You can’t kick politics out of football
Despite commercialization and elite capture, the world’s most popular sport still generates forms of collective life that resist the logic of capitalism.
- Interview by
- Bartolomeo Sala
There are few things that have been so consistently political as football. This is true of the sport’s early folk origins, in which village-wide kick-abouts became an excuse...
The strongest version of this narrative is that football, despite its commercialization, remains a vital arena for political struggle and communal identity. Goldblatt’s analysis credits the sport’s unique ability to mobilize collective emotion, from anti-colonial solidarity to labor-class nostalgia, while acknowledging the distortions imposed by elite ownership and state actors. The tension between football as a "public theater" and a capitalist enterprise is framed as a microcosm of broader soc...