem is that neither of these are priorities for most clubs. Most clubs prioritize profits. Especially in the United States of America soccer is entirely a pay to play sport. This has horrible consequences in both of the above-mentioned aspects. What's on display is that the sport is becoming white and middle-to-upper class. It’s no longer a sport of the working class, but rather a sport of the privileged. In America many of the best young talents are from lower class immigrant families. They bring a passion for soccer from the countries of their families and play for fun within their communities. By doing so they develop a raw talent that is rarely replicated in any other fashion. However, to become a successful player in America you must play for the big clubs to get an opportunity to play college soccer or professional soccer one day. This is where the problem begins. Every club has player fees for each season. Many players are paying over a thousand dollars to play each season. This is an obvious barrier for lower class families. In addition, travel is required and is the family's financial burden. It’s also expected to be able to travel to practice twice a week minimum, which can present a substantial hurdle to families with two working parents, to say nothing of single parents. As the children get older, players steadily drop out and quit playing soccer sheerly because of the inaffordability. It is an economic culling. This entices the clubs away from the cities and into the suburbs. It's at this point the make up of the players turns from a varied array to a uniform majority of upper and middle class white players. This system really only benefits two parties: the owners of the clubs and the upper class families which benefit having competition from the lower classes priced out of the game. It hurts everyone else, and it hurts the overall development of soccer in general. If the United States ever wants to become a world football power it will have to abandon the pay to play system and adopt a system which rewards talent for talent, not ability to pay.
Football truly is the global proletarian sport. The majority of players and fans are still proletarian. The bourgeois are still dilettantes in the sport. Their presence, however is amplified by their high concentration of capital. It doesn’t have to be this way. We as the global proletariat can fight back. This will of course be much bigger than just football. It must be a battle against the global bourgeoisie and the capitalist system all together. If we can all unite behind a common cause of the betterment of humanity by the socialization of the means of production, we will find a better world for our reward. We will seize a better life for everyone. We will also allow more opportunity for everyone to enjoy the wonderful sport of football. Footballers of the world unite! We have nothing to lose, but our chains!