The Local and the Global: Football and Capitalism

This essay was written approximately one year ago and some elements may be out of date eg. Liverpool definitely do not currently sit atop the premier league.

‘The suspicion of Enlightenment metanarratives for their denial of difference makes for a suspicion of all metanarratives which suppress or overlook differences, allows for localized consciousness, and points to the local as the site for working out “alternative public spheres” and alternative social formations. This is the promise held out by the local. The local, however, also indicates fragmentation and, given the issues of power involved, political and cultural manipulation as well. This is the predicament’

Arif Dirlik, ‘The Global in the Local’ p.90

It is a Saturday morning in March in the outskirts of San Juan de Limay, a small town in the north-western EstelÍ department of Nicaragua. A crowd of approximately 500 people has turned up to the town’s football pitch to watch local sides compete. Teams from tiny communities such as Parcila, whom I am supporting today, are stretching and warming up, despite the baking 40-degree heat which has transformed the pitch into a cracked, brown rectangle of dust. In Nicaragua, the football season is typically contested during the drier months, with baseball occupying attentions during the wet season. Today in Limay, there are three matches consisting of two 35 minutes halves (with such strong heat the games have been shortened from the standard 90 minutes), played consecutively before an attentive, occasionally raucous, crowd. The six teams wear replica football strips corresponding to the supposed ‘powerhouses’ of European football. Parcila sport the red and blue stripes of Bayern Munich’s 2014–2015 season. The black and white of Juventus can also be spotted, preparing for their clash with the distinctive red of Liverpool. Borussia Dortmund’s bright yellow and black swarms around a goalkeeper who clutches paper with notes on how best to counter Real Madrid, adorned in pristine white. A speaker blares contemporary Latin American Bachata music, a ‘romantic’ genre originating from the Dominican Republic, but now enjoying considerable popularity throughout the Spanish speaking world. This is incongruously and sporadically interrupted by 80s Western pop hits by Cyndi Lauper, Madonna and Michael Jackson. A Beatles song plays, and a local resident points at me, shouts “Inglaterra! Liverpool!”, and recites the names of the ‘Fab Four’. I am here working with an international development charity and weekends are an opportunity to relax and watch sport.

After Parcila have completed their game, a feisty 2–2 draw, a friend, Raymond Suarez, gifts me his shirt. It is not ‘official’ Bayern Munich merchandise, but one of millions of counterfeit shirts sold annually across the world. Bayern’s shirts are manufactured by Adidas, the German multinational corporation, but this shirt lacks the famous triple stripe logo (Adidas’ branding was purchased from Finnish company ‘Karhu’ in 1952.) It is made of poor-quality material, not expensive polyester mesh, and was manufactured in Bangladesh and purchased using US Dollars by the team’s captain when he worked in Costa Rica. The official currency of Nicaragua is the Córboba, whose eponym is the Spanish conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, but the US Dollar is also used. The Córboba uses a ‘crawling peg’ against the Dollar, a result of the exchange rate policies of Violetta Chamorra’s presidency in the early 90s which aimed to ‘stabilise’ the economy following years of civil war which devalued Nicaragua’s currency considerably[1]. Consequently, US dollars can be incredibly useful in Nicaragua, a country in which a significant proportion of the workforce travels to neighbouring, more economically ‘developed’ countries, such as Costa Rica, to bring back money (and seemingly football strips) to its communities.

Through a close reading of the football shirt one glimpses a consequence of the predicament that Arif Dirlik alludes to in the epigraph to this essay — namely the seeming inextricability of the ‘global’ from the ‘local’. The shirt signifies ‘local-ness’, in its concrete materiality, its functional purpose for use in sport, but also as a symbol of kinship, support and belonging for those both participating in, and spectating, the match on behalf of their local community. Furthermore, following the shirt’s conversion from functional sports attire to gift, its symbolic function shifts to that of a keepsake, a reminder of friendships and memories forged in and bound to a particular place and a particular time, imbued with value that cannot be measured financially. However, alongside such significations of localness, specificity and the concretely particular, is the indelible evidence of the abstract forces of “global capitalism”, which Dirlik (drawing on the work of Fredric Jameson and David Harvey) argues is, in its current stage, characterised by the “deterritorialisation, abstraction and concentration” of capital, and which represents an “unprecedented penetration of local society globally by the economy and culture of capital.”[2]

