Super Leagues and Sacred Sites

As I write, sport in Europe has returned to something like normal, despite the continuing restrictions caused by the pandemic. The Tour de France is in its first week, although the spectator thought responsible for a crash on the second day is no longer facing a law suit from the Tour organisers. Wimbledon has returned, after there being no competition in 2020, but players are struggling with slippery surfaces. In the world of football, Euro 2020 is happening a year late. England are currently ecstatic at having beaten Germany, and Wales in despair at a humiliating loss to Denmark, and we all share Denmark’s relief that Christian Erikson has been discharged from hospital. (We’ll pass over Scotland’s fate in respectful silence.)

However, the most exciting sporting event of 2021 occurred in April. The owners of twelve prestigious soccer clubs proposed the founding of a European Super League. This league would have complemented existing competitions, and would ‘deliver excitement and drama never before seen in football’ (see The Economist 2021a). The plan was swiftly rejected by football fans, with one poll indicating that 78% of fans were opposed to it. The UK government indicated that it would block the League’s formation, and launched an investigation into how football is run.

What was perhaps most telling about this debacle was the owners’ woeful misunderstanding of the culture of European football. The proposed Super League would have been a self-contained entity. There would be neither promotion into the league, nor relegation from it, and rules would govern the distribution of talent amongst the clubs through a draft system. The financial risk to a club of a poor performance would thus be minimised. The Super League would have turned football into a mere television spectacle, and one largely geared towards exploiting lucrative markets in Asia. An opinion piece in The Economist suggested that this was, in effect, an imposition of a North America model of sport on European competition (2021b)—several owners of European clubs are indeed United States citizens. Such a model, focusing on the centrality of the league and the economic structuring of clubs as franchises, radically differs from a European model in which the club is central. Safe within a league, the club would become little more than the means by which profit is maximised for that league. Football would be nothing much more than a marketable commodity.

Without under-estimating the commercial side of modern football, it can still be argued that European clubs are not merely commodities. They have long and proud histories. Peter Lupson (2006), for example, tells the story of how a number of English teams were first formed as church youth clubs—including potential Super League members Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, and indirectly, as a break away from Everton and St Domingo’s Methodist Chapel, Liverpool. Clubs are the focal points of a community, and a source of communal identity. As one Manchester United protester’s banner expressed it: ‘Created by the poor, stolen by the rich’. European sport fans have, I suspect, long been baffled as to how an American baseball or football franchise can simply move from one city to another. Perhaps many American fans are equally baffled by this. What exactly are you supporting if your team can change from being the Houston Oilers to the Tennessee Oilers over night? (I always like this example. Tennessee, of course, has no oil. The franchise is now the Titans.)

Consider now another news item from 2021. This I picked up from a popular archaeology magazine (Catling 2021). Chi’chil Bildagoteel is a high desert plateau in Arizona. The site is sacred to the Apache nation, as well as being listed on the National Register of Historical Places. Unfortunately, large copper reserves have been discovered beneath this land, and permission has been granted for the exploitation of those reserves. The Federal Government has granted 2,422 acres of National Forest land to the Western Apache in exchange for the 5,344 acres of Chi’chil Bildagoteel. Ignoring the fact that 2,422 is a significantly smaller number than 5,344, the very principle of the exchange ignores the unique religious and cultural value of Chi’chil Bildagoteel. Land is here conceptualised as a mere quantity, one parcel being readily exchangeable with any other. The area is of so many acres and will yield so much profit through mineral extraction. Nothing more need be said. An activist group, Apache Stronghold, has taken legal action to prevent the exchange.

I want to suggest that the injustice experienced by the Apache nation is similar in form to that which football fans potentially suffered at the hands of the Super League, albeit that it should be stressed that the Apache nation are suffering a far greater degree of injustice. The similarity lies in the failure to understand a culture, and indeed in a failure to understand the importance and value of culture and history per se. This failure results in the false reduction of a resource that is of great communal and cultural significance to a mere commodity—something that is quantifiable and exchangeable. A perhaps apocryphal story has it that, during the 1980s, and thus the high point of neo-liberal government in the UK, a complaint about the high prices of tickets at Manchester United was answered with the observation from a government official that fans could simply watch Manchester City instead. This logic of commodification and exchange underpins the Super League and the exploitation of Chi’chil Bildagoteel alike.

To draw a parallel between a commotion in European soccer and the continuing oppression of indigenous American communities may seem inappropriate. I nonetheless draw the parallel in order to highlight the potential that sport has in making us aware of our moral and cultural values, as well as the tensions, contradictions, and dangers that lie within our current situation. The challenge of the Super League made fans explicitly aware of the role that their clubs played in their lives, but also as to how that culture lies in tension with the commercial side of the football as an entertainment industry. Further, the Super League turned fans into activists, ready to protest against the threat posed to their core values.

Yet, the Super League proposal was a thoroughly enjoyable moment in sporting history (at least in retrospect). To cite my favourite description of sport: ‘Sport is … an ersatz Creation with both design and purpose (wholly arbitrary, yet consistent)’, and ‘[s]port of necessity works with the raw materials of everyday life, its desires, energies, and obstacles, but it detoxifies them, renders them pleasurable’ (Heinegg 2003, 55). The Super League was a moment in which we played with the raw material that is our sense of justice and value. In contrast, the struggles of the Apache nation are in deepest earnest. Yet, if sport cannot merely make us aware of our values—and indeed of the importance of history and community in making us who we are—but also motivate us to apply those value beyond sport—outside the ersatz Creation—then it has the potential to make the world a better, more just place. European football fans should now, perhaps, have a greater motivation to make common cause with disenfranchised, exploited groups. Indeed, the German team and their fans did so powerfully in their Euro 2020 protest against the implementation of homophobic laws in Hungary (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57570472), and the England team does so by continuing to take the knee, despite criticism, before matches (see https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/57457120).