CHAPTER 16

“Another World (Cup) Is Possible!”:

Twenty Theses About Modern Football

Tim Walters

The motivation for this analysis is twofold. First, it is my contention that

the governance of the top tier of elite men’s professional football is today
in an unprecedented state of disrepair, moral bankruptcy and public disre-
pute such that hitherto unimaginable transformations have become pos-
sible. Second, this chapter is interested in addressing what I take to be a
significant lack in the growing body of critical writing about football. In
his “Introduction” to Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French econo-
mist Thomas Piketty explains that the genesis of his sweeping analysis of
inequality is a belief that historical debates among economists were a “dia-
logue of the deaf”1 by virtue of the fact that “research on the distribution

Earlier versions of parts of this essay were presented on the “Philosophy of

Football” panel at the Soccer as the Beautiful Game Conference (“What Is
Football For? A Modest Proposal,” Hofstra University, Long Island, NY, April
10, 2014) and as a keynote address at Manchester Metropolitan University’s
Football and Communities of Resistance Conference [“‘Another World (Cup)
is Possible!’: Brazil 2014 and the Birth of Occupy Football,” Manchester,
UK. June 12, 2014]. I would like to acknowledge the many positive
contributions of the participants at these events for their valuable feedback,
which has changed the shape of this work.

T. Walters (*)
Department of English, Okanagan College, Kelowna, BC, Canada

© Hofstra University 2017 315

B. Elsey, S. Pugliese (eds.), Football and the Boundaries of History,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-349-95006-5_16
316 T. WALTERS

of wealth was for a long time based on a relatively limited set of firmly
established facts together with a wide variety of purely theoretical specula-
tions.”2 He explains how his discipline has been historically blighted by
an excess of deeply held theoretical views, all of which were based on very
little or no hard evidence or concrete analysis grounded in data. More
so than his conclusions or diagnoses, Piketty’s primary contribution to
our thinking around inequality has been the creation of, and engagement
with, massive data sets within which he looks for larger patterns and the
theories to account for them.
Critical thinking about football has precisely the opposite problem.
It is a field overflowing with up-to-the-minute data, awash with micro-
analyses and carefully researched histories (of players, clubs, leagues,
nations, contests, eras), but a paucity of theory, of broad, unifying
claims. As a growing and resolutely interdisciplinary discipline, it has
yet to produce its own theoretical apparatus. And while football has
been written about fleetingly by various critical theorists from outside
the field—Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Terry
Eagleton, Antonio Gramsci and so forth—thinking about football has
remained largely non-dialectical, episodic and unsystematic, which is to
say “football needs theory.” Here, and elsewhere, I advocate for the
particular suitability of the work of Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek for
this purpose.3 My attempt is to transpose Žižek’s idiosyncratic fusion
of a Marxist critique of political economy with Lacanian psychoanaly-
sis and Hegelian philosophy to the world of football. It’s time that we
start thinking about football more theoretically, and I believe Žižek’s
approach, with its emphasis on the “good old-­fashioned art” of critique
of ideology, insistence upon viewing phenomena in their totality and
conception of the various registers of violence, provides a model with
which to map out and begin to develop this analysis. The 20 theses that
follow are an attempt to begin this theoretical work, to unify the analy-
ses done elsewhere into a broader set of shared conclusions about the
state of the game today.

The Relationship Between Football and

Capital Has Changed
It has become commonplace to say it, but it bears repeating, as it has
become broadly determinative of the entire orientation of the game
today: modern football has become, and is becoming, more and more
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 317

intertwined with modern (transnational, corporate) Capital in ways we

do and do not understand, some, but not all of which, are new. While
business has been involved with football almost since its formation as an
organized endeavor, there is more money coursing through more parts of
the elite game today from, and to, a greater variety of stakeholders than at
any other point in the history of football or indeed of any other sport, and
this quickly growing influence is an escalating concern, as it should be. All
analyses of the game today ought to take as their starting point the many
effects and implications of this unprecedented influence.

This Changed Relationship Has Generated More

Negative Than Positive Effects
Football has, and we as its supporters have, reaped certain spectacular
benefits from this ongoing drawing together and tangling up of Capital
and football. As a result of its huge commercial appeal, for instance, its
international accessibility has improved enormously, so that now anyone
with a high-speed Internet connection or a cellphone signal can watch
just about any live game they choose regardless of how far away from
the field of play they might physically be. I can watch my hometown
team—Middlesbrough FC—play every week, despite living more than
7000 kilometers from the Riverside Stadium, which would have been
unimaginable even 20 years ago. There are many other benefits that have
also been well documented. Attending a match is for the most part a safer
and more welcoming experience than was the case a few decades ago.
More attention is generally paid to the physical well-being of players than
has historically been the case. The racism, homophobia and misogyny
that were once endemic to football are no longer as prevalent or as per-
vasive as they once were, although much remains to be done in each of
these areas.
However, regardless of its benefits, those elements of modern football
that are most offensive to most people are most often direct or indirect
functions of its specific relationship(s) with Capital. The list is too long
and too familiar to fully enumerate here, but we might begin with obscene
player salaries; outrageous ticket prices; the myriad encroachments of com-
mercialization into the game through omnipresent branding, merchan-
dising, synergistic ventures and so on, and the attendant shift from the
football fan to the football consumer; the subordination of the game and
318 T. WALTERS