The football-shirt bears witness to the proliferation of multi-national corporations, the transnationalisation of production which has created neo-colonial economies such as Bangladesh, the overdetermination of inextricably connected transnational trade routes and decentred financial and informational networks, and the emergence of transcontinental spectacles of culture and entertainment, of which football is arguably one of the starkest examples. In fact, in this essay, I shall argue that ‘football’ can currently be understood usefully as a synecdoche for global Capitalism — a part one can take for the whole. Thus, ‘football’ should not be understood as the site of a particular struggle between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, but rather as analogous to global capitalism and consequently the site of a heterogeneity of vastly different ‘local’ modes of resistance and capitulation to its logic. I shall find use in Dirlik’s exploration of postmodern repudiations of Enlightenment metanarratives and Joe Kennedy’s discussion on football’s relationship to the modernist aesthetic, to posit a potential theoretical groundwork from which opportunities for ‘the local’ to resist the ‘global’, both within football and without, can be illuminated.

Scholarship concerning the local/global relationship responds to what Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake note was the creation of “an altered and more fractal terrain” which is simultaneously becoming more “globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance.)”[3] This Local/Global spatial dialectic is of key interest to Dirlik, who noticed an increased concern with ‘the local’ as a site of resisting the apparent total hegemony of global capitalism in the second half of the 20th Century, most noticeably among “ecological, women’s, ethnic and indigenous people’s movements.”[4] Many of these movements borrowed theoretical perspectives from post-structuralist and postmodern theories which criticised Enlightenment metanarratives of modernity. Modernism is theoretically slippery, its definition contested. For brevity’s sake, modernity can be thought of usefully as that mode of thought stemming from the Enlightenment which sought to “develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art, according to their inner logic.”[5] Harvey explains that modernisation was predicated on an unbounded commitment to progress and the furtherment of human understanding and communal knowledge based on ‘rational’ modes of thought which promised “liberation from the irrationalities of myth, religion, superstition, release from the arbitrary use of power as well as from the dark side of our own human natures.”[6]

The relationship between this conception of ‘modernisation’, which Dirlik is wary of, and the modernist aesthetic as discussed by Kennedy, is complicated, but Harvey’s opening chapter of The Condition of Postmodernism provides a somewhat useful overview. Where Enlightenment thought ostensibly treated modernisation as the result of a teleological process, the laws of which merely needed to be uncovered, the modernist aesthetic ruptured traditional teleology and entailed “a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions.”[7] Modernist artists recognised the ephemerality, transience, and fragmentary nature of human existence, laid bare by technological advancements, urbanisation and an ever-shrinking world. The modernist aesthetic became a “powerful means to establish a new mythology as to what the eternal and the immutable might be about in the midst” of all this.[8] James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, are examples of those who, in radically different ways, attempted to salvage eternity in the fleeting experiences of a modern, urbanised, cosmopolitan world. Post office, metro, arcade — all could become sites of the modern aesthetic. Yet an often shared factor between Enlightenment thinking and the modernist aesthetic, was that the cosmopolitan, globalised city was placed at the forefront, and ‘the local’ was shunned.

Modernism’s commitment to the universal, whether through a ‘forwards-looking’ teleology guided by Enlightenment commitment to rationality, or through a backwards-looking salvage-job of the eternal in the ephemeral, could be seen as devaluing the particular and ‘the local’. Modernist teleology, Dirlik argues

has gone the farthest of all in stamping upon the local its derogatory image: as enclaves of backwardness left out of progress, as the realm of rural stagnation against the dynamism of the urban, industrial civilization of capitalism, as the realm of particularistic culture against universal scientific rationality and, perhaps most importantly, as the obstacle to full realization of that political form of modernity, the nation-state[9]

Dirlik notes that these values construct a “historical consciousness that identifies civilization and progress with political, social and cultural homogenization,” and which necessarily sacrifice ‘the local,’ with its connotations of heterogeneity, hybridity and particularity, threatening modernism’s internal logic.[10] One should note that modernisation did not come to dominate without resistance, but too often these forms of resistance rendered ‘the local’ a sight of “refuge from the ravages of modernity.”[11] Yet, the moral, economic and political catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century led to repudiations of modernism’s teleology of progress, and even its aesthetic; in the famous assertion by Theodor Adorno, “all post-Auschwitz culture … is garbage.”[12] As Adorno and Max Horkheimer noted in their still pertinent critique, Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947 following the atrocities of World War Two, ‘the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’.[13] Enlightenment was the promise unfulfilled by modernity.

