Football in Neo-Liberal Times: A Marxist Perspective on the European Football Industry

Description

This book offers an original Marxist critique of the European football business. It argues that the Marxist account of the difference between profits and surplus value is crucial to an understanding of the fluid and contradictory nature of the commodification of football. Section one analyses the nature of modern professional football and section two highlights attempts, via government agency and football clubs, to corral fans into ever greater identification with business logic aimed at breaking traditional social relations. Section three draws on a number of cases studies across Europe, to analyse how some fans are attempting to mount a counter ideological response to the assault of neo-liberalism on the game. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of illustrations Introduction Notes Bibliography 1. The commercialisation of football Introduction Football and the money game Enter corporate capital From the love of money to the political economy of debt Enter UEFA Concluding remarks Notes Bibliography 2. Marxist political economy of the football industry Introduction The traditional perspective The specificities of capitalist social relations in the football industry Football as fictitious commodity Elite football labour process The market situation of elite footballers The work situation of elite footballers Understanding the politics of supporter movements in the context of the peculiarities of the political economy of the football industry Conclusion Notes Bibliography 3. Supporters Direct Europe: the ‘recolonisation’ of football fandom Introduction Setting the context: Marxist state theory and the European social model The political and economic context for Supporters Direct Europe’s formation Supporters Direct as a European project? Concluding remarks Notes Bibliography 4. Europe’s stadium revolution Introduction UEFA competitions and European stadium growth UEFA and the rise of the corporate-media stadium complex Who profits? European stadia revolution and the changing culture of football fandom Concluding remarks Notes Bibliography 5. Europe’s Ultra football supporters movement Introduction The complexities of ‘Ultra’ identity formations Dynamics of the particular and the general in the formation of Ultra identities Crisis in European reformism Against Modern Football Red Bull Salzburg affair Racism/fascism: the Ultra response Conclusion Notes Bibliography 6. Grassroots football, autonomous activity and the forging of new social relationships Introduction Not-for-profit football Freedom through football? Grassroots football in context Capitalism, football communities and the struggle over the commodification of everyday life Conclusion Notes Bibliography Concluding thoughts The analytical power of Marxism Core conflicts in football outlined by the book Final observation Index