its cheapening in countless ways to the spectacular demands of television

and other media; the delocalizing effects on the game in the post-Bosman
era; the use of football as a greenwashing tool for energy giants (Gazprom,
Azerbaijan, Qatar, etc.); the growing chasm between the game’s rich and
poor (within and between leagues and countries) and related diminish-
ment of competitive balance; the remarkable financial precariousness and
unsustainability of the modern game; the use of billions in public funds
to build private stadia and subsidize mega-events that are too expensive
for many of the general public to attend and which appear to primarily
benefit global corporations and international footballing authorities; the
growing influence of agents and third-party owners; the upscaling and
making generic of football stadia and surrounding areas, including forced
relocations; and so on.

Most People Who Are Interested in Football

Believe the Effects of Capital Are Corrosive
Which is to say that, on balance, a good many people now think that the
enterprise of football has been made comprehensively worse by Capital,
and those people are right to think this. There is now, somewhat sur-
prisingly, a widespread shared understanding that recent increases in the
rate and breadth of the capitalization of football have come at a real cost,
and the prevalence and intensity of this attitude is a new development
in the popular discourse about football. The prevailing public attitude
toward the increasing monetization of the game is now characterized by
weariness, disgust and bewilderment, which now underscores most media
engagement with the football business. This is a hugely important percep-
tual shift.

In Myriad Ways, Modern Football Is a Symptom

of Modern Capitalism, and Should Be Treated
as Such

Those theoretical and critical apparatus that can help us better understand
the political economy of the world at large can and ought to be used to
help us understand the crises besetting modern football; or, the diagno-
ses and solutions to the problems of the one are inextricably related to
the other, and often revealingly so. If modern football is symptomatic of
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 319

modern capitalism, ways of addressing the one might also be used to

address the other. Obviously, this is not meant to minimize the important
ways in which football is unlike other sectors of the economy or culture,
nor is it to suggest that all of the myriad ways of arranging football are
uniform. However, while acknowledging the particular internal logics of
different systems, my analysis operates from the position that since the
problems of football are primarily functions of the core features of its cur-
rent political economy, then the solutions to its problems might be the
same as those which address those problems in similarly blighted spheres.

Modern Football Is Useful, and Maybe Even

Necessary, to Modern Capitalism
Indeed, as our most popular source of shared pleasure as a species, as a
privileged cultural field within which ideas of the acceptability of vast eco-
nomic inequality, the determinative capacities of wealth and the omnipres-
ence of commerce are normalized, it may be not far from indispensable to
it lately, but this seems to be changing. Much has been written about this
relationship, from Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” to Marcuse’s “repressive
desublimation” and beyond. As Marxist critic and World Cup abolition-
ist Terry Eagleton argued on the eve of the 2010 tournament in South
Africa:

The World Cup is another setback to any radical change…If every rightwing
think-tank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political
injustice and to compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in
each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the prob-
lems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle
between them, football is several light years ahead.4

I dare say his position would be at least a little different today, when foot-
ball has been made by many activists and concerned citizens into a tool to
bring the world’s attention to political and economic injustices in Brazil,
Russia and Qatar in the wake of the tournament in South Africa, where
these issues began to be broadly considered in mainstream media for the
first time. The World Cup and football more generally might still be bread
and circuses, a useful distraction to the masses, but the notion of football’s
utility to capitalism is becoming considerably less straightforward.
320 T. WALTERS

Public Feeling About the Political Economy

of Football Has Changed

Even before the latest FIFA scandal, popular thinking around the World
Cup in particular had fundamentally changed in the years since the
Confederation’s Cup protests in Brazil in 2013, so that the mainstream
media discourse surrounding the tournament now routinely focuses on
corruption, exploitation, FIFA’s internecine shenanigans and other alarm-
ing symptoms of our current system. In the lead-ups to these tournaments,
coverage routinely spotlights stories about FIFA corruption, often-sympa-
thetic coverage of protestors in Brazil and elsewhere, articles about Qatari
labor standards and so forth. The months before the 2014 finals in Brazil
were marked by countless articles in the popular international press call-
ing for the dismantling of FIFA, and while the ostensible motivation for
them was the contemporaneous discovery of evidence of vote buying for
the Qatari World Cup, the reason for their appearance in plain view is
the massive public interest in the tournament in Brazil, and the work of
the protestors in that country in the wake of the Confederation Cup a
year prior. The events of the summer of 2013 have helped to familiarize
people with the idea of thinking about the politics and socioeconomics of
football tournaments, something that had barely registered in the public
consciousness up to this point. While the currently unprecedented degree
of media interest will wane once the FIFA scandal is resolved, in important
ways these crises have led to the creation of a new normal in terms of cov-
erage of the game and have permanently reoriented the popular discourse
surrounding it.