Dirlik thus finds it unsurprising that ‘the local’ has emerged in contemporary discourse “hand-in-hand” with ‘postmodern’ repudiations of modernist teleology.[14] These repudiations imply that “there is nothing natural or inherently desirable about modernism … and that the narrative of modernization is a narrative of compelling into modernity those who did not necessarily wish to be modern,” and consequently direct attention to “coercion over teleology in development.[15]” Furthermore, if one of the defining features of modernity was the development of nation states into ‘imagined communities’ creating “coherent modern identity through warfare, religion, warfare, blood, patriotic symbology, and language”[16], then this coherence has now been problematised by a global economic system reliant on the porosity of borders (for commodities and capital, if not for people) and the proliferation of overdetermined transnational markets and chains of production.

For Dirlik, these repudiations had two key ramifications. Firstly, they rescued “from invisibility those who were earlier viewed as castaways from history”, whose “social and cultural forms of existence appear in the narrative of modernization” as “irrelevancies” or “obstacles to be extinguished on the way to development.”[17] Secondly, they have allowed for greater visibility of local narratives:

the history of modernization appears now as a temporal succession of spatially dispersed local encounters to which the local objects of progress made their own contribution through resistance or complicity, contributing in significant ways to the formation of modernity, as well as to its contradictions[18]

The repudiation of modernist teleology allowed for a reemergence of the previously neglected ‘local’ as a potential site of resistance to capital, the rejection of colonialism and the retelling of local histories as counternarratives to Eurocentric notions of ‘progress’. Dirlik correctly notes, however, that repudiating something does not eliminate it — after all nationalisms are currently on the rise globally and capitalism still penetrates the local, suggesting inhabitants need to be “liberated from themselves (stripped of their identity)” and “to be homogenized into the global culture of capital.”[19] Such incidences can be seen in the Nicaraguan example above. From the perspective of global capitalism, the local is a site “not of liberation, but manipulation.”[20] Capitalism’s current stage of disorganisation and deterritorialisation places the local as a site of predicament. On the one hand, the reemergence of the ‘the local’ in response to the repudiation of Modernist metanarratives creates opportunities for a local resistance to capital and a reengagement with local traditions that were previously swept under the carpet by modernity. But equally, these responses can fall prey to “the manipulations of capital, and its ideology of ‘Global Localism.’” It is crucial, then, that local responses to global capitalism are ‘critical’. Wilson and Dissanayake gloss Dirlik’s concept of ‘critical localism’ as wary of “romantic nostalgia for communities past, hegemonic nationalism, or a museumifying historicism that would imprison the present in the past and disguise oppression in a neo-ethnic sheen.”[21]

It is through Dirlik’s reading of the local as a site of promise and predicament, and through his interpretation of ‘global capitalism’ that I posit that football can function as a useful synecdoche for the contemporary era, through which one can explore modes of local resistance to global capitalism. This is not an attempt to erase or overlook the modes of resistance from the ecological, women’s, ethnic, and indigenous people’s movements that Dirlik alludes to. Indeed, these movements are often intertwined with ‘football’; Forest Green FC recently became the first “UN-recognised carbon-neutral sports club;”[22] professional female footballers have organized strikes protesting gender pay-gaps;[23] organisations such as ‘Kick it Out’ in the UK counter racism, and in 2014 indigenous Brazilians protested government legislation introduced prior to the 2014 World Cup which affected the demarcations of their “reservations”.[24]

Like capital itself, FIFA is unabashed about its “expansionist” motives; it is committed to “progress.”[25] Its “mission” is to “grow the game” and it has set targets for 60% of the world’s population to “participate” in football by 2026 in some form.[26] Their governing documents drip with corporate jargon — “accountability to stakeholders”, “investment of human capital.”[27] Although FIFA is a non-profit organisation, plans to grow the game to this extent clearly provides opportunities and incentives for private capital, and it is unsurprising that an organisation with such homogenizing power, and expansionist intent, has been riddled with corruption scandals in recent years.[28] Furthermore, ‘football’, like global capitalism, is decentred; FIFA regulates the game on a global level, and could perhaps be likened to the International Monetary Fund’s function for the global economy, but continental, national and regional associations also contribute to the game’s governance. Furthermore, clubs are interconnected by global markets. The ‘transfer market,’ in which players are traded as ‘human capital’ par excellence, explicitly exemplifies this. This market is as overdetermined as any under global capitalism; when Qatari-owned Paris St-Germain purchased Neymar from Barcelona for a record $264,000,000 in 2017, it effected the ‘value’ of nearly every single professional male footballer on the planet.[29] Furthermore, clubs are often floated on stock exchanges and regularly change hands between the owners of multinational companies. Currently in the English Premier League, 16 of 20 teams are owned, partially or entirely, by foreign businesspeople or consortiums.

