There is perhaps no more luminous incarnation of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism – the notion that under capitalism, the social relations that underpin production are disguised behind seemingly objective measures of commodities’ economic value – than football. Born in the industrializing maelstrom of mid-19th century Britain, forged in the working-class crucible of professional sport, dispatched to the far corners of the planet by an expatriate army of British mariners, merchants, educators, and railway workers, football’s history has married the global arc of industrial capitalism from the very start.
But the fetishism at work here invests football with a metamorphic power far greater than that envisaged by Marx. Not only is the labor that creates value in football made invisible, as the German social theorist would have it, but the game’s very status as a commodity is itself concealed beneath the passions of fandom and the ludic framework of sport. We tend to think of players in many ways – as athletes, artists, standard-bearers for their teams, gladiators, heroes, cultural icons, sex symbols, temperamental divas, and undeserving millionaires – but rarely as wage laborers. In the same way, supporters’ varied modes of identification with their teams, whether mediated through familial, neighborhood, ethnic, class, political, religious, or national commitments, mask their own role as consumers in football’s labor-capital-commodity nexus.