Nadine Dorries or Jacob Rees-Mogg? Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk? Uefa or the European Super League? Yes, sometimes life seems like a succession of Hobson’s choices.
Last week the European court of justice (ECJ) ruled that Uefa, which oversees European football, and the game’s global body, Fifa, acted unlawfully in threatening sanctions against players and clubs that joined the European Super League (ESL) in 2021. In April of that year, 12 of Europe’s biggest clubs announced the creation of the ESL, a lucrative new competition to rival Uefa’s Champions League, promising clubs even more riches but also freedom from the possibilities of relegation, thereby making those riches permanent.
Six English clubs were part of the original ESL cohort – Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Spurs. Within days, a huge backlash from fans, national governments and existing football organisations, forced all but three to pull out. The three remaining clubs – Barcelona and Real Madrid from Spain’s La Liga and Italy’s Juventus – brought a court case against Uefa and Fifa. Last week they largely won.
The ECJ did not suggest that “a competition such as the Super League project must necessarily be approved”. But Uefa and Fifa had to allow competition rather than “abusing a dominant position”. The possibilities of an ESL-like body are in play again. Indeed, straight after the ruling, the ESL published plans for a new, even more ambitious form of the Super League.
Such a league is unlikely to happen, unless with the participation of Uefa. But were it to do so, most fans would abhor it. The ECJ ruling exposes how the demand for market competition and the mantra of “choice”, often promoted as being in the interests of the fan or the consumer, is in reality a weapon wielded by those with power and resources to attack existing power structures, but rarely to benefit ordinary people.
Nevertheless, the dilemma facing football fans is that while the ESL is an execrable money-spinning exercise detached from any organic sense of sporting history or rivalry, the current system is barely any better. In responding to the ECJ ruling, Uefa’s president, Aleksander Ceferin, insisted that “football is not for sale”. Yes, and Michelle Mone insists she has “done nothing wrong”. Football has long been for sale and often in the most corrupt of ways.
As David Conn maps out in his book The Fall of the House of Fifa, the commercialisation of football, and its corruption, began in the 1970s. João Havelange, the Brazilian businessman who became Fifa president in 1974 and ran it as his personal fiefdom for almost a quarter of a century, recognised the potential of commercial sponsorships and TV rights to garner vast riches. Teaming up with Horst Dassler, the son of the Adidas founder Adolf Dassler, he organised global sponsorships for the World Cup and other Fifa tournaments, beginning with Adidas and Coca-Cola, before mining an even richer seam by selling off television rights.
Havelange turned Fifa from a one-room operation in a private house into a global empire, “able to command the allegiance, interest and engagement of more people in more places than any other sport”, as David Goldblatt puts it in his The Age of Football. He also created a global empire of corruption and greed, as millions were expended in kickbacks and bribes to procure contracts, win the right to host the World Cup and to secure posts inside the Fifa hierarchy.
The choice of Qatar as host for the 2022 World Cup brutally exposed how football most certainly was for sale; a country with no football history, few stadiums and unplayable summer temperatures, but with bags of riches to spread around. Fifa’s growing partnership with Saudi Arabia, the world’s new sporting financial powerhouse, including the likelihood of it becoming the host of the 2034 World Cup, is the latest manifestation of this trend.
Over the past half century, Fifa helped create, in the words of the former FBI director James Comey, unveiling bribery indictments against football officials and corporate executives, “a culture of corruption and greed” in which “undisclosed and illegal payments, kickbacks and bribes became a way of doing business”. Eventually that culture helped bring down Sepp Blatter, Havelange’s protege and the inheritor of his Fifa crown in 1998, and Michel Platini, one of France’s greatest players, who became in turn Blatter’s protege within the governing body, both banned from football for eight years by Fifa’s own ethics committee, though both were later cleared in a court case.
The ESL may be a competitor to Uefa, but it is also the creature of that “culture of greed” that football’s governing bodies have spawned, a product of the marketisation of the game that they have encouraged. And yet, for all that we may detest the transformation of the game into a commodity like cars and computers, and the corruption that has accompanied it, few fans would want a return to football as it was in the 1970s.
As Havelange and Blatter helped create a global empire of corruption and greed, they also helped globalise the sport, moving it beyond its original heartlands of Europe and South America. In many African, Asian and Caribbean countries, Fifa largesse has helped build stadiums, construct training fields, launch development programmes and nurture the women’s game.
At the same time, in another of the ironies, the globalisation of the game has also concentrated power within Europe. Every member of Senegal’s squad at the last World Cup played for European clubs. And even for a traditional powerhouse such as Argentina, only one member of the squad played in its domestic league.
Football today may be more cosmopolitan, but the cosmopolitanism is not equally spread. As with much else in our consumer culture, the market has opened new possibilities – and closed them down at the same time.
All this should matter even to those for whom sport doesn’t matter, who don’t care to know the byzantine laws governing offsides and handballs, who look upon football fandom as a strange, inexplicable obsession. The major themes in the transformation of football, from marketisation to globalisation, from inequality to corruption, from the marginalisation of fans in the decision-making process to the consolidation of power in new elites, reflect in a more concentrated form much wider political, social and economic developments.
Football shadows the dynamics of our age. We should pay attention.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
