As club football becomes increasingly placeless and commercialized, international football begins to feel strangely real again.
What makes the current age feel particularly unnerving, even desperate, is that people’s apolitical pleasures and pastimes are colonized to an unprecedented degree. Disillusioned, we’ve long come to accept that politics may be intractable. Most people now seek betterment, or simply respite, in private life. But what happens when those areas of life that would serve as retreats—for leisure, for finding meaning, for a little peace and quiet—become exceptionally loud? Our churches and temples, both sacred and profane, no longer provide escape from the world. Worse, they no longer feel like they belong to us.
So it is with football—and especially with club football, hit with a one-two punch of commercialization and politicization. As so much of life becomes flattened and homogenized, bought and sold, does international football not emerge as the only pure form left?
It’s a risible, even perverse notion: FIFA is beset by corruption, qualifiers are often tedious, and the big tournaments price out fans; the infinite expansion of the World Cup dilutes its quality. But at the end of the age of globalization, we might consider how the relationship between football, identification, and meaning-making, and the processes of deterritorialization are evolving—perhaps in ironic directions. Club football, once rooted and tied to place, has been set loose. Like Theseus’s ship, a football club might change its parts, but its identity remained relatively stable over time—a process that becomes harder to sustain when a club’s fans are drawn from anywhere, its revenue streams likewise.
These days, we football fans are beset by demands to behave the right way or to think the right things. Another sanctioned pro-forma anti-racism or anti-homophobia campaign? Whatever, you can brush it off. It’s good-hearted, but ultimately toothless. Or maybe you regard such initiatives more darkly: ideological campaigns by a technocratic elite desperate to remain relevant, or even to control what people think. In any case, that same messaging is being funneled to you at work and on public transport. It’s everywhere.
It isn’t only politics or hyperpolitics—that is, a politicization that is constant and everywhere but which gains no traction. There is the ceaseless commercialization of the game, which is making club football less competitive and more oligopolistic; it is turning players into robots and even transforming historic clubs in France or Spain into mere feeders for superclubs in England, or making a local Brazilian or German club into a franchise of a fast-moving consumer goods (fmcg) brand. Add to that all manner of bureaucratization and technocratic managerialism—video-assisted refereeing redresses small injustices while the authorities commit far greater outrages—and it’s no surprise many feel something ineffable has been lost. You might even refer to it as soul, if you don’t wince too much at the cliché.
The theorist Benjamin Studebaker refers to the four F’s of faith, fandom, family, and futurisms to describe the areas of life that act as escapes or enclaves from the hyperpolitical public sphere. But even these institutions are in the business of legitimation. Perhaps more than ever, they act as mediators for the ruling order. The authorities find they have little purchase with the populace. With football, they have a captive audience, one whose usual cynicism has been left at the gates—fans have abandoned themselves to romance and passion. It’s a level of libidinal investment the state can only dream of. It’s a great place for propaganda. But the more football is made to serve legitimation, the more fandom stops working as an enclave.
For most of football’s history, club football has been taken to be the real thing. The club was place-based, often rooted in a community, and by extension, supporters’ self-conception was interwoven with other identities. And these weren’t just off-the-peg individualistic badges; they were related to major social forces: religion, class, region, and political ideology. Moreover, the regularity of matches gave it a seamless integration into the rhythms of daily life.
In contrast, international football was the realm of pure spectacle: an occasional happening, a competition of all-star teams, often on neutral terrain. It was magic, but not lacking in ambivalences. You had to cheer for players who were your enemy for most of the year. And the nation was far too big a collectivity at times. It pasted over cleavages of class and locale. Even in small countries, the pool of national talent was vast relative to the catchment areas and transfer markets most clubs operated in. Indeed, it may have been this limited nature that made club football what it was.
Now, at the end of the age of globalization, club football at the top level is basically limitless: Global brands shop in a global market for players, managers. . . . and fans. The nation, the ultimate modern social construction, now appears more place-bound, more limited, more real; and so with football. A national team manager can’t recruit players on the open market; he must work with what he’s given. A new owner can’t come in and change the key identifying symbols of the team. The players all speak the same language (mostly) and share a common experience of socialization (sort of). In today’s hypermodernity, where everything is deregulated, deinstitutionalized and globalized, we search in desperation for some fixity.
In the 2000s, an airy, cheery—some would say gormless—image of the nation was projected, but as economic and geopolitical conditions soured, the project became less plausible. Virulent, exclusionary nationalism returned to the scene at the same time as baseless nation-branding and sportswashing reached their apex—a fact that should not be seen as a paradox but as a necessary unity of opposites. It is a story that can be told through the World Cup itself, which has gone through its own dramatic process of attempting to represent the nation, albeit in contradictory ways.
