The World Cup is upon us, and for a few weeks the language of amity and unity will be pushed aside by rants and rumbles of nationalistic exclusivity. In the wake of the Greek financial crisis, European national amity and unity have also been severely tested, which leads one to wonder whether the future of capitalism will resemble the beautiful game.
Whether in football or Europe, don’t be fooled, the integrative forces of the market will overcome the divisive dynamics in both. Football has long been an advanced manifestation of what open markets are supposed to be about: players move with little difficulty across national borders; a great deal of money liberally exchanges hands as a consequence, in no small part greased by highly profitable television contracts; marketing and appeal is global; and the most talented players and managers usually come out of the maelstrom far richer.
Some might protest that football in general, and European football in particular, works more like an oligopoly. The wealthy clubs are the most powerful; they are able to buy the best players, which allows them to win more games and gain more lucrative television contracts and advertising revenue, especially in European championship play. This earns them even more money and resumes the cycle.
But the power of some clubs is also what transforms them into truly global, unifying phenomena. If a club has the means to pick and choose players from an international menu, it will do so. Let’s say you’re an Italian club like Inter Milan; why select a majority Italian team when you have the money to mix things up and import even better players from Brazil, Argentina, Holland, and anywhere else?
The irony is that football remains an unfettered outlet for fans’ allegiance to a particular city, country, region, or even in some cases social stratum. Yet capitalism has made such identities less and less meaningful. Inter was once regarded as the working class team of Milan, but the notion is almost laughable today, with the team a major financial powerhouse enjoying international appeal. The market has fundamentally altered Inter’s image, so that while this was once defined by what the team stood against (above all, its rival AC Milan), today it is defined even more by all that the team embraces through its expanding fan base.
Which brings us to Europe after the Greek financial crisis. There too there has been much talk recently of nationalism and the emergence of a two-tiered European economy. The Germans didn’t initially want to pay for the profligate Greeks, and for a moment the European experiment looked like it might collapse. A deal was done, but the European Union is not out of the woods yet. What is emerging is a sometimes disturbing form of “cultural” differentiation, whereby the burden on Europe is said to come from the “southern” states, most on the Mediterranean, who take a very different view of taxes and public finances than their parsimonious brethren in the north.
We might even go further to say that Europe has gone the way of football in allowing hubris to get the better of prudent accounting. Neither in Europe nor in football is the sky the limit anymore. And when that happens populist instincts return, as do doubts about the cosmopolitan advantages of the whole. But then reality somehow kicks in.
A sport defined by antagonism, but that has seen the relative dissolution of that antagonism thanks to the integrative dynamics of capitalism, finds itself in not so different a place as the project of European integration. This too faces antagonism, but capitalism was instrumental in the creation of a unified Europe and will continue to sustain it.
And that place, quite simply, is the broad realization that retrenchment and divorce is not an option either for Europe or football, at least if both are to prosper. The market is a cruel leveler, but it takes enormous effort and time to restructure things when it is flawed. The penalties in participating may be damaging, fouls are common, but then, making it all worthwhile, come the goals.