FIFA and The(ir) World Cups

Have Made This Inevitable
In part, this shift is an indirect consequence of FIFA’s since-abandoned
continental hosting rotation system that led to their decision to host the
2010 finals in South Africa, which was exacerbated by the awarding of
the 2022 tournament to Qatar, but which really took off in the wake of
the 2013 protests in Brazil. To most people, there is something recog-
nizably obscene, indeed murderous, about the taxpayers of developing
nations spending billions of their citizen’s money building white elephants
and erecting a massive security infrastructure while a Swiss non-profit and
a select group of multinational corporations walks away with the profits
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 321

(£3–5 billion per tournament, tax free). This is not British footballing rac-
ism, as has regularly been suggested by President Blatter to deflect ongo-
ing criticism on this front, nor is it nostalgic, imperialist Eurocentrism.
Obviously, an argument can be made for giving developing countries in
overlooked regions a chance to host the finals, as it is the World Cup after
all.5 However, no argument can be made for continuing to finance and
run World Cups in these regions according to the same formulas used for
Germany, France, Japan/South Korea and the USA, whose infrastructure
(sporting and otherwise) is such that they didn’t really need to build much
of anything. In such a context, FIFA walking away from host nations with
billions in broadcasting, marketing and ticketing revenue makes a certain
kind of sense, or at least doesn’t offend. Unfortunately, but in no way sur-
prisingly, it seems that this is a conversation FIFA’s Executive Committee
never really had when they adopted this policy, to the massive detriment
of bidding nations.6 Accordingly, in 2010, South Africa spent around $4.7
billion to host, and received an estimated $500 million in economic ben-
efits. Brazil spent $17 billion. Russia is currently predicting that it will
invest $19 billion in spending related to the 2018 tournament, although
only two years ago they were predicting a $9 billion spend, so it’s very dif-
ficult to estimate what the final costs will be. In 2022, the Qatari govern-
ment will shatter all records related to public spending on a mega-event
with its proposed $120 billion World Cup, which is an outlay of approxi-
mately one million dollars for every citizen. Russia can arguably afford this
kind of profligacy, and Qatar can, if anyone can, but the decision to grant
these nations the opportunity to host was broadly recognized as being
self-evidently problematic for a variety of other reasons: both countries
lack a well-developed footballing culture and both have appalling human
rights records and practices that directly contravene FIFA’s own mission
statement7 and both appear to have absolutely nothing other than crude
financial claims to make as regards their being best suited to host an event
of this sort.

2013–2022: An Opportunity for Us to Get Back

to Basics: What Is Football for?

Accordingly, a rare window of opportunity has opened within which to

offer a new answer to the most fundamental question about the beauti-
ful game as a growing economic and cultural force in the world: what is
322 T. WALTERS

football for? Obviously, for most people it is played and watched and
debated largely for its own sake, for the pleasure it affords, for the thrill of
play and the community and excitement it can bring into being. However,
what is considerably less clear is what it is and will be for at the very highest
levels of play. In only a few decades, contests like the World Cup, UEFA
Champion’s League and the British Premier League have been trans-
formed into multibillion dollar enterprises that capitalize on the attention
of billions of viewers, and we need to decide what best to do about this
development. The aforementioned recent hosting decisions, and FIFA’s
farcical and corrupt business practices more generally, have inadvertently
generated the displays of resistance we have seen in Brazil for at least a few
more years, which will no doubt be followed by similar actions ahead of
the next two tournaments. Accordingly, FIFA and its critics have opened
up a window of opportunity—roughly between 2013 and the 2022 tour-
nament in Qatar—a rupture in the sleek edifice of the big money game,
within which the near and long-term future of football will largely be
determined and shaped. This is the era in which it will be decided what
football will be for in the twenty-first century, which ought to be the most
important and foundational question regarding the game today, and the
one we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking and talking about, pos-
sibly because it has long seemed a settled issue. It isn’t.