Germany 2006 was a coming-out party for the host country: Flag-waving was back, without a whiff of sieg-heiling. The new postmodern Deutschland could speak its name without the weight of historical guilt—on condition that the nation had no determinate content, beyond tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and economic dynamism. Germany may have hegemonized Europe, but only in the guise of the post-national EU. As Wolfgang Streeck has long pointed out, European unity and harmony were a vehicle for big German exporters’ interests. But in the age of peak globalization, national interests were verboten, as were those of class. So German ruling-class interests were not pursued through the German nation but through the post-nation collectivity of the EU.
In 2010, South Africa likewise announced itself as something new and different. The rainbow nation had shed not just racism and apartheid but also the means by which that oppressive order was cast off: national-liberation struggle. So both racial and class politics were relegated to the past, even as deep inequality and developmental failures persisted.
By 2014, the global context had changed, and the commodities boom that lifted South Africa and Brazil both had ended. The lead-up to Brazil’s World Cup saw mass protests against inequality, corruption, and misdirected public spending. The subsequent years saw the national colors, previously universal and uncontested—and with a strong association with the Seleção—become the object of rancorous polarization. Anti-corruption protests swung to the right, with conservatives adopting the canary-yellow jersey—one which would soon after become the icon of the radical right under Bolsonaro.
Although Russia used its World Cup to detoxify its national image, presenting itself as open (despite sanctions) and friendly (despite the 2014 annexation of Crimea), the specter of a more assertive nationalism was always there. This was a revanchist power, shunned by the West, and for which liberal democracy was now just a series of hypocrisies and lies. In the eyes of sagacious Westerners, Russians were the worst thing: white people untroubled by colonial guilt. In reality, ordinary citizens had been shoved off the political stage, and the state swallowed the nation. Either way, dangerous stuff.
The apparent opposite was presented at Qatar’s World Cup. Along with other small Gulf states, this was a nation without a people, a contradiction in terms: credentialed and salaried labor is imported from the West, a mass of low-skilled workers is imported from South Asia, and a thin top layer of 10% of residents are actual Qatari nationals. While Qatar attempted to reframe criticism of human rights abuses as selective or neocolonial, the result was nevertheless a transparent exercise in legitimating a petro-hub and entrepôt as a member of the community of nations. It was the most explicit case of nation-branding through sport.
Nowhere in this postmodern perambulation do we encounter the nation understood in its much earlier conception: a self-determining body of citizens committed to building a collective life together. That would be far too demotic, even democratic, for the technocrats and demagogues who alternately run the show. As a consequence, attempts to rediscover the nation through football are confounded—as are attempts to rediscover a love for football through nationalism.
If for Benedict Anderson, the daily newspaper was central to the generation of national self-consciousness, stimulating the sense of a body of people existing at the same time in the same space, then it is not surprising that, in the age of hypermedia, the nation becomes much less determinate, less anchored. The nation is a free-for-all in which global branding initiatives meet their obverse: reactionary ethnic nationalism—an attempt at finding fixity in a liquefied world. Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 are part of the same whole.
Thus, we find that radical-conservative reactions to globalism do not escape the tendency toward placelessness. Much the opposite. Consider maga—it has become a franchise. So Brazil’s Bolsonaro family appeals to Trump to impose sanctions on their own country in the name of nationalism, or Orbán supporters in Hungary no longer sing their national anthem collectively, as they have traditionally done, but have it sung by a single performer, US style.
National football teams might have racist ultras insisting on ethnic purity, but how can a team represent you on the pitch if there is no longer even a pretense of a national style? Organized Germans, defensive Italians, brave English, creative Brazilians. . . . these are just clichés of another age.
So is it all corroded, both football and nation, and with them, national football? Perhaps there is hope yet.
It may seem a shabby banality in the face of all the above, but the scarcity of an event may be its value. Rare are the moments in always-on, 24–7 capitalism when a collectivity can stop and regard itself. We lack modern rituals—and we lack recognition for the new rituals that have emerged. Recall that ritual’s relationship to time, as Byung-Chul Han argues, is that of home to place: Time becomes manageable and meaningful rather than a ceaseless stream of moments. Anderson argued the nation answered the key question of belonging by tying together time and place: “Why are we. . . . here. . . . now.” In a similar way, an earlier theorist of nationalism, Ernest Renan, called the nation a daily plebiscite—the ongoing assent or shared will to live together. If fragmented hypermedia impedes this process today, then the infrequent Big Event provides a little substitute.
Popular rituals interrupt the daily grind and provide a temporal home in which the people can come to see themselves, to recognize themselves. The euphoria which greeted the uprisings of the early 2010s, from Tahrir Square to Syntagma Square and beyond, was testament to the way such moments are treasured. Club football’s own daily plebiscite has become exhausting. The experience of being a football fan today is to be submitted to a barrage of legitimation stories. The World Cup, in contrast, can serve as a reminder of what is otherwise being lost, its rarity preserving ritual from total commodification.
Of course, football won’t rescue the nation. And the nation can’t rescue football. But a popular-democratic project of nation-building, if taken up once again, could yet salvage the last collectivity from mediatic spectacle, lest it be left to reactionary entrepreneurs and globalist marketeers alike.