Top Marxist Analyses World Football - 10/10/2007

One might think that all Marxist intellectuals had by now gone into retirement or were making money on the stock exchange. However, 90-year old Eric Hobsbawm keeps going and is certainly one of the most distinguished Marxist historians. One doesn't have to agree with his position to accept that what he has to say might be of some interest. His latest book Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism (certainly a title that embodies three trigger words) has a section on football. He is interested by the way that the game has mutated into a global business dominated 'by the imperialism of a few capitalist enterprises' such as Manchester United and Real Madrid. Sir Alex Ferguson has been called a few things in his time, but an agent of international monopoly capital is a new one.

Hobsbawm argues that 'since globalisation it's been possible for a consortium of wealthy clubs in a particular set of Western European countries to build themselves up as global brands which have relatively little contact with their original local roots and hire people from all over the world. They make money by selling goods, such as T-shirts, television and to a diminishing extent by people watching [live] football. Logically these clubs would prefer to limit the game to a super-league of teams playing together irrespective of national leagues and local loyalties, were it not for one thing: football's marketability is rooted in nationalism. What keeps the whole system going is the fact that football is something non-economic for a large number of people who use it to identify themselves and their country. The imagined community of millions seems more real in the form of 11 named people. For many Cameroonians, for example, the first time that they had a sense of themselves as members of an independent nation state was when their team played at the World Cup.'

Hobsbawm's core argument is very much framed in terms of 'contradictions' that cannot be resolved under capitalism as one would expect from a Marxist. Hence, he is stronger on analysis than solutions. He argues, 'The world is, in some sense, not fully globalisable. Just as clubs and world football must coexist, so globalisation must coexist with the national interests which still have enough leverage to establish themselves.' In more practical football terms, Hobsbawm predicts a weakening of the traditionally strong but economically poor national teams such as Brazil, which now export most of their players to Europe.