FIFA Have Built the Stage for Occupy Football

Largely as a result of FIFA’s policies, their choice of hosting locales and
the various injustices associated with bringing World Cups into being, the
unseemly inequities of the big money game have become foregrounded
in public thinking about football. Mega-events provide a massive micro-
phone to the world through which otherwise ignored critical voices, social
movements and activist groups can get their message out globally, and
the international media now routinely latch on to these protests despite
FIFA and the host government’s best attempts to stifle and marginalize
this dissent. It is the reason for the huge media interest in Brazilian social
issues in the summers of 2013 and 2014, as well as the reason why many
people around the world know anything about the conditions faced daily
by migrant workers in the Middle East. The monstrous Qatari kafala sys-
tem might not yet be a household term, but it will be by 2022 unless
something dramatically changes, which all indications suggest it will not.
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 323

It’s Critical That We Make the Most of This

Opportunity (For a Change)
For those of us who care about transforming football or (its relationship
to) Capital, this window is an exceptionally rare opportunity that must be
seized, and seized properly, because it is only because of a combination
of the grossest managerial incompetence and absolute ethical bankruptcy
(primarily but not exclusively) on the part of FIFA that it has appeared
in the first place. Unlike the Right, who do their best work in moments
like these, the Left has a grand tradition of completely failing to take
advantage of rare and unexpected opportunities for revolutionary sys-
temic transformation (consider, for instance, our largely unchanged global
financial system in the wake of the 2008 crash) and we need to get it just
right this time.8 How might this happen? What could and should world
football be for if not this?

Occupy Football Must Be “Infinitely Demanding”

Those of us who believe football requires not just minor reforms or changes
in personnel but sweeping revolutionary transformation should look to
the streets, and to what Simon Critchley calls the “infinite demands”9 of
the protestors in Brazil. The activism we saw there is most akin to that
of the Occupy movement, with which it shares a broad-based distrust/
rejection of Capital and those charged with administering it, a linking of
specific, local issues with broader, ethical commitments, a willingness to
form provisional coalitions with often unlikely allies in order to demon-
strate solidarity against an oppressive system and an insistence on a whole-
sale transition from whatever this strange neoliberal beast we have now is
to a political economy based on fairness, dignity and equality.

We Should Refocus Our Analysis/Critique

to Emphasize Economic Institutions and Systems.
Or: It’s the Economy, Stupid!
Collectively, we need to stop focusing on individuals rather than systems,
stop focusing primarily on structures of governance rather than economic
ones, and not let our obsession with covert corruption blind us to those
overt forms of corruption which are both much more ubiquitous and
324 T. WALTERS

more corrosive than their shadowy counterpart. None of this is to say

that FIFA is not a staggeringly corrupt organization, or that Sepp Blatter
or Jack Warner or Mohamed Bin Hammam or Chuck Blazer or whom-
ever the next FIFA Executive Committee member to be found guilty of
stealing the wealth of the game is not a ruinously corrupt and self-serving
individual. It is and they are. Although there is value in this work—it
is the attention given to these spectacular moments that allows more
disruptive questions to be foregrounded—as with the political economy
of the world in general, the focus on it to the exclusion of broader and
more uncomfortable analyses is functionally diversionary and ultimately
conservative (Fig. 16.1).
Then what? In both the world at large and the world of football, the
problem is ultimately economic/capitalist rather than political/demo-
cratic. Žižek is one of a growing group of influential radical contemporary
theorists (Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, Frederic Jameson, etc.) for whom
modern global Capitalism is fundamentally unable to alleviate the inequi-
ties, shocks, and crises it generates any longer. The ur-problem of modern
football is not a problem of governance, or of accountability, or of Asian

Fig. 16.1 FIFA President Sepp Blatter showered with American dollars by
British comedian Lee Nelson at a press conference in Zurich, July 2015 (Photo
credit: Arnd Weigmann/Reuters)
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 325

gambling syndicates or doping or FIFA or the Premier League or Sky

(although all of these things are symptoms): it is modern capitalism, and
this is what needs changing if we are to change the game for good. We
have a tendency to focus on criminality, covert corruption and theft, rather
than analyzing a system that is overtly corrupt. The Bin Hammam scan-
dal is emblematic of this: while it is now clear that he distributed bribes
in order to secure the tournament, Qatar’s only real argument to make
for its suitability to host the tournament in the first place was precisely
its willingness to spend the most money to do so. The “corruption” was
simply the obscene informal extension of the logic of the formal bidding
process itself.
Examples of this useful misdirection abound in writing about the
game. An analogous misplacing of emphasis, of not seeing the forest for
the trees, is found, for instance, in those who argue10 that the greatest
threat to the very future of professional football comes from Asian gam-
bling syndicates, whose crime is trying to use money to unduly influence
the outcome of games. While this is a problem, to be sure, the idea that
black market gambling is the primary way in which money is inappropri-
ately determinative of the outcome of games is rather to miss that point.
Legal money has a much greater influence than illegal money ever will.
As Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski demonstrate in Soccernomics11, in
the top leagues, how much a team spends on players “explained a massive
92 percent of variation of their league position.”12 If the concern is that
money is tilting the playing field such that it determines the outcome
of individual games and entire seasons, illegal match fixing ought to be
among the very least of our worries. Financial doping is considerably
more influential than actual doping or match fixing. If you want the
inside scoop on how your team will do this weekend or this year, the
most reliable indicator is the size of its wage bill, which is predictive of
league position more than nine times out of ten.13 That this is deemed
more or less acceptable and illegal gambling is deemed an existential
crisis to the idea of fair competition that is prerequisite to the appeal of
the sport is an indication of the extent to which we have accepted the
wholesale submission of football to the logic of free markets. Again, the
problems besetting football have to do with its economic structure and
the belief among its allegedly “apolitical” administrators that it should
be bent in every way to align it more smoothly with the demands and
logic of Capital.
326 T. WALTERS