However, the penetration of capital into ‘the local’ is as true for the largest, most financially lucrative teams as it is for the 215 UK school playing fields that have been sold off since 2010 to meet budgets ravaged by austerity,[30] or in the more peripheral modes of capitalist entry into the space of football that I alluded to in my opening, which demonstrate football’s intermeshing with other strands of culture such as music and fashion. In this current era of globalised capitalism, football manifests itself as a homogenizing force, while paradoxically, it is also a multitude of heterogeneous ‘local’ sites (clubs, stadiums, schools) marked by difference, interconnection and marketisation. As Dirlik warns, ‘the local’ has become the “object of the operations of capital”[31] and football clubs are sites of the predicament he describes. In Mark Fisher’s Capital Realism, he alludes to the slogan, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”[32] Equally, it appears easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine ‘football’ extricated from the markets of global capitalism.

Just as Dirlik finds import in exploring the relationship between modernist teleology, its meta-narratives of ‘progress’ and their subsequent repudiations by ‘postmodernism,’ in providing the theoretical groundwork from which a ‘critical localism’ can mobilise against ‘the global’, I believe a similar strategy can be applied to football. Thus, it is important to explain how the total permeation of capital into the ‘site’ of football has occurred. As Kennedy notes in his book Games Without Frontiers, in order to privatise (and commodotise) something, “it needs to be imbued with a mimimum of definability which makes its being distinct from what’s around it.”[33] Kennedy traces the emergence of the definable ‘modern game’ to its codification in 1863 at the Football Association’s first ever meeting “above a pub in Covent Garden.”[34]The 1863 rules were penned just weeks before in Cambridge at a meeting of schoolmasters seeking to review rules, drawn up in 1848, but enforced with limited success.[35] Prior to this standardisation, different versions of ‘football’ were played to local rules, none of which would cohere to the contemporary game. Some of these archaic cultural relics have been preserved, such as Ashbourne’s Royal Shrovetide Football match, a version of local medieval ‘mob football’ which, somewhat ironically, still draws national and international spectators. This example of contemporary engagement with ‘the local’ is concerned with, what Wilson and Dissanayake lament is, a “bounded particularity” signifying an “ontological pastness,” a nostalgic “back-wards gazing fetish of purity.”[36] The ‘local’ is displayed in the proverbial pickling-jar, something to be preserved, but without a critical recognition of or engagement with a globalised capitalism which simultaneously sweeps the rug from underneath contemporary modes of local solidarity. Ashbourne’s high street, and also part of the ‘pitch’, is a testimony to the “recent run of retail misery” that independent businesses have faced when competing with national and international companies.[37] It is such museumifying historicism one should be wary of since it can “imprison the present in the past and disguise oppression.”[38]

The public school was another site of versions of pre-modern football which, as Richard Holt notes, varied according to “local traditions and the requirements of the terrain.”[39] Holt depicts school football in the first half of the 19th Century as a site of intense brutality and barbarity where “endurance and courage were the qualities most admired.”[40] Although ostensibly a team sport, ‘football’ provided the opportunity for boys to become local heroes. The ends of the game were the solidification of local status within a school or town, but also, no doubt, intense libidinal release in an otherwise authoritarian, austere and repressive environment. ‘Football’ was a disordered, ‘uncultivated’ affair, unrecognisable from the contemporary game, with handling and scrummaging often permitted. Many schoolmasters initially attempted to suppress it; Samuel Butler, headmaster at Shrewsbury School (1798–1836), called it “more fit for farm boys and labourers than for young gentlemen”.[41] However, he did eventually submit and provide a football pitch to keep the game within the school boundary — through the imposition of limits, ‘football’ was slowly becoming defined.[42] Gradually, masters eased their stance on football. Rather than capitulate embarrassingly to increasingly unruly cohorts of juveniles who were unafraid to wage “continuous warfare against adult government”, masters, such as Thomas Arnold, found sport useful for instilling discipline and morality.[43] The provision of spaces for organised games deterred boys from roaming the countryside and causing havoc in the area.

