- Hubert Walas
Football wars.
Football, or soccer as some people call it, has been building its global position as a sport for the last 100 years. It has become a vital part of the cultural landscape of many nations. In turn, the money that accompanies it makes it an arena of not only matches, but also of power competition similar to the one we associate with geopolitics. With the European Football Championship beginning very soon, now is a good time to look at football from a different angle.
A Game for Influence
Football - please let me call it this way - is by far the world’s most popular sport and more than half of all people, or around 4 billion, follow, play, and/or show interest in football. This critical mass translates into the money that accompanies the sport. And behind this comes influence and interests. Due to the resources that circulate around football, it is often not just a game for victory on the pitch, but also a fierce game for influence on a supranational level.
The Sports Global Market Opportunities And Strategies report shows that the spectator sports sector generates globally around $250 billion per year and football accounts for 43% of this amount. And this means that football's “GDP,” if we give it the characteristics of a sovereign state, is around $107 billion, or roughly the same as the GDP of Ecuador and more than the GDP of Slovakia or Ethiopia.
Europe is definitely dominant in terms of geography division. Before the pandemic, the entire football market in Europe was valued by Deloitte at around $30 billion or €28.4 billion. This is not surprising. Every year the media reports on the sale of television rights, where contracts concluded amount to billions of dollars and the amounts spent on football players would often be enough to build a stadium.
Money is one of the most common motives in competition for power and agency in the geopolitical realm and it’s no different in football. Recently, we witnessed a classic example of this competition, when 12 leading European clubs organized a kind of coup d'état on the reigning status quo. The coup was called the Super League. But, starting from the beginning - the superior, global football organization, that is FIFA, associates 6 regional organizations according to a geographical key. In Europe, its subordinate is UEFA, which brings together 55 national associations. UEFA is organizing the European Championship, as well as European club competitions, with the Champions League being the crown jewel. The lucrative years, during which the largest football clubs in Europe were aggregating more and more capital, lead to a point where many of them are now valued at billions of dollars. However, neither FIFA nor UEFA have any resources of their own and so both are directly dependent on the players, clubs, and federations associated with them.
Eventually, the owners of the top 12 clubs in Europe asked themselves: “Do we really need an intermediary to play matches?” And such an intermediary is, in fact, UEFA. As a result, 12 clubs organized a coup, proposing an alternative league outside UEFA's jurisdiction: the Super League, which was to have a format similar to the games in the United States - MLS or NBA - that is, an internal league for the selected, where there are no relegations. However, the project turned out to be a standard example of a misreading of the balance of power by the club leaders. On one side, we had 12 very large and wealthy clubs that wanted to create a hermetic league to generate even more income. On the other, thousands of other clubs and their fans, years of tradition, and a fundamental rule for all football fans in the world - the rule of relegations and promotions. It led to a point when even their own fans were against the founding clubs of the proposed Super League. UEFA also announced severe sanctions, including kicking the clubs and their players out of all competitions. The seriousness of the situation was also evidenced by the fact that voices on this matter were given by leading European politicians, such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron. The Super League ended up collapsing faster than it was built. However, the specter of a split caught the eyes of FIFA and UEFA officials and if the idea of the Super League were not so absurd and extended to more clubs, the first football schism in history could become a reality.
This is not entirely a hypothetical scenario. While the power held by FIFA and UEFA is huge, it may become an object of competition in the future. Over its years of operation, FIFA has expanded its spheres of influence. It has more members than the United Nations and it even associates with entities such as Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan that are not members of the United Nations. The situation is the same with Palestine, recognized by FIFA, but not by the United Nations. Through football, nations try to declare their identity and remind the world of their independence and aspirations. As a result, often the first step of nations striving for independence is to become a FIFA member.
Football is also hard politics. The World Cup host chosen by FIFA must prepare big money to be given the opportunity to host the tournament. The organizing country must guarantee huge stadiums that will generate the appropriate revenues. In addition, there have to be marketing and tax concessions provided to FIFA by the host. Therefore presently, the possibility of hosting a tournament is, in practice, reserved for the largest and richest countries of the world. Despite this, the World Cup has been the dream of many nations and their leaders for years, which puts FIFA in the vortex of the geopolitical game.
From the very beginning, the World Cup presented itself as an ideal soft power tool. Its host, by attracting the world’s attention, can convey its message. In 1930, Uruguay celebrated its 100th anniversary of independence. In Italy in 1934 and Argentina in 1978, it was a stage display for authoritarian regimes. The 1994 World Cup in the United States served to colonize America by football. The World Cup in South Korea and Japan in 2002 was the first tournament held in Asia and, in addition, it was by states that were once sworn enemies. The 2018 Russian World Cup, on the other hand, was a warming up of the tarnished, international image of Russia. Interestingly, this tournament, together with the planned 2022 World Cup in Qatar, could have been awarded by FIFA officials who were corrupted for this very purpose. The US Department of Justice declares to have evidence for this case. This would not be a novelty in football, as Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini lost their positions a few years earlier due to corruption allegations.
