Speaker
Description
For more than thirty years, capitalism has been presented as the only realistic political and economic framework around which society (let alone elite European football) can be organised. Drawing upon the cultural analysis offered by the late Mark Fisher, this paper seeks to diagnose and explore the effects that ‘capitalist realism’, as critically interrogated by Fisher, has had upon the governance, regulation, and consumption of European football in late modernity. This paper is timely in that the European game, like wider society, has been forced to negotiate simultaneously the exigencies of Brexit, Covid-19, and a prolonged period of economic crisis. Amid these conjoined crises, European football has also been subject to a power struggle between twelve of the continent’s leading clubs and the governing body, UEFA, around a proposed Super League and Champions League reforms. Occluding any notion of social democratic reform, the response to these political and economic crises has been the demand for more capitalism rather than less. Europe’s elite continues to prioritise the economic goals of growth and expansion over the principles of redistribution and solidarity. Yet the upward redistribution of this wealth has created ever-widening levels of inequality across Europe’s domestic leagues, the continent as a whole and indeed, the global game more widely. Looking beyond Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’, this paper seeks to imagine those post-capitalist alternatives that could be used to plot and navigate a new post-crisis trajectory for football; a new course upon which a more democratic, more equitable, and sustainable sport might emerge.
