Football’s Premiership spectacle embodies anti-utopian market realism

Evidence

But it’s more than a metaphor. Football has been at the forefront of the total re-engineering of English culture, society and economy wrought by neoliberalism over the last thirty years. Neoliberalism presented itself as supremely realistic — as the only possible realism. It told us that utopia is impossible because there is no such thing as society, only individuals pursuing their own interests. What better image of this anti-utopianism is there than the Premiership, with its imperious, untouchable elite of clubs, its synergy with multinational media conglomerates, its conspicuously consuming players, its super-predatory club owners buying success like they are buying another yacht? Competition, exploitation, the strong lording it over the weak, paparazzi snaps of the fabulously wealthy masters of the universe players exiting nightclubs, flashing their very new money: football as anti-egalitarian Nietzschean combat. Forget utopia: dream, instead — if you’re young — of eventually becoming like this, of owning these Cheshire mansions, of getting a cyborg-slick WAG; or if you’re too old to ever lace up those ultrabranded boots, get used to being inferior, to never making it — dream instead of media-transfiguration via reality TV, or of a lottery win… … Players’ spiralling wages are a consequence of the very market dynamics that, until last year’s bank crisis, were held to be sacrosanct. You can detect a sour anti-working class resentment — shared by self-hating elements of the working class itself — in the attack on football’s “undeserving” rich. But all of this — the player’s high wages, the exorbitant ticket prices — is an effect of football’s total subsumption into post-Fordist capital. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1550

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to Fisher’s recurrent thesis in this book about post-Fordist capital and the evacuation of the future — and to ‘no such thing as society’ Thatcherism threaded throughout K-Punk. — connects to: Member-owned football clubs model utopian non-capitalist competition. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1555; A member-owned football club models an alternative to capitalist competition.; Sport preserves and theatricalizes a competition that monopoly capitalism has abolished — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 129 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: The class-resentment reading of attacks on high wages echoes themes of those published under ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ — economic inequality read through moral panic framing.

Broader Connections

• Member-owned football clubs model utopian non-capitalist competition. #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1555
• Sport preserves and theatricalizes a competition that monopoly capitalism has abolished #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 129
• Neoliberalism makes competition rather than exchange the essence of the market #expands (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 59
• A member-owned football club models an alternative to capitalist competition. #corroborates (0.80)
• Jungle’s realism naturalises winner-take-all reality along with defensive anti-capitalism #corroborates (0.80)
• Mass cultural products come to resemble measurable sporting competitions #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 128