We The People

One of the more entertaining spin-offs of the short-lived European Super League has been the attempt to draw parallels with Brexit. For some rightwing leavers, remainers are hypocritical for refusing to join a project that would deepen European integration. Of course, this has brought the retort from liberals that what they're defending is competition in a free market. The left has been a little more realistic in focusing on the limited agency of fans and players, with many calling for the general application of the 50+1 "fan ownership" rule common in Germany (the reality isn't quite as democratic as this sounds - some clubs, like Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, are majority-controlled by companies, while RB Leipzig has restricted its membership to placemen). Where the left has been on-point is the focus on owners, who in the case of the English "big six" - all private companies - are mostly tone-deaf American capitalists or else oligarchs, sportswashing states and tax-exiles. Whether the UK government will have the gumption to legislate on club ownership is another matter. What I want to focus on here is not the prospects of a "fan-led review of the game" but the parallel between Brexit and the aborted league in terms of how we imagine "the people".

According to the Guardian this week, "The notion that the typical Brexit supporter was a working-class voter 'left behind' in a red-wall constituency or dilapidated seaside town has been upended by research that shows half of leave voters were comfortably well off". The idea that this "notion" has finally been "upended" is as risible as the claim that the Super League is an adjunct of the European superstate. It was obvious long before the referendum that the core leave vote comprised the middle classes of the non-metropolitan South and Midlands. Nigel Farage was popular with this constituency because he was representative. The focus on ex-miners and steelworkers in run-down Northern towns was always a distraction, which the vote distribution simply confirmed. For example, leave got 52% in the populous South East, mirroring the national split. Yet the discourse didn't change. Instead we got more safaris to interview grumpy pensioners in "hollowed-out" towns. This was partly due to the utility of this narrative in the emerging Labour civil war, but it also reflected a persistent failure to address the immediate causes of the growth of euroscepticism in favour of competing historical fictions. 

For the eurosceptic press, Brexit was presented as a matter of sovereignty. This both elevated it to the supra-political realm of patriotism and provided a historical justification based on freedoms that had supposedly been "lost" since 1973. For the europhile press, the dominant issue was the false consciousness of those "left behind" since 1979, misled in equal parts by lies about NHS funding and their own atavistic xenophobia. In both cases, Brexit was seen as the product of a secular trend that had been building for almost 40 years. This focus on the past occluded the more recent ratcheting-up of class hatred by those who had supported austerity after 2010. It also ignored the weaponisation of anti-asylum-seeker sentiment by both main parties, which started in the 1990s and peaked in the years leading up to 2016 with the fear of Syrian refugees. This was always a more emotive driver for leave than Poles picking potatoes outside Peterborough. As subsequent events have shown, from the government's points-based immigration system to the theatre of the "Channel Threat", gastarbeiter are welcome, but we refuse to accept any moral responsibility for the victims of conflict elsewhere (or, indeed, for the legacy of empire). This is not the attitude of the economically-stressed but of the entitled and unreformed.

The rightwing press had long established a link between the EU and a "metropolitan liberal" political culture that restrained the return of a more punitive approach to welfare, a more exclusionary ideal of citizenship and a more conservative social policy (much the same process can be seen today in Hungary, where the European Union serves as a proxy for this threatening other). With the UK now outside of the EU, this reactionary impetus has been diverted into a more generalised "culture war" in which the integrity of the nation is threatened by a miscellaneous cast of deviants, from truculent ethnic minorities through the disrespectful "woke" young to the ungrateful Scots. This cultural dichotomy is often correlated with educational attainment by political scientists and journalists, but that in turn reinforces the idea of a class division in which not having a degree is characteristic of a working class background as much as socially conservative values. In fact, the significant gradient is simply age. 

Today's middle-aged social conservatives came to maturity before the expansion of higher education in the 1990s. What determines their values is not the lack of a degree but their class position. Many are self-consciously middle-class, but perhaps more significantly many are now (or will shortly be) dependent on private pension schemes and so believe their comfort is associated with the continuing health of capitalism. To add to this picture, the last 40 years have seen a significant internal migration of the young away from smaller towns to the metropolitan cities, in particular London. This is usually held up as evidence of sorting: the liberal young head to the cities and add to left-of-centre vote-banks while the small towns become more conservative and inclined to vote right. But this obscures that the generation that quit declining towns in the 1980s are now approaching retirement. Many are confirmed Tory voters who believe they followed Norman Tebbit's advice to get on their bikes. In short, the Brexit division is more temporal than geographical or cultural, and outlets like the Guardian have been as guilty in misrepresenting this as the Daily Mail.