Eventually, sport “ceased to be a means to a disciplinary end and became and end in itself” and panegyrics of athleticism and competition “came to dominate the whole system of élite education”.[44] This cultural change also had spatial impacts on schools. Harrow, for example, spent enormous sums of money on expanding its grounds “from 8 acres at [the beginning of the 19th Century] to 146 in 1900”.[45] Football was nevertheless a ‘local’ affair throughout most of the 19th century, and when students from schools with different local rules met at University, conflicts arose when deciding which rules to adopt; boys from Rugby, “where handling of the ball was permitted”, disputed with Etonions and Harrovians.[46] Interlocution and compromise were necessary to prevent games from becoming restricted to factional contests between alumni of the same school, with each boy well-stocked with his own local communicative currency. Gradually, though not without resistance, more commonly-accepted rules were adopted. The Football Association was formed by a collective of old-boy groups in London as a means of agreeing “the basis upon which they could play each other.”[47] Throughout Holt’s detailed genealogy of the ‘development’ of football in Sport and the British, one can trace a strain of Enlightenment thought, in which ‘football’, in its contemporary usage, is treated as a coherent and rigidised totality, gradually illuminated following centuries of innovations — a story of progress and refinement, from schoolboy barbarism to the beautiful game which deserves to be brought to 60% of the planet, regardless of the local traditions that may be impacted by its expansionist aims.

However, I would argue that this genealogy does not necessarily show progress, but merely the establishment of limits — limits which allowed for football’s commodification, in turn ascribing it with an illusory sense of totalizing coherence. In other words, the “definability” of ‘football’, which, as Kennedy notes is required for commoditisation, had begun to take shape.[48] Kennedy also explains that football’s codification opened the door to football becoming a “spectator sport in the contemporary sense of the word.”[49] A standard set of rules allowed people in disparate places to “recognize they were watching a game that others were watching elsewhere”; this transformed it into a “communicative currency” which was increasingly accepted and exported globally.[50]

Furthermore, the temporality of football altered. Leagues and competitions involved “objectives that were increasingly long-term,” more so than winning a match for the sake of a local community’s honour.[51] This change in temporality from the immediacy of attempting to win a particular game, to the strategic and durational objectives of winning a campaign, attracted more committed and invested support from local fans. The fact that a competition could be re-run annually made possible “the looping temporality of supporters’ desire.”[52] Kennedy argues that football fandom shares in the modernist aesthetic of the ephemeral; “the moment a which victory is sealed is simultaneously the one at which it begins to recede into the past.”[53] Thus fans’ happiness persists in a state of dialectical tension with anxiety; “any sense of completion which the game affords is shadowed by the awareness that this sense is illusory and contingent.”[54] If a team loses there is always another opportunity for recovery; if a team wins there is always the threat that victory will be sullied by the next game, thus fortifying the motive for on-going support.

The increased emotional, and sustained, investment in a local team’s fortunes, coupled with the standardisation of football which allowed for it to be exported further afield, made football attractive to the interests of capital. After all, there was a readymade group of customers, and, while many football clubs developed from associations of old-boys, workers or “other communitarian structures”, it took very little time for teams to fall into the hands of businessmen.”[55] Indeed, the ownership of football clubs generally resembles a “scale model of capitalism” as Marx saw it.[56] By “predictably and repeatedly” going to watch a club, they lend it an identity:

which exceeds that constituted by those, namely the players, implicated by the match. This identity, this thing, which is now more than group of people playing a game, becomes a product, a commodity made so by none other than the people who buy it [57]

This explains why there is now so often a dialectical tension between fans and owners, which usually erupts when a team’s performances are below par, and which often overspills into protest from fans against owners whose interest in the club usually consists, whether partially or solely, in using the local team as a site to grow brands, expand into foreign markets, and ultimately, generate profit. As Kennedy notes, owners use clubs as “instruments of civic and commercial leverage”, “concentrations of material stuff awaiting asset-stripping”, “objects of juvenile fantasy”, “sources of wealth from television and merchandise” and “political laundrettes.”[58] However, such explicit commoditisation of ‘the local’, which for many fans constitutes key signifiers of identity, local history, tradition and kinship, leads to mobilisations of resistance and protest.