Democracy Cannot Save the World

(of Football) from Capital
Given some of the characters who presently run the game, we who take
football seriously spend a lot of time and energy talking critically about
governance reform and the politics of the sport. However, and perhaps
troubling to our liberal sensibilities, the idea of democracy being the
mechanism by which the worst excesses of Capital are restrained seems
less convincing than ever, and compelling arguments can be made that
both the world of football and the world at large are in some ways blighted
by a surplus of a certain kind of democracy, rather than by a paucity of
it. Greater democracy cannot revolutionize or even meaningfully reform
FIFA or football any more than it can the political economy at large, since
lots of people either don’t care about or actually quite like systems that
produce inequality, even when they’re on the business end of them.
FIFA is a particularly instructive organization here, since it is precisely
its democratic structure—with each confederation and national associa-
tion possessing equal representation and voting rights, regardless of its
population size or footballing power—that is largely responsible for the
majority of the problems that beset it. The idea of “one nation, one vote”
seems fundamentally admirable in theory, but in practice it has directly
enabled some of the organization’s most enduring problems. Among the
many reasons why this is the case is the lengthy recent record of smaller
nations’ greater susceptibility to offers of bribes and other forms of cor-
ruption than larger and better-resourced nations. While most people who
follow the sport would agree that Russia and Qatar are not the two best
countries in the world to host the World Cup Finals, the decision to allow
them to do so was a democratic one, and if the voting were done again
today, the outcome would likely be the same: Blatter’s lengthy reign and
many of the most contentious decisions made during his tenure were the
result of FIFA’s democratic governance model, not perversions of it.
Democracy isn’t, nor can it be, the solution to these problems. Rather,
our collective faith in the necessary fiction that liberal democracy will serve
as the mechanism that restrains the excesses of Capital is part of the reason
these problems exist in the first place. The problems that beset football are
ultimately not about who is running the show, or how: the problems are
caused by what it’s being run for, and changing that is where we ought to
be directing our critical energies.
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 327

(Football) Capitalism Isn’t Broken: It’s Working

For Žižek, this is one of the grand narratives that sustains our present
socioeconomic order: the notion that current crises generated by capital-
ism are flaws of the system, or breakdowns in its smooth functioning, that
can be fixed by better management.14 As regards world football, I will fol-
low his lead and suggest that they aren’t, and it can’t. Neither Capitalism
nor Football Capitalism is broken–they’re working. Viewed from a certain
angle, world football is in great health. Each World Cup is more popular
and profitable (for some) than the one that came before, and if the audi-
ences and television and commercial sponsorship deals all keep increasing
in size, then what really is the problem? From this perspective, the present
onslaught of sporadically bad press is just a consequence of some trans-
parency and governance issues that can be sorted with some managerial
reforms and personnel changes. This was the position assumed by Sepp
Blatter, for instance, who seemed constantly in a state of genuine bewil-
derment that people could be so fiercely opposed to the changes we have
seen to the game during his tenure, and to a lesser extent it is the position
of the mainstream media also, who typically conclude even scathing cri-
tiques with advocacy for rather superficial changes to football governance
since so much about it seems to be going very well indeed.
If the criteria by which we evaluate the game are financial in nature,
then all is well. Its value is increasing at impressive rates. The final match
between Argentina and Germany will be the first sporting event in his-
tory to be watched by more than 1 billion people, besting the 909.6 mil-
lion who tuned in for the 2010 final.15 During the month of the entire
2014 finals, fans generated 3 billion World Cup-related Facebook interac-
tions and 672 million Twitter messages.16 However, these apparent suc-
cesses would not have been possible without the equally unprecedented
presence of many of the less savory features of this tournament, which
have been well-documented elsewhere.17 Mass evictions, the deaths of
construction workers, the forced relocation of indigenous peoples, the
suppression or gentrification of the favelas, the routinely brutal suppres-
sion of expressions of dissent by an expanded and increasingly milita-
rized Brazilian security apparatus, the forced privatization of public areas
to create FIFA’s corporatized “zones of exclusion,” the overturning of
Brazilian law by a Swiss not-for-profit organization walking away from the
tournament with between $3 and $5 billion in profits while the Brazilian
taxpayers were left with a bill for around $11.63 billion: this is the price
328 T. WALTERS

