Soccer

Globalization, commercialization, and competition killed the romance of soccer—creating the best competition in the world in the process.

(This is an order, we should remind ourselves, in which the German league title has been won by its biggest club for each of the past 10 years; the Italian league title by one of its big three for the past 20 years; and the Spanish league title by one of its big three every year since 2003. It marked a shifting order in European soccer, an order that has been revolutionized by soccer’s transformation from a continental sport and plaything of its own continental elite into a globalized entertainment product and plaything of a global elite. Globalization, commercialization, and competition did that—creating the best sports competition in the world, which I will tune in to watch with my friends. European soccer became more and more commercialized in the 1980s and ’90s, but everything changed in 2003 when Chelsea—not part of the traditional European elite—was bought by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, instantly becoming a superclub in terms of wealth. The Spanish capital’s leading sports newspaper has accused Mbappé of a lack of class in turning the club down. Real Madrid first created a team of galácticos in the early 2000s, using its financial muscle to sign an array of superstars with the hope of blitzing the opposition on and off the pitch, winning trophies while creating the sport’s most desirable commercial brand, matching American franchises such as the New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys, and Los Angeles Lakers, which were, back then, bigger and more profitable than their soccer counterparts. Just to compete in European soccer today, you need either a billionaire owner or a global commercial operation generating huge revenues that can be pumped back into the team, and this shift has expanded the ranks of the sport’s elite. The club has been further revitalized under the ownership of an American billionaire, John Henry, who joined a host of other foreign owners attracted by the potential of the English Premier League, the most commercially successful in the world. (The police wrongly held Liverpool fans responsible for a 1989 stadium disaster in which 97 people died.) Liverpool believes itself to be a nonconformist, radical city, somehow distinct from the rest of England. Its rival for the Champions League, Real Madrid, meanwhile, literally is the Spanish establishment, symbolized with a crown on its crest, supported by the royal family, and representing Spain. Liverpool supporters might decry the political and economic establishment, but their club has long been part of the soccer establishment—it and Real Madrid have won 19 Champions League titles (or its predecessor tournaments) between them. That thing was the old hierarchy, the romance and glory, of European soccer, or rather my naive belief in it. I thought of this recently when I found myself in the absurd situation of feeling sad that a multimillionaire French soccer player had decided against joining the world’s most successful club.