In the grand churn of the money machine that is modern football, it ranks as a fairly small deal. But when Liverpool recently announced they will earn more than £60m ($76.3m) a year from a new kit deal with Adidas starting next season, the reaction from the club’s supporters across social media said a lot about the nature of modern fandom. Apart from the habitual grumbles about what this might mean for the design of the team’s kit, fans mostly seemed to respond to the announcement in one of two ways: why doesn’t the new deal bring the club into line with the £90m ($114.3m) that Manchester United receives from Adidas for a comparable arrangement? And more pressingly: what kind of squad investment can an extra few million pounds a year secure? “Enough to pay Virgil,” declared one user on Reddit. “Does that mean we will buy a RB and a 10?” asked another.
These are, of course, completely normal reactions; any other club announcing any kind of commercial “win” would face similar responses from its supporters. But they highlight the extent to which we, as fans, have all become psychologically colonized by the grubby extractionism that defines the modern Premier League, applauding from the sidelines as a new content deal or shirt sponsorship or asset sale or fresh suite of unaffordable subscription packages lurches into view on the club balance sheet. That seat upgrade “layer” and points-based VIP fan tier might be part of the commercial drift that’s making football less affordable, carrying it ever further from the communities it claims to represent, but if they nab us a quality back-up keeper to put pressure on that number one chronically fumbling under the high ball? Well, maybe they’re not so bad after all.
The quest for revenue is the defining struggle of modern football, and many fans correctly see higher revenue as the surest route to on-field glory; balance sheet improvement and squad improvement now go hand in hand. Fans, faced with these economic realities, have become unwitting cheerleaders for the untrammeled commercialization of the sport, for the exploitation of minor seams of commercial value and the manipulation of regulatory loopholes, for the dark administrative arts that backroom operators rely on to give their clubs an edge. The depth of anger that many supporters feel toward referees for perceived on-field injustices and biases – some of which, recent events suggest, may have a legitimate anchor in reality – has its converse in the cool indifference that greets any evidence of rule-skirting in the corporate suite.
We all have that group of Chelsea supporters in our lives who are vocally thrilled at the club’s dexterity in flogging off their own hotels to themselves at generous prices in a bid to squeak under the league’s loss limits; we all know that one Man City fan comically untroubled by the 115 charges hanging over the club they love. Even – or perhaps especially – as the Premier League enters a new era of regulation and accountability, the temptation for fans to view their own clubs’ off-field chicanery as part of the “game” of modern football has only grown. Regulation, if anything, offers manipulative club owners another “enemy” against which to mobilize fan support: it’s perhaps no surprise that Manchester City fans cheered the recent arbitration ruling against the Premier League’s rules on associated party transactions, or that Chelsea fans were buoyed by the failure of a motion at the league’s annual general meeting in June to ban clubs from booking artificial windfall profits on property sales. Never mind that both the ATP rules and a limitation on Chelsea-style hotel sales would help create a fairer league; all that matters is the win, the extra bit of financial juice, that boost to the bottom line.
Fans have agency in all of this, of course, and not all fans behave this way. But it’s club owners and the sport’s administrators, rather than fans themselves, who bear the responsibility for this reduction of football to an exercise in financial and regulatory squeezing, a soulless game of numbers and loopholes. Emotional though they may be by nature, fans cheering these advances off the field are responding in an entirely rational manner to the world as it’s presented to them. More money, more deals, more maneuvering around the rules: such are the routes to success in the modern Premier League, and with them invariably come more litigation in the courts and tribunals, more contestation of the Premier League’s authority, more moral equivalence, a deeper league-wide drift into cynical amorality and transactionalism. These values have now seeped into the very bloodstream of the sport.
As the arrival of Big Money in European soccer has become routinized, debates around the ethics and morality of club ownership lose their initiating bite, and football as a whole shuffles toward a numb acceptance of its new status as a plaything of global capital, supporting the team on the field and cheering the off-field corporate trickery that keeps teams competitive have merged into a single culture of whatever-it-takes fandom. This isn’t simply a matter of following events off the field, which have always been the stuff of debate among supporters; it’s about the emergence of a collective mindset in which fans don’t simply accept the commercialization of all aspects of modern soccer but celebrate each successive marker of money’s tightening grip over the sport. Anything that allows clubs to keep growing, keep spending, keep chasing the top players while remaining within the letter of the law – no matter what it means for the sport’s overall accessibility, sustainability or connection to community – is a discussion-board toast waiting to happen. Club owners and administrators have, of course, done their bit to stoke and exploit this mindset; the science of “customer engagement”, along with a host of strategies designed to gamify and financialize the fan experience, have encouraged and rewarded blind, vocal club loyalty among fans while disincentivizing dissent.
None of us who follow football are immune to the power of this devious rationalism. As fans, we’re all petty traders and unethical accountants now, managing our own shadow ledger of the mind to keep track of where our clubs can go long, take profit and squeeze out an extra few bucks at the margins to afford that attacking but defensively solid left back/20-goal-a-season No 9/squad utility who can play across the back four but also has a head for goal from set pieces/technically adept and positionally secure midfield anchor who will unlock a glorious future of sustained on-field success. Fandom has become yet another realm of human life that’s been captured by gambling and speculation; fans are emotionally and mentally engaged in the league-wide search for the highest yield with the smallest outlay, becoming footsoldiers of the extraction economy. Players, meanwhile, are now seen as chattels – units of value on a balance sheet pumping up the assets column or liabilities dragging the operation down. Squads are increasingly assembled in the manner of venture capital portfolios, as a volley of scattergun bets on untested products.
In the long run, the only people who benefit from the Premier League’s new gamified climate of risk-taking and rule-bending are the billionaires and private equity parasites with control of the clubs. But as fans, we are the useful idiots turning their schemes for self-enrichment into a cultural prize. As we hail the latest streaming deal, merch tie-in, gaming partnership or tribunal win, football continues its transformation into an asset class, striding blithely into the jaws of the market.