of running the most successful World Cup in history, and for those in
charge of running football today, it’s obviously a price worth paying. This
is what business as usual looks like, and it’s booming. FIFA’s official self-­
evaluation of the tournament was an impressive 9.25/10.18 Their reve-
nues were the most money they’ve ever made from a single event, until
the next one.

Forget Utopia: Capitalism Cannot Save Us or

Football from the Excesses Caused by Capitalism
Even Marx was in awe of Capitalism’s resilience, its fluid adaptability—
what he called its “self-revolutionizing” character—but it cannot resolve
every problem, and it seems less and less well equipped to solve the most
significant ones it is causing today. I claim, then, following Žižek, that
changing the bidding process and hosting arrangements, or replacing
Blatter as President, or even outright replacing FIFA19 as the body charged
with organizing world football are attractive but ultimately short-termist
solutions whose impact might be to inadvertently sustain the system by
temporarily improving or making it superficially more palatably demo-
cratic or transparent while it continues to rot from within. Contemporary
capitalist football cannot ultimately be saved by more democracy or better
governance processes or the adoption of some quasi-socialist European
model. And, crucially, it cannot keep going as it is today. For Žižek, this
is the true utopian fantasy as regards our present economic system—the
delusional idea is not that Capital cannot be replaced, but rather that it
can keep on going as it is forever. The modern football economy is nothing
if not unsustainable. Despite astonishing flows of capital into the game
in the past generation, more than half of the teams in Europe are losing
money as this incredible wealth has been used primarily to inflate player
salaries and transfer fees to levels that are obscene by any measure. Ticket
prices and television subscription fees continue to increase at rates hugely
out of step with working people’s wages, so the game is becoming increas-
ingly expensive to those audiences upon whom it absolutely depends.
Even the most avowedly capitalist, pro-free-market observers of the game
today have little choice but to acknowledge that it is currently dependent
on unsustainable financial bubbles and not built to endure. Capitalist foot-
ball has no long-term future—the game cannot continue to be run the
way it has been run of late. Then what? What should an Occupy football
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 329

movement be aspiring to from beyond the matrix of Capital? How might

it be made to be for something else?

The Future (of Football) Should Be Communist

Football does not need reforming; it needs revolutionizing. Football
needs to remove itself from the commodifying structures and profit
motives of Capital or, to put it another way, it needs to become for some-
thing else besides money. Until this is the case, it will always be subject to
the same kinds of crises, compromises, misrule and clientelism that beset
it today. With Žižek,20 and with all the usual caveats about not wishing
to repeat the same errors of the past, I will call this alternative vision of
the future communist football, a name chosen both because it signals the
strongest possible rejection of the current capitalist model and because it
makes absolutely central the idea of the commons, to which football must
belong, if anything does. Modern capitalism is ill equipped to deal with
those phenomena that belong to the commons and so the system with
which we replace it must be one fit to purpose, one fit to manage a glob-
ally shared resource. We need a fundamentally different system if we aim
to stop treating the collective resources of football as private property and
the commanding heights of the game itself as an opportunity for actively
recreating as entertainment the same kinds of inequalities that beset the
world beyond the pitch.
This kind of a shift may seem as inconceivable or naïve in the world
of football as it does in the world at large, an imaginative obstacle that
is boundlessly useful to those who would perpetuate the rule of Capital
indefinitely. As Fredric Jameson famously asserted, “[i]t seems to be ­easier
for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and
of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some
weakness of our imaginations.”21 However, it is worth pointing out that
this incapacity to envision a path to a radically different political economy
is a relatively recent development, as is the flooding of money into the
game in the past three decades. Football’s relationship with Capital can
be radically transformed once more. This could happen easily and quickly,
but most importantly: it can happen. There are many different ways in
which football could undergo a process of decapitalization or communi-
zation, so I will end with a brief outline of at least two possible paths by
which this kind of a sweeping transformation might happen.
330 T. WALTERS

A third option, of course, would simply be to do away with the World

Cup, although I see little value in the abolitionist perspective. Aside from
depriving the people of the world of one of the things that makes our
time together here most pleasurable, it also presupposes an “either/or”
dichotomy that seems to me both unimaginative and theoretically unhelp-
ful. Instead, football can be transformed from a symbol of much that is
contemptible in the modern world to something potentially liberatory and
revolutionary, which is more in keeping with the creative nature of the
game itself.

