Does Anyone Have the Right to Football?

In this article, Jon Mackenzie interrogates our responsibility as consumers of football, examining the extent to which our viewing habits shape us.

We only ever find ourselves in the middle of things. I was twenty-two when the global financial crisis roiled itself into the general consciousness in 2008. Even only twelve years later, my memories from that time are hazy; an oddly-beguiling semantic—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, securitization, subprime mortgages; panning newsreel of stock market ticker boards and men with untucked shirts and glazed eyes; interminable puns about the ‘Credit Crunch’ (thank fuck that neologism went away). I had ridden my way through university on the diminishing spume of New Labour’s positivity towards Higher Education without the faintest whiff of economic insecurity. And now, all of a sudden, I was being told that things were not only unlikely to get better but were, in fact, about to get much, much worse.

One day in late September—a final attempt to imbibe the dregs of summer—I spent an hour or so throwing an American football back and forth with a family friend at a picnic. He explained ‘triple A ratings’ and ‘bundling debt’ and ‘housing bubbles’ and I was largely none the wiser. But at that moment, I was filled with a keen sense of being in the middle of things. I knew then that the present moment would prove to be significant in my life. But I also knew that I would not fully understand how it was significant until it had passed; until I was able to arrive at some sort of vantage point that would allow me perspective.

Finding ourselves in the middle of things often makes for a confusing intellectual landscape. Without critical distance, we are doomed to hold positions on things that are in tension with other positions we hold without ever recognising the contradictions that entail. The philosopher Reiner Schürmann made this quirk of finding ourselves in the middle of things fundamental to his history of philosophy. Every intellectual system, he argued, is based on an idea that is simple enough to be grasped by the majority but which contains a contradiction which makes it compelling enough to be continuously deliberated. Eventually, though, the contradiction cannot hold and the system collapses into a new iteration—a simple premise and an internal paradox—and the whole merry-go-round rumbles on.

These days, we find ourselves too incredulous towards meta-narratives like Schürmann’s to take them seriously. But I sometimes wonder whether or not there is a grain of truth in amongst all the grandiose. Are there tensions that run like a seam through our intellectual hinterlands? Are there ideas that we hold in contradiction to the other notions that we subscribe to? And what role do they play upon the way we develop conceptually as a society?

Of course, the point is that we cannot easily recognise these tensions until we have achieved some sort of distance to be able to assess it. But sometimes, even right in the middle of things, a moment of clarity occurs. And this week, I had one.

What does it mean to desire or to be desired?

I’d never really given the question much thought until recently. A few weeks ago, I came across an article in the London Review of Books from 2018 by Amia Srinivasan: ‘Does anyone have the right to sex?’ The essay begins with a précis of the life and times of the incel Elliot Rodger who, in May 2014, went on a killing spree around Isla Vista, California, with the final death toll running in at six. Srinivasan rounds out the story with an observation: ‘Feminist commentary on Elliot Rodger and the incel phenomenon more broadly has said much about male sexual entitlement, objectification and violence. But so far it has said little about desire: men’s desire, women’s desire, and the ideological shaping of both.’

What unfolds is a chronological primer laying out what was at stake in the various feminist debates of the last fifty years (and I would recommend anyone who hasn’t to read the piece in full). The central thesis of the piece is that the concept of desire underlying these debates has remained largely underdeveloped. Srinivasan writes:

‘Since the 1980s, the wind has been behind a feminism which takes desire for the most part as given – your desire takes the shape that it takes – and which insists that acting on that desire is morally constrained only by the boundaries of consent.’

And underlying the narrative is the constantly re-iterated refrain from the author, ‘...but at what cost?’ Take the concluding sentence of the section on ‘sex positivity’: 

‘...the sex-positive gaze risks covering not only for misogyny, but for racism, ableism, transphobia, and every other oppressive system that makes its way into the bedroom through the seemingly innocuous mechanism of ‘personal preference’.

