Sport preserves and theatricalizes a competition that monopoly capitalism has abolished

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that sport keeps competition alive as spectacle precisely because real competition has been eliminated is dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: Parallels the pseudo-individuation mechanism: difference as product feature stands in for difference as lived reality. — connects to: Monopoly capitalism destroys the very notion of property while retaining its form; Member-owned football clubs model utopian non-capitalist competition. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1555; Football’s Premiership spectacle embodies anti-utopian market realism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1550 (+1 more)