Pulling the Plug on Modern Football?

The first of the two potential general directions in which the game could
move involves a regression to a bygone era: a concerted effort could be
made to deflate the precarious financial bubble that has inflated in and
around the game. World Cups used to be organized quite cheaply, and
could be again. Most of the astronomical spending is new and utterly
unnecessary. In order to sufficiently appreciate these spectacles, do we
need to watch tournaments played in newly erected stadia, many of which
will never be full again and many of which are paid for with public funds?
Do we need the surface-to-air missile installations, drones and small armies
of militarized police forces that have become ubiquitous features of recent
sporting mega-events?
This move is one that could extend across the entire elite game.
Efforts could easily be made to move backward toward a decapitalized
game, which would provide no less pleasure to most people than it does
today, only without the obscene, alienating excesses that seems to many
to diminish its charm. We could gradually reduce player salaries, allow
branding arrangements and corporate partnerships to whither, deflate the
television bubble, move toward the nationalization of football leagues and
teams and so forth.

Football “For the World”?

While the previous proposal has the advantage of simplicity on its side, and
will obviously appeal to nostalgic sentiments about the gradual corruption
of the game—the reversal of which might help purify it—another set of
possibilities exists. Rather than draining the money, and thus its perni-
cious influence(s) from the game, efforts could be made to redirect an
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 331

increasing percentage of the remarkable surplus value the game now gener-
ates to alleviate the kinds of suffering it presently exacerbates. FIFA could
be replaced by a body with minimal organizational responsibilities and a
very narrow mandate, whose raison d’être is to redistribute the income
generated by the world’s love of football to those that need it most, wher-
ever they might be. This may seem far-fetched,22 but if we do not need
a garish FIFA style World Cup spectacle, then very little is required to
organize a tournament that is as good (or better) and as profitable as the
ones we have now. Obviously, FIFA does already redistribute some of its
income to local associations (a minimum of $250,000 annually) and the
federations (each of which get $2.5 million), but in spite of its flowery
self-­aggrandizing statements about doing so much good for the world,
it currently gives only $27 million to development projects, which is slim
compared to the $102 million it gives to its staff and the $36.3 million it
gave out last year in executive bonuses, not to mention its current $1.4
billion in reserves; $27 million is also almost exactly the amount FIFA
recently spent on the production of United Passions, an utterly delusional
“autobiographical” feature film about the rise to power of Sepp Blatter and
his band of “passionate mavericks” to their current position of dominance
over the world’s game—a truly embarrassing public relations exercise.23
For reasons that have not very much to do with football itself, the
upper economic tier of the game has become awash with money. Football
has found itself the spectacular beneficiary of broader economic shifts
related to remarkable advances in communications technology, changes
to corporate models of advertising and branding and, most recently, the
influx of billions of dollars from petro-states into the higher echelons of
the game each year. While one can certainly understand the impulse to
return to a time before money became such a distorting, centrifugal force
in the game, to do so is to miss a chance to permanently reorient the game
in ways that do it credit and which might actually meet FIFA’s current
lofty mandate of existing “For the Game. For the World.”
Contra the previously discussed strategy of aspiring to the recreation
of a less capitalized time, approaches to revolutionizing football in this
particular way would utilize and redirect its newfound wealth rather than
attempting to back away from it. By imposing sensible limits on how the
wealth of football is presently deployed that just about everyone would
agree with, those charged with running the sport would have massive
surpluses that could be made available for redistribution. The money that
could be diverted to international aid agencies, for instance, from even
332 T. WALTERS

one World Cup would be enough to save the lives of tens of millions of
people globally, as well as to vastly improve the lives of millions of people
in host nations. If used for this purpose, FIFA’s current cash reserves
could save the lives of a million people before the 2018 World Cup finals
begin.24
As strange as this proposal may seem given the current hyper-capitalist
state of world football, nothing about this would be particularly difficult
from a practical perspective. It could easily be implemented in a few years
were the will there to make it happen. Indeed, it would be a tremen-
dously popular idea with many of the key stakeholders in the game. Fans
would presumably—rather their spending on tickets and replica shirts and
television subscriptions—contribute something positive and meaningful.
Advertisers and corporate sponsors would appreciate the chance to be
associated with good charitable works rather than endless stories of graft,
greed and corruption. Many of those individuals who are most financially
invested in the sport have done so with a knowledge that doing so will cost
them a small fortune but will benefit their business in other less apparent
ways (free advertising, good publicity, greenwashing and so forth), so a
shift of this sort would benefit them even more than does the current
arrangement. This is what communist football might look like: a mecha-
nism for the eradication of economic inequality.

Football as a Weapon of the Revolution (Again!)

