2023-10-11 03:00:07
European professional football is an oligarchy. A system in which a handful of rich clubs capture most of the resources and the best players. A machine for producing inequalities, where sporting results are ever more closely correlated to financial power, where the logic of spectacle prevails over that of competition.
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At a time when a debate on the need to reform this sport is beginning to consolidate, it is essential to question all the mechanisms which have led to the situation in which it finds itself. It is this inventory that the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Football notebooksalso a columnist at Monde, proposed in What football has become. Three decades of liberal revolution (Divergences, 200 pages, 15 euros).
Many people today deplore this drift. The Super League episode in April 2021 was a reminder of this. This private and closed championship project, the result of the secession of twelve of the most powerful teams on the continent, should have been the culmination of this model. It sparked an unprecedented outcry, leading to the project being abandoned. “It’s a bit as if football had passed in front of a mirror for the first time in twenty-five years and had let out a cry of fear when it saw itself”writes Jérôme Latta.
“Companies like any other”
Of course, “There has always been money in football” and this one “has always been a problem”recognizes the journalist. But the economic growth initiated at the turn of the 1990s by the explosion of TV rights caused a paradigm shift. Very quickly, calls for tenders were no longer designed for the public but for broadcasters, with a litany of consequences: “Dispersed and paid access, reconfiguration of competitions and calendars, encouragement of the starification of players and teams, spectacular staging, interference of television devices in the game, etc. »
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Football has transformed into an entertainment industry, the windfall of which is distributed according to market attractiveness. In this context, clubs have become “businesses like any other”, to use the mantra dear to Jean-Michel Aulas, president of Olympique Lyonnais between June 1987 and May 2023. Failing to defend a specificity of sport, their capital was open to all kinds of investors, making football the instrument of designs that are foreign to him. The stadiums are reduced “to profit centers”the football players “to speculative assets” and the spectators “to consumers”summarizes Jérôme Latta.
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