Newcastle United is a perfect example of the antagonistic disconnect between football fandom and ownership. Coincidentally, Newcastle United’s players walk out to the pitch to Mark Knofler’s ‘Going Home’, from the film Local Hero, a discussion of which opens Dirlik’s essay.[59] Dirlik claims Local Hero indicates an emergence of the “romantic nostalgia” for “the local.”[60] This communal nostalgia is palpable among Newcastle fans, for whom Newcastle United is the only professional football club to support in the city, and whose owner is Mike Ashley, CEO of the “pile-high-and-sell-cheap” retail firm Sports Direct.[61] Ashley has ostensibly turned the ground into an advert for his own personal business empire, even re-naming St James’ Park “The Sports Direct Arena” in 2011. His managerial objectives, such as margin-oriented mass-redundancies and asset stripping, appear to be taken with the “unadulterated objective of aggravating the supporters … reminding them that the club is not a spiritual institution but just one more thing to be melted into air.”[62] Fans have reacted by boycotting matches, organising protests outside his offices, and signalling their displeasure on the terraces and online in the hope that he will sell. They feel alienated; “he’s emptied the club of … hope; he does the bare minimum … investing in absolutely nothing.”[63] Yet the club cannot change hands until Ashley agrees a price with a buyer which renders his tenure profitable. Fans desperately want a new owner, but ultimately, such desires capitulate to the very logic of global capitalism which could place another equally profit-motivated owner at the helm. The local here is a sight of powerlessness, seeking refuge in communal solidarity, but ultimately worked over by capital’s commitment to profit.

In contrast, one should look at a team from the same league currently outperforming expectations. Liverpool, owned by USA sports company FSG[64], currently sit atop the Premier league and I believe we can see within their fandom just one example of what I call a ‘fetishisation of the local’. In May 2019, Liverpool won the Champion’s League, Europe’s most prestigious club tournament. Trent Alexander-Arnold, a ‘local lad’ from Liverpool’s suburbs was just 20 years old. He had risen through the ranks of Liverpool’s extensive academy since being scouted, aged 6. Interviewed immediately after the game he said, “I’m just a normal lad from Liverpool whose dream has just come true.” This quotation has now been immortalised in a mural painted on a property on Anfield Road. Visiting it for the first time he said:

I was once that kid in a Gerrard or Carragher shirt. They were the players who were the local ones … the ones who made me feel … anything can happen. It wasn’t the players coming in, but the lads who said they were just normal lads in Liverpool[65]

Alexander-Arnold alludes to the very different pressure placed on players who grew up locally to the clubs they now represent. A recent profile in The Times makes clear: “family, city, academy; every kid on a Liverpool street, Scousers whatever their background and race: he’s conscious … that he carries them all”[66] Fans on the terraces chant: “He’s Alexander-Arnold, the Scouser in our team.” At first glance this appears simply as local solidarity, and undoubtedly there are elements of this at play, but I think the increased pressure placed on, and pleasure taken in, the success of ‘local lads’ necessarily involves a disavowal of football teams’ increased internationality. As mentioned above, players function as human capital, exchanged between clubs internationally. However, Alexander-Arnold “has his heart set on playing at Anfield for the rest of his career.”[67] Thus, to celebrate this local, academy-grown player, not purchased from another team, and who has pledged to retire at Liverpool, is the celebration of player who exists extrinsic from ‘the market’.

Yet within this celebration lies the tacit recognition, and presumed disapproval, of the mercantile and ‘non-local’ identity of literally every other player in Liverpool’s team. This disapproval, must be disavowed, however, for players and fans ‘belong’ to the same club. Failing to show solidarity inevitably leads to tensions which can negatively impact on a team’s performance, in which both players and fans are invested, albeit differently. The ‘local’ player is thus fetishised among the fans precisely because he provides the opportunity to disavow the recognition that their ‘local club’ is penetrated by ‘the Global’. This is a subtler instance in which ‘the local’, despite appearing to mobilise in local solidarity, actually capitulates to ‘the Global.’

Perhaps a route out of the seemingly inescapable homogenizing effects of global capitalism within football, which treats clubs, fandoms, players, school playgrounds, and indigenous “reservations” as potential sites of capitalist exploitation, can be found through what Dirlik might call a ‘postmodern’ reading of football. This may lay the groundwork for possibilities of creating ‘alternate public spheres’ within football which recognise its heterogeneities and attempt to salvage it as a site of ‘local’ communal kinship, extricated from global capitalism. Football as a concept is as abstract a concept as capital, but, unsurprisingly given its global ubiquity and cultural pervasiveness, it is uncommon, outside academic spheres, for it to be engaged with critically. The moment a word requires no further clarification is precisely the moment further interrogation becomes essential, to unpack the ideological work at play in the presumption of its stability. Ideology is an intensely contested concept and I do not wish to become embroiled in a conceptual minefield.[68] My usage here is loosely aligned with the ‘tradition’ emerging from the European Avant Garde in the 1970s. Terry Eagleton summarises ideology usefully within this tradition as:

a matter of “fixing” the otherwise inexhaustible process of signification around certain dominant signifiers, with which the individual subject can then identify. Language itself is infinitely productive; but this incessant productivity can be artificially arrested into ‘closure’ — into the sealed world of ideological stability, which repels the disruptive, decentred forces of language in the name of an imaginative unity[69]

