A member-owned football club models an alternative to capitalist competition.

Evidence

A non-profit making association owned and controlled by its members, Barcelona’s slogan is “more than a club”. Do Barca, with their foundations and educational activities, give a hint as to how football might operate in a utopia? Proletarian artistry the beauty of teamwork, competition, yes, but not the dog-eat-dog combat of capitalist realism. There could surely be no utopia that didn’t include something like this… — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1555 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The rules of the game resemble those of the market, equal chances and fair play for all, but only as the struggle of all against all. Thus it is that sport permits competition, now reduced to a form of brutality, to survive in a world in which competition has actually been eliminated. While sport does indeed express competition as a form of immediate activity, it also expressly thematizes a historical tendency which has done away with competition proper. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 129 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Football’s Premiership spectacle embodies anti-utopian market realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1550; Member-owned football clubs model utopian non-capitalist competition. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1555; Sport preserves and theatricalizes a competition that monopoly capitalism has abolished — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 129

Broader Connections

• Member-owned football clubs model utopian non-capitalist competition. #corroborates (1.00) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1555
• Sport preserves and theatricalizes a competition that monopoly capitalism has abolished #complicates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 129