A Footballing Theory of Value
Why do we love football? The answer is both simple and complex...
With my S.O. completing a post-graduate degree, my home has been a hotbed of discussion surrounding neoliberalism, cultural criticism, Marxism and postmodernism—you know! The fun stuff.
Part of this discussion sent me down a rabbit hole as I've tried to understand Marx’s labour theory of value. This the idea, in a pithy (if oversimplified) nutshell:
In other words, Marx believed that workers created the value, and capitalists reap additional or ‘surplus’ value on the back of the work of labourers, which is obviously exploitative.
Believe it or not, I’m not going to use this newsletter as a platform to discuss Marxist theories of value.
Rather, going down this rabbit hole got me thinking about who or what generates value in football. I think this is worth discussing because it is the source of a lot of unacknowledged disagreement by people who have dedicated their lives to analyzing the game!
Understanding where value in football originates is also important for club decision-making, because clubs need to decide how to allocate what are increasingly finite resources. Properly understanding the question of value in football might mean the difference between investing in better players, stadium renovations, or competent front office staff. And, as it turns out, I happen to have a strong view on what, exactly, makes football valuable.
Before that, however, it’s important to note that unlike a factory that produces goods, it’s not even entirely clear what football’s end ‘product’ is, or if there is any discernable product at all.
For example, is football entertainment? A way to objectively enjoy the athleticism of gifted players? Perhaps, except people don’t consume football matches the same way they watch an HBO drama or a dance competition or whatever. The fervency seems driven by a sense of personal connection with a club or the sport itself. Football is about more than an exhibition of player skill.
Is it about ‘glory’? Winning trophies and dominating football matches? Again, there may be something to that. People want to see their teams dominate, but at the same time, many will watch football TV and go to games for years on end without any prospect of winning a trophy or even finishing in the top half of the table. Glory alone doesn’t seem enough to explain why football attracts fans.
Is it a sense of community, of belonging? Well, there are plenty of ways to feel part of a community—anime, Star Wars, the Catholic Church—and many are free! Moreover, beyond wearing a scarf, watching football with friends and standing side by side with strangers in a football ground, there aren’t exactly limitless socializing opportunities in the sport.
Perhaps the answer is that football’s ‘product’ is itself, i.e. a combination of all these things. It’s the thrill of supporting a club with countless other people, it’s the history and the lore, it’s the athleticism, the glory of winning, the entertainment of a beautiful goal. But, as I will argue later on, all of these are symptoms or side effects of a much more elemental source of value.
Before we identify that source, we also need to ask the related question: where does football’s value come from? Who or what generates it?
If you build it, they will come—but why?
Discussions on the origins of value in football tend to resemble an ouroboros, an inescapable chicken-and-the-egg problem.
To illustrate, some might argue that players make football valuable, and the better the player, the more valuable the football. Players make the game entertaining; they score the goals, they help teams win—football wouldn’t be possible without them.
But if the best football stars in the world all suddenly decided to play for, I don’t know, RB Leipzig, would Leipzig become as popular as Manchester United or Barcelona? Perhaps, over time, but it’s not a certain prospect. So clubs, their history, their traditions and their supporter culture do add some value to the sport.
At the same time, a club’s reputation, while durable, cannot sustain a club without star players, both to ensure the club remains on a higher competitive tier. So the two need each other.
Perhaps, then, it is supporters who make the sport valuable—as the hoary old saying goes, you wouldn’t have football without fans. But this is absurd: fans are incidental to the sport itself. Though they recognize and consume football’s value they do not produce it.
Well, then, perhaps it’s the club owners that produce football’s value. They pay for the stadia; they pay the players (with club revenues); they lead the clubs. But if owners disappeared overnight, the game went bankrupt, and every football league disbanded, something would rise from its ashes. People would organize games, teams would form, football would be played, and fans would still pay for the privilege of watching.
Which gets us to the core question—if you took away pro players, historic clubs, and wealthy owners, why would fans continue to consume football?
Football derives value from competition
Though the game itself is ancient, modern, competitive football in England traces its roots to the foundation of the Football Association Challenge Cup in the 1870s. And before there were dominant clubs, wealthy owners and recognizable stars, people would flock to watch matches—two thousand people watched Wanderers beat the Royal Engineers 1-0 in 1872 at the Oval, and the numbers would continue to rise.
What attracted them initially was competition.
The truth is that football, like most sports, is nothing more than an ideal medium for competition, where its true value resides. Competition is, in other words, the a priori value of football, upon which everything else is either a component or a symptom—glory, entertainment, a sense of community and belonging, whatever.
Competition in and of itself is a ghost, a spirit, and football is one of the few ideal institutions that gives it a clearly defined body, allows competition to properly come to life. This is possible because of football’s rules, which are fair insofar as they are (in theory at least) universally applied. The rules bound the competition, define it, embody it. But those rules are limited to the pitch. Everything outside of that is fair game and, at the same time, reflective of football’s competitive power.
This is why I don’t really share the moral panic of people who lament the ‘growing’ inequality of the modern game, although I do believe lesser off clubs should pursue rules that bound richer teams, but not because it’s for the good of the game, but because it is another way to compete.
I spoke to this ‘all’s fair in love and war’ view last year in this piece on the ‘two views’ of competition in football. I have come to strongly believe that competition in football includes everything and anything clubs do to win, whether that involves lobbying league officials for a better fixture list, or campaigning for a luxury tax to level the playing field, to threatening a Super League or finding wealthy suitors to buy the club or seeking advantageous commercial deals or whatever.
The truth is football is now and has been perpetually locked in class warfare, and right now, the rich are winning. But this struggle isn’t separate from football—it IS football, just as much as 4-3-3 or the high press or Lionel Messi’s footwork. And this struggle itself, this competition, is what makes football valuable. Once clubs understand this properly, it becomes much easier to try to maximize this value for their teams.
Next time, I’ll discuss concrete ways clubs can do this in practice.