As Srinivasan sees it, in order to fight the immediate battles at hand, feminism accepted an empty concept of desire – desire as given – so as to achieve a gain elsewhere. Now, on the face of it, this is entirely understandable in light of the fact that, at the time, desire was constantly being policed by the status quo. The problem was that, by leaving the concept of desire under-examined, feminism had facilitated the introduction of various oppressions through the back door. In the end, Srinivasan concludes:

‘a feminism that totally abjures the political critique of desire is a feminism with little to say about the injustices of exclusion and misrecognition suffered by the women who arguably need feminism the most.’

Now, I am hardly the right person to assess the content of Amia Srinivasan’s claims about the history of feminism. But as for the supposition that there are those within the feminist sphere  who ‘[take] desire for the most part as given – your desire takes the shape that it takes’, I would like to extend this idea into a wider remit. Instinctively, this sort of account of the way desire functions seems, at least to me, to broadly fit when applied as a general observation about my generation (let’s call that ‘millennial’, for want of a better term, where that means roughly: ‘coming of age in or after the year 2000). For us, the idea of desire as given seems entirely unproblematic.

And that was when my moment of clarity occurred. Because isn’t it odd that we have largely accepted the notion of desire as given and yet continue to rail against the structures and inequalities of capitalism? Why is the inherent tension of these two positions seldom raised?

At heart, capitalism is an apparatus of desire.

Of course, in its pure theoretical form, capitalism is simply a system of exchange where things of equivalent value – material goods, labour, knowledge, skill – are traded freely between actors. But this formal definition stands in direct contradiction with one of the tenets of capitalism: the need to create surplus value. It is not enough to exchange goods at equivalent value; you need to be able to sell things for more than they cost to produce. So where does the extra value come from to assure a profit in a system that depends on equality of exchanges? There must exist a commodity that has the capacity to create more value than it possesses itself. That commodity is labour power.

But a problem arises. If labourers become more productive in a bid to generate surplus capital, the value of their product decreases, forcing perpetual growth in production and markets (as well as increased pressure to constrain labour costs... but that’s another story entirely). And this is where desire comes into it all. Because on the opposite side of the coin that is the need for perpetual market growth is the need for perpetual consumption. And the need for perpetual consumption entails the need for ever-craving consumers. Desire, then, is the underlying force that makes the wheels of capitalism go around.

Of course, we all know this. How could we not, as constant subjects of the low-grade propaganda that is subtly pipelined into our consciousness whenever we engage with media of almost any kind? We are endlessly being told what it is we want; our desires covertly – or perhaps overtly – policed by external forces battling it out for our eternally-consumptive souls. In a capitalist world, our existence is constructed as a lack: we are incomplete, our beings cracked and in need of repletion. In the eyes of the market, we are nothing more than vectors of desire.

Our desires, then, at least viewed through the lens of capitalism, are no longer considered interminable but up for grabs; fair game for whichever corporation can get to them first. And this is where the tension comes in. Because how do you marry together an account of ‘desire as given’ with a lived experience of ‘desire as co-opted’?

In answering this question, our generation has tended to compromise towards the first. Desire as given seems irrefutable; as soon as you start scrutinising people’s proclivities, you quickly end up marching down a road that ends at authoritarianism. The result has been a tacit acceptance that we can neglect to interrogate our desires within a capitalist world, hiding behind the comforting mantra, ‘There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.’ Desire is given. Capitalism is a totalising system. There is little to nothing that we can do. 

But is there perhaps a different route to be taken here? Amia Srinivasan suggests that there is. In concluding her piece in the London Review of Books, she writes:

‘[T]he fact is that our sexual preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either... Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love.’

Sexual preference, of course, is a much thornier issue than the question of material consumption. But as soon as you apply the kind of attitude that Srinivasan applies to sexual desire to our consumptive desires, the whole question of our responsibility as consumers is blown open. If we can scrutinise the things that we want and question the desires that underpin our activities as consumptive beings, then our role as ethical consumers takes on a new valence. No longer considering our desires as proper to ourselves, we see them as much shaped by external factors. And this allows us to be far more discerning as consumers. 