The farcically abrupt end of the European Super League has generated a lot of noise about what is wrong with the modern game, though most of the ills highlighted are precisely the features that the Premier League and UEFA are defending, so there's a sense that the revolutionary backlash against the ESL might well take the ancien regime with it too (but it probably won't). Chief among these ills is the dominance of billionaires and Gulf states among the club owners. This has made the issue intensely political, leading to the bizarre sight of Boris Johnson offering a "legislative bomb" to halt the project in its tracks, though whether this was motivated by a desire to appeal to "red wall" voters (notorious munchers of lower league pies), or to deflect the accusation of "greed" onto someone not associated with the government, is not entirely clear. But as with Brexit, there has been an attempt to identify a "true people": the real fans. Unfortunately, this has quickly taken on a xenophobic hue in which the global fanbase, whose engagement is necessarily limited to TV and online, are seen as somehow less authentic that those who can turn up outside a stadium with a homemade sign.

To be fair, this turn was less the work of parochial UK fans and more the consequence of the ill-chosen language of the ESL's masterminds. Early reports of their rationale spoke of a division between "legacy fans" and "fans of the future who want superstar names", while Florentino Pérez, the President of Real Madrid, went so far as to claim that the 16-24 year old demographic is being lost due to the current lack of spectacle in the Champions League. This was at least open about the temporal nature of the fanbase: that what matters is less your proximity to the home ground and more your interest in mediated galaticos and classicos, and that clearly has a generational dimension in an era when live attendance is financially or logistically prohibitive for most young people. Critics of the ESL project fear that commercialisation simultaneously "seeks to sever the game from its base in the community" and poses "an existential threat, not only to local leagues, clubs, players and communities, but to the very future of the game as a potentially unifying global force". The desire is to reconcile the national and the global, but there's a distinct air of "soft Brexit" about this. Ultimately, the question remains: who will be sovereign? 

If it's not to be emotionally remote owners whose only interest is profit or the political benefits that association with the brand brings, and if we're not to follow the German example of clubs as wholly-owned subsidiaries of multinationals (albeit ones with demonstrable community ties), then some form of fan-ownership will be necessary. But what would this look like? Barcelona is perhaps the most famous fan-owned club in the world. It has over 140,000 socis, but these have to prove a familial connection to an existing member (or wait, and pay a fee, for three years) and annual membership fees are quite steep at €185. As a result, it's mostly those who attend a lot of games who become members, so it's very much the Catalan middle class who are in charge. But this presents a problem when it comes to raising equity: even if every member punted in €1,000, this would barely dent the club's current debts of over €1 billion, hence the attraction of the ESL. The largest club membership is Bayern Munich at 290,000, which includes many who don't regularly attend games at the Allianz Arena (unlike most German clubs, FC Bayern has a nationwide following), reflecting the more modest annual fee of €60.

The ESL proposal may have been cack-handed, but it is going with the grain of history. Football is now predominantly a streaming product, and that presents opportunities for clubs to take a larger slice of the game's income away from the TV companies and to reserve more of the pie for the clubs that generate the largest audiences. This isn't going to change, so the imperatives driving the Super League proposal will only get stronger. But it also means that the fanbase is increasingly international, if harder to pin down. For example, Arsenal's total "membership" is 1.6 million, but this includes "digital-only" members with no ticket rights (probably at least 90% of that total). Manchester United have around 200,000 UK-based members but claim a global following of up to 659 million. In terms of having a vote over the management of the club, it is likely that any moves towards greater fan control will be geared towards the smallest constituency: those likely to attend home games. But that population has already changed considerably since the introduction of all-seater stadia and the steady rise in ticket prices. As with Brexit, this "populist" revolt is likely to be driven by, and largely benefit, the middle classes. And that probably explains Boris Johnson's interest as much as how his opposition to the ESL has played with the voters of Hartlepool.