Thus, any treatment of ‘football’ as a static and stable concept constitutes merely the subject’s futile attempt to suture the cleavage between an incessantly mobile and decentred language and the ineffable ‘truth’ to which it purports to correspond. If the most commonly understood meaning of ‘football’ treats it as a game with a specific set of rules, then this is problematised by almost every playground kickabout which contravenes these ‘rules’: the number of players, its duration, the pitch size, the condition of the ball. Yet, every child asked what game they are playing would respond: “football”. The meaning of ‘football’ is contingent on the subject’s engagement with it in a particular moment. Kennedy points out that ‘Football’, “lacks intrinsic meaning”, it “means nothing whatsoever in its own right” making it “the ideal vehicle for any number of superimposed meanings”.[70] A key paradox of football is that its heterogeneity, the multifariousness and continuous reworking of it significations, has been enabled by the homogenising effects of its commodification. It is the treatment of football as if it pertains to a universalizing totality which allows for a reterritorialising global capitalism’ to manipulate the ‘local’ to its own ends.

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Let us return to Nicaragua. Sporting my new Bayern Munich top, I watch the final game between La Grecia (Borussia Dortmund), a village of approximately 50 dwellings, and San Juan de Limay (Real Madrid), by far the largest community represented with a population of around 4,000. There is a flurry of activity at the sides of the pitch. A dozen spectators assist some of the players in scraping away the chalk markings while two ‘officials’ push their wheel line-markers; the goals and corner flags are lifted and dragged in, redefining the parameters of the pitch. I must look confused because a friend explains that La Grecia are only able to field nine players this week; when this happens, teams agree to match their number of players and reduce the size of the pitch accordingly. “Es lo justo”; “it’s only fair.” This strikes me as refreshing. Having played competitive Saturday cricket throughout my youth, I know being unable to field the correct number of players almost certainly meant being on the receiving end of a thrashing, and an unpleasant waste of a Saturday for all involved. If this happened often enough, low morale might cause players to join neighbouring clubs, travelling further to games if it meant the chance to play on more competitive terms. Occasionally clubs would withdraw from leagues and perfectly functional, often beautiful, pitches would be deprived of their local team for a year, or until there was enough interest from prospective players to reform.

In redefining the parameters of the game, I believe the members of this community illuminated four instructive things. Firstly, that football heterogeneous and malleable; standardisation is effective only in so far as it establishes a communicative currency. A rigidised commitment to a globally homogenised football would have created a sense of unfairness and injustice among the community. Secondly, dismantling standardised and homogenised modes of practice does not imply regression; the game did not capitulate to ‘mob football’ but was rather temporarily modified to take into consideration the particular needs of the community at a particular time. Thirdly, extrication from competitive structures can shield from an anxious modern subjectivity of ‘looping temporality’ which incentivises sustained competitive emotional investment, which in turn can create sights of antagonism. Finally, the local should not be site of refuge, but of exploration, uninhibited by the shackles of global homogenisation — a site in which local people can recognise their history as one of cultural negotiation, hybridity and heterogeneity, and which also allows for new local traditions and modes of practice continuously to emerge.

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Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1996)

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming
(London: Verso, 2016)

Aravena, Oscar Catalán, ‘A Decade of Structural Adjustment in Nicaragua: An Assessment’,
International Journal of Political Economy, 30:1 (2000), pp. 55–71.

Brennan, Andrew, “European Soccer has an Inflationary Bubble that will Eventually Burst”,
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[1] Catalán Aravena ‘A Decade of Structural Adjustment in Nicaragua: An Assessment’,International Journal of Political Economy, 30:1 (2000), pp. 55–71. (p.63)

[2] Arif Dirlik. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998) (p.90)

[3] Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham and London:Duke UP, 1995) p.1

[4] Dirlik p.86

[5] David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) p. 12

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Harvey p.18

[9] Dirlik p.86.

[10] Dirlik p 86.

[11] Dirlik p.86

[12] Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialectics. trans. by E. B. Ashton. (London: Routledge, 1996) p. 367

[13] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. trans. by John Cumming (London: Routledge, 2016) p.3.