None of which is to say that desire is bad. The principle here follows the Pauline logic of  ‘Everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial’. You are not wrong to want to eat meat. You are not wrong to want that product that is manufactured unethically. You are not wrong to want to replace your iPhone with every iteration produced. But that does not mean you need to be defined by that desire. In many cases – particularly those involving sexual preference, as Srinivasan is at pains to point out – there will be no need to re-mould our desires. They may be good and natural. But that is not to say that all desire needs to be seen as incontrovertible. When it comes to proclivities shaped by market forces, perhaps we can unlearn the preferences imposed upon us by an unforgiving economic reality that holds us in its grip?

Amia Srinivasan begins her interrogation of desire by taking the ‘incel’ as a reductio ad absurdum – the logical endpoint of a position – and asking the simple question: ‘Does anyone have a right to sex?’ I want to end this piece with another reductio ad absurdum question: ‘Does anyone have a right to football?’

As football fans, we have never had more consumptive capacity than the present day. With the Premier League returning after a break imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, we find ourselves in the slightly unbelievable situation of being able to watch all ten fixtures in a Premier League game week back to back; an eye-watering 900 minutes of football if we want it. If that doesn’t suit us, we can watch matches from around the globe at the click of the button (and an artfully installed VPN). Any one of us could feasibly watch football in every waking moment and never run out of up-to-date content to satisfy our needs. 

Usually, we aren’t granted the space to examine our desire for football. But when the world entered lockdown and football leagues were stopped, the IV drip was pulled out and we were forced to go cold turkey. With all these ideas about scrutinising desire percolating about in my head, I decided to apply them to my consumption of football.

There is nothing like a resumption of football in a time of pandemic to make you realise just how marketised the world of football has become. As the world gently burns around us, the sight of a game behind closed doors, played so as to fulfil a broadcasting revenue contract which, should it remain unfulfilled, could bring the whole edifice of elite football crashing down, gives the whole proceeding a somewhat chintzy feel. Yes, I love football. But when the thin veneer covering the machinery of global capital that grinds away behind the surface is removed and the reality reveals itself in such startling brazenness, you start to question just how pure you think football is.

And then there is the sheer volume of it all. There is so damn much football. Capitalism has a funny way of distracting you away from introspection by giving you more and more of what you want. Before you know it, you’re caught in a spiral of FOMO where you feel the need to watch everything on offer for fear of missing something vital, or so you tell yourself. I have thoroughly enjoyed the break from football. It’s been nice to reset; to do the things that I would otherwise avoid doing because of football. And with the Bundesliga back, I have enjoyed giving one league my undivided attention.

This partial return made me question just how much the ideas I had about football as a comestible were not simply the product of a drip-feeding that has been going on my whole life. How much have my desires with regards the consumption of football been exacerbated by the corporations set to benefit from me increasing my consumption exponentially? In the cold light of day, I would have to answer: more than I care to admit.

In responding to the question ‘does anyone have the right to football?’, I find myself reaching the same sort of conclusions that Amia Srinivasan reaches about sex: far too often we leave our desires unexamined, viewing them as a given for fear of asking more difficult questions of ourselves. There is nothing wrong with wanting to consume football, of course. But to pretend that this lets us off the hook as ethically-responsible beings is to misunderstand the complex nature of moral existence. 

As the football schedules slowly begin to refill – rightly or wrongly – I am going to allow much more scrutiny to my own consumptive proclivities as a football fan. I resent the fact that the game that I love has been co-opted by people looking to grind out a profit, to market a brand, to wash an image. But whilst I will not allow myself to bear the moral burden of this reality, I am not going to sacrifice my own agency as a consumer of modern football. Instead, I am going to take things into my own hands and seek to consume football more responsibly, recognising that, when it comes to football, to borrow from Srinivasan once more,  ‘preferences can and do alter, sometimes under the operation of our own wills – not automatically, but not impossibly either…’

You can follow Jon Mackenzie on Twitter @Jon_Mackenzie.

Why not subscribe to our mailing list and get these essays sent directly to your inbox?

If you are a writer who finds themselves without a home in the wake of the pandemic, do get in touch with us. We would love to explore the idea of working with you.