The Football Powerhouse of the Future?
Football is believed to have originated in Great Britain. While such a statement can be disputed, as similar games have been played in other parts of the world, the British certainly deserve huge credit for making football global. In practice, the worldwide popularity of football is partly a function of 19th and 20th-century British imperialism and naval power. Interestingly however, it was also probably one of the factors serving its collapse. In many British colonies, the sport helped the colonized people to resist British rule. The sport was often used by the colonizers to strengthen a sense of discipline and hard work, but above all, it was supposed to help control the local population. However, this discipline was often later used against the colonizer.
Football expansion mainly affected Latin America and Africa and was less visible in East Asia and its two giants - China and India. China, isolated from the world, founded the first professional league only in 1994. Since then, interest in football in China has gradually increased, while more and more money has appeared in Chinese football. This was due to the fact that the Chinese Communist Party, seeing the potential of football as a soft power tool, looked favorably on companies and people investing large funds in Chinese Super League and European clubs. Also, it is well known that President Xi Jinping is a football fan. More and more money in Chinese football has attracted football stars. European clubs, noticing the untapped potential of the Middle Kingdom, began to tour China. In 2014, Chinese Super League clubs spent a total of £81 million on transfers, an amount second only to English Premier League clubs. However, these transactions often did not present much rationality. A good example is the transfer of 33-year-old Carlos Tevez from Boca Juniors to Shanghai SIPG. The transfer fee was £71m, and Tevez himself charged over £30m a season.
Nevertheless, the Chinese approached the subject in their own style. In 2016, they announced a plan to become the world's football powerhouse by 2050. The plan presented by the Chinese Football Federation dealt with the problem in concrete terms. 50 million children and adults playing football by 2020; 20,000 football schools and 70,000 pitches by 2020. In 2030, China is expected to have one of the best national teams in Asia, and in 2050 to be a football tycoon. It's hard to verify how the Chinese are doing in fulfilling their infrastructural and social plans, but FIFA’s current ranking remains clear. The Chinese national football team for the last couple of years has steadily ranked around the 70th to 80th place in the world, next to teams such as Curacao, Panama, and Syria.
Proxy Wars
EURO 2020, which is just about to start, will once again trigger a wave of emotions on the Old Continent. For European countries, with their centuries-old conflicts and confrontations, it is often a battlefield where hidden geopolitical ambitions, phobias, likes, and dislikes are revealed. Sometimes, football is even seen as a metaphor for war in which nations of different ideals attack each other on the battlefield with the support of crowds filled with fanaticism.
During the match, we can observe a whole series of war rituals - waving flags, changing colors, singing anthems and songs. The language of the sport itself draws elements from the military nomenclature. Before each match, you need to determine the tactics and strategy. One shoots at a goal, like with a missile. The match starts with a “breakout of hostilities,” one “bombs” the goal, blows up the defense, etc. By the way, the very fact that we associate the terms attack and defense with sport more than with warfare proves the stability - or lack thereof - in our current times.
Football and its culture are often determinants of geopolitical, religious, and national identity. That is why in Spain, the Basque club, Athletic Bilbao, only accepts Basque players. The confrontation of Madrid's "Real" with FC "Barcelona" is an extension of the confrontation between the capital and separatist Catalonia. Glasgow's Celtic Club is mainly backed by the Roman Catholic side of the city, while its main rival, the Glasgow Rangers, is backed by Protestants. At the 2004 Asian Nations Cup Final, where China faced Japan, Chinese fans wore 1930s-style Japanese military uniforms to express their hostility to the Japanese team. Other Chinese fans waved "300,000" signs, a reference to the number of Chinese murdered by the Japanese army in 1937.
However, there are times when football actually oscillates between sport and warfare with the hostility on the football field reflecting the strained relationship between two countries and bearing the burden of a painful history. This was the case in 1969 when the World Cup qualifying match between Honduras and Salvador broke the scales of bitterness. In the aftermath of the match, the two countries clashed militarily.
Nevertheless, for most of the time, football allows for symbolic, limited confrontations without much political risk. Its impact on national and international public opinion is wide and is often a healthy safety valve to national resentments. As sociologist Norbert Elias put it: "Viewers of a football match can enjoy the mythical excitement of the battles taking place in the stadium and know that neither the players nor they will suffer any harm."
Sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48444575
https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/press-releases/articles/european-football-market-worth-28-billion-euros-as-premier-league-clubs-lead-the-way-to-record-revenues.html
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312130510_Football_and_Geopolitics
https://www.thenational.scot/news/19252741.boris-johnson-backs-british-super-league-stop-scottish-independence/
https://www.stadiumtalk.com/s/soccer-geopolitics-soft-power-755d1d317fc442d3
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-geopolitics-of-football
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/geopolitics-european-football
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https://www.dw.com/en/china-aiming-to-become-global-sporting-power/a-52026942