Only a move of this type—one fully away from the acquisitive drives of
global capitalism—can save football in the long term. If there are for-
tunes to be made from Capital, if it is organized around generating profit
as the locus of winning, around competition off the field (in the spheres
of retail, branding, global marketing, synergies, player speculation and
so on) for the product that is on it, then it will always exhibit the same
tendencies it does at present. And so it goes with the rest of the world
as well. An ancillary benefit of this approach is that football is a powerful
teaching tool, and a radical economic shift in its basic orientation may
make similar national and international shifts more comprehensible and
attractive to its billions of fans. If football can help teach us how to be
subjects in a capitalist world—and it has been doing that for quite some
time, among other things—it can and must be reshaped to help us create
a better one.
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 333

These Are the Best of Times;

These Are the Worst of Times…
As a result of the situation of the game today, we are entering a tremen-
dously exciting time whether we like it or not. The dismal depths to
which elite football has been dragged of late have made even the most
radical, exciting, egalitarian possibilities widely imaginable, in some ways
perhaps even inevitable. There is a huge groundswell of revolutionary,
critical energy emanating around the world which began in South Africa
and really kicked off on the streets of Brazil, where the rallying cry of the
Popular Committees of the World Cup was “World Cup for Who?” Žižek
says that “[i]n football we win if we obey the rules. In politics we win if
we have the audacity to change the rules.”25 A window of opportunity
has appeared within which we can be audacious. We have the chance for a
short while to fundamentally change the rules by which world football has
come to be governed, to reshape the ideological framework within which
football has come to be defined and understood and to work toward a
game that does much good in the world. All of this can be done, and it
can be done, in the words of the peerless footballing philosopher Socrates,
while “struggling for freedom, for respect for human beings, for equality,
for ample and unrestricted discussions, for a professional democratization
of unforeseen limits, and all of this while preserving the ludic, and the joy-
ous, and the pleasurable nature of this activity.”26

Notes
1. See Piketty’s, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 4.
2. Ibid, 3.
3. See Walters, “White Elephants and Dark Matter(s): Watching the
World Cup with Slavoj Žižek,” “What’s the Matter with English
Football Fans? Watching the Match with Slavoj Žižek,” and
“Football’s ‘Dark Matter’(s): Differing Registers of Violence at the
FIFA World Cup Finals.”
4. See Terry Eagleton’s, “Football: A Dear Friend to Capitalism.”
5. Although it is not an argument I agree with.
6. I have argued at length elsewhere that this spending ought to be
understood as an act of violence against the people of South Africa
and Brazil by those in charge of ruling them. See my “White
334 T. WALTERS

Elephants and Dark Matter(s): Watching the World Cup with

Slavoj Žižek.”
7. See FIFA’s “Mission and Statutes.”
8. See Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism.
9. See Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of
Resistance by Simon Critchley.
10. See in particular Declan Hill’s, The Fix: Soccer and Organized
Crime.
11. See Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanksi, Soccernomics: 11–46.
12. Ibid, 12.
13. See Nick Harris’s characteristically excellent analysis “It’s the econ-
omy, stupid! How money fuels glory in the Premier League” on
the Sporting Intelligence website.
14. See Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously.
15. See Dion Dassanayake’s “One billion people set to tune in to watch
Germany and Argentina battle for the World Cup”
16. Reported by ESPN FC in “World Cup final sets US TV record.”
17. For the best analysis of the tournament in Brazil, see David
Goldblatt’s Futebol Nation: A Footballing History of Brazil, Dave
Zirin’s Brazil’s Dance With the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics,
and the Fight For Democracy and Christopher Gaffney’s excellent
Hunting White Elephants blog.
18. See “Global Parties, Galactic Hangovers: Brazil’s Mega Event
Dystopia” by Christopher Gaffney.
19. Quite who would best fill the void left by FIFA is difficult to say, as
none of football’s major governing bodies appear notably inter-
ested in operating in a fundamentally different way than does the
sport’s present administrators.
20. See Žižek, Living in the End Times, The Year of Dreaming
Dangerously, The Idea of Communism and The Idea of Communism
2.
21. See Jameson’s “Introduction” to The Seeds of Time.
22. And it is, but what about the political economy of modern foot-
ball, which doesn’t seem far-fetched these days?
23. See James Riach, “FIFA film United Passions is PR exercise that
rankles even with its stars.”
24. The amount of charitable giving required to save a human life in
the world today is based on the analysis of Canadian activist and
author Steven Lewis (Big Ideas) and Australian ethicist Peter Singer
 “ANOTHER WORLD CUP IS POSSIBLE!”: TWENTY THESES ABOUT MODERN... 335

25. (The Life You Can Save).

26. See Žižek on philosophyfootball.com
27. Cited in Goldblatt, Futebol Nation (151).

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