[14] Dirlik p.87

[15] Dirlik p 87

[16] Wilson and Dissanayake p. 3

[17] Dirlik p 87

[18] Dirlik p.87

[19] Dirlik p.96

[20] Dirlik p.96

[21] Wilson and Dissanayake p. 8

[22] Colin Drury. “From League Two to UN Ambassadors: How a Tiny English Football Club is Leading the World’s Climate Change Fight”, The Independent, 2019 https://www.ind ependent.co.uk/news/ uk/home-news/forest-green-rovers-dale-vince-carbon-neutral-sports-club-vegan-ecotricity-a9030556.html> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[23] Samantha Lewis “Matildas’ Equal Pay Deal is Part of a Global Shift Recognising Value of Women in Sport”, The Guardian, 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/football/ 2019/nov/06/matildas-equal-pay-deal-is-part-of-a-global-shift-recognising-value-of-women-in-sport [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[24] Kashmira Gander. “Native Brazilians Protest Against Fifa World Cup 2014”, The Independent, 2014 <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/native-brazilians-protest-against-fifa-world-cup-2014-9457139.html> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[25] FIFA Activity Report, 2018 <https://resources.fifa.com/image/upload/yjibhdqzfwwz5onqszo0.pdf> [Accessed 12 January 2020] p.4

[26] “Who We Are” FIFA, 2020 <https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/explore-fifa.html> [Accessed 12 January 2020] No Author. n.p.

[27] Ibid.

[28] “FIFA Corruption Crisis: Key Questions Answered” BBC News, 2015 <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32897066> [Accessed 12 January 2020] No author. n.p.

[29] Andrew Brennan. “European Soccer has an Inflationary Bubble that will Eventually Burst”, Forbes, 2017 < https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewbrennan/2017/09/11/european-football-has-entered-an-inflationary-bubble-and-it-will-burst/#3d9eb9f01188> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[30] Eleanor Busby. “Schools Being Forced to Sell Off Hundreds of Playing Fields ‘To Make Ends Meet’” The Independent, 2019 < https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/schools-playing-fields-funding-austerity-gmb-union-department-education-a8853121.html> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[31] Dirlik p. 90

[32] Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism (Alresford: Zero Books, 2009) p. 2

[33] Joe Kennedy. Games Without Frontiers (London: Repeater, 2016) p. 89

[34] Kennedy p. 34

[35] Kennedy pp. 33–34

[36] Wilson and Dissanayake p. 8

[37]Gareth Butterfield. “The THREE Ashbourne Stores That Have Announced Closure in the Space of a Week”, Derbyshire Telegraph <https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/three- shops-closing-in-ashbourne-2738861> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[38] Wilson and Dissanayake p. 8

[39] Richard Holt. Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993) p. 77

[40] Ibid.

[41] Holt p. 75

[42] Ibid.

[43] Holt pp. 78–80

[44] Holt p. 81

[45] Holt p. 82

[46] Ibid.

[47] Holt p. 85

[48] Kennedy p. 89

[49] Kennedy p. 34

[50] Ibid.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Kennedy p.35

[53] Ibid.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Kennedy p. 36

[56] Ibid.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Kennedy p. 7

[59] Kennedy p. 85

[60] Dirlik p. 84

[61] Kennedy p. 83

[62] Kennedy p. 84

[63] India Rakusen. “In Black and White Why Newcastle United Want Mike Ashley Out: Podcast”
The Guardian, 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2019/aug/09/in-black-and-white-why-newcastle-united-fans-want-mike-ashley-out-podcast [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[64] Fenway Sports Group, LLC

[65] Emilia Bona. “Trent Alexander-Arnold’s Powerful Message to Liverpool Fans About Anfield Mural”, Liverpool Echo, 2019 < https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/trent-alexander-arnolds-powerful-message-16721628> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[66] Jonathan Norcroft. “Trent Alexander-Arnold: Liverpool’s Local Hero”, The Times, 2019
< https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trent-alexander-arnold-liverpools-local-hero-bkfvcd90> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[67] Alex Smith. “Trent Alexander-Arnold Makes Declaration on Liverpool Future”, The Mirror, 2019< https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/trent-alexander-arnold-makes-declaration-21180351> [Accessed 12 January 2020] n.p.

[68] Louis Althusser, György Lukásc, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek are just some of the radically divergent left-wing thinkers associated with its analysis in the 20th and 21st centuries.

[69] Terry Eagleton. Ideology: An Introduction (London:Verso, 1994) pp. 196–197

[70] Kennedy p. 6