05.03.2026
When Saturday comes
As club owners have ceded control over the terms and conditions under which elite players sell their labour-power, they have tightened their grip over the labour process. Peter Kennedy discerns an ongoing class struggle
For many of us long in the tooth, elite football has become a hollowed-out spectacle in the tradition of Debord.1 Viewed as the bastard offspring of hybridised global sports and entertainment industries,2 elite football presents itself as more “soap opera” than ‘workers’ ballet’.3
Indeed, this negative tag of ‘soap opera’ for the masses appears confirmed, whenever professional footballers are caught in the glare of media headlines for ‘having one too many’, staying out ‘partying’ before important games, gorging on fast food or being caught smoking during down time (most recently Scott McTominay, who was condemned for smoking during Napoli’s victory parade in 20254). Yet, behind the hype and headlines - through the unique prism of the elite football industry - lies that very traditional struggle between capitalist and worker.
As we all know well, capitalists seek to control the terms and conditions in which workers sell their labour-power (market situation) and their labour process (work situation) to maximise their profit margins. Granted, the world of elite football is more ‘gilded cage’ than ‘factory barracks’, where elite footballers are concerned, while clubs are more likely to make a loss than profit.
Nevertheless, there is a class struggle ongoing, discernible to a Marxist lens. Although generating a sustainable profit is an issue, the English Premier League’s (EPL) system of fines and point deductions, and the threat thereof, on clubs to keep their books balanced does go some way to ensure elite football operates according to capitalist principles, to the extent that any gratuitous logic it may still adhere to on the playing field must submit to the logic of capital-labour relations. As I demonstrate below, club owners, having ceded control over the terms and conditions under which footballers sell their labour-power, have tightened their grip over the elite-footballer labour process.
Controlling labour
For most of the 20th century, clubs had more control over players’ wages (whether direct or indirect wage caps), but ceded control over elite players’ work situation (training in the morning; off to the races and a couple of pints in the evening). However, in more recent decades this logic has been flipped on its head.
The commercialisation of the game from the beginning of the 1990s ceded contractual power to elite players. Today they exercise extensive control over the terms and conditions under which they sell their labour-power. Jet-propelled by player agents, they are able to secure lucrative transfer deals, media rights and vast salaries. Over the period 2015-24, the big five leagues in Europe (EPL, Bundesliga, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1) spent far more than they generated, with the Premier League accounting for roughly half the losses incurred in net transfers.5 Every transfer presents a lucrative opportunity for players and their agents to lever yet more lucrative windfalls, wage cheques and media rights add-ons.
Elite football clubs in the EPL succumb, because they face a number of problems in curbing the market power of elite players. Firstly, any potential solution would have to be Europe-wide, because no single club would choose to place formal wage caps, if others did not follow suit. Secondly, highly paid footballers add to the glamour of soccer, placing them in the same bracket as globally recognised actors and performers in the entertainment and music industries, who are able to attract lucrative corporate and media sponsorship. Thirdly, fans place heavy demands on their club to cough up what is required to ‘buy’ the best talent possible, to the point of mounting up debt and absorbing club profits. Having ceded control in the market place, clubs look to control their labour process.
Extracting labour
Elite football clubs have been determined to extract as much labour as they can out of elite players, to the point of attempting to control their entire lifeworld. Sport science has been deployed to exact more control over the footballing labour process. Traditional methods have gone to the wall, replaced by state-of-the-art training regimes and matchday preparation.6 The arrival of ‘big data’ and GPS technology have transformed club capability to quantify, measure and record every facet of individual and team, including movement in training and on matchday.
Clubs have at their fingertips information on ‘average number of sprints per team’, ‘recovery time between high-intensity sprints’, how many times a player touches the ball, what areas of the pitch players cover.7 In-game intelligence data generate statistical models to pinpoint each individual player’s capacity to keep the ball when under pressure, relative to their position in the team.8
They make systematic use of biomechanics, psychology, computer-aided design, specialist nutrition and sports physiology. In this respect the modern football club no longer lags behind other sports in applying the accumulated wealth of scientific knowledge toward achieving peak body performance: sport science - from big data, dietetics to vitamin D beds - has firmly embedded itself in the professional lives of elite footballers.
That is all the more necessary when elite footballers not only train more, but play more matches, as clubs sweat their asset in-season and pre-season by hawking squads around the globe to ‘build the brand’. The elective affinity between the latter year-on-year grind and the use of legal stimulants such as caffeine pills and snus pouches, along with ‘therapeutic use exemptions’, such as medication for treating asthma and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, is palpable.
Away from the grind and amidst the paradox of immense wealth and gated isolation, the elite footballer lifeworld is broken up by adherence to dietary regimes, digital tracking of biometrics and monitoring of a player’s social media output - their lives and bodies relentlessly monitored, utilising wearable sensors and AI-driven data analysis.9 The aim is to ensure elite footballers are constantly under the gaze of a sport science-infused labour process committed to prune and nurture their bodies into finely tuned performers.
The Marxist term for the above is the formal and substantive subordination of labour by capital. And we know why clubs buy into this individually and collectively: it raises ‘player productivity’ (the performance principle), and raises the asset value of players, especially when they internalise the mantra of health, training and dietary discipline. We also have a good idea why players tend to ‘buy in’ to their formal and substantive subordination to their capitalist employers. Mainly because sport science techniques help increase player peak performance, lessen injuries and extend careers at the highest level, especially when they are expected to play more matches per season than ever before.10 Even when intruding into player lifestyle, it may be more or less tolerated, more or less embraced by elite players due to the benefits sport science has for sustaining the saleability of their talents.
At the same time football players continue to resist their status as a commodity, in multiple ways - from partial withdrawal of their labour, their effort and talent, to refusing dietary regimes and indulging in what would be defined as excessive lifestyles. So-called disciplinary breaches - from time-keeping, on-field aggression and weight gain to partying - reflect this resistance.
Two-edged sword
In so far as elite clubs succeed in their quest to control their football labour process, and in so far as elite players succumb to their Faustian pact, then the modern elite player is more likely to be attracted to their latest team performance pie charts than their proverbial post-match pork pie and chips. But whether this will kill off the aesthetics of the ‘beautiful game’ is another matter.
Marx approached the formal and real subordination of labour by capital as one of struggle contestation, viewing science as a two-edged sword in that struggle. Science and technique “conditions the parameters of our lives at a given moment in time; it doesn’t determine our lot, control our fate”.11 In which case, while sport science can subordinate, quantify and standardise the matchday experience, yet it can also underpin the more consistent execution of iconic football artistry, completed in the blink of an eye. No doubt the appliance of sport science holds the capacity to enhance elite skills and help to foreground the aesthetic, moral and ‘gratuitous logic’ of the game.12
Nevertheless, the over-arching reality is that of the exploitative dynamic between the market and work situation elite footballers and club owners operate in. A contested terrain in which sport science facilitates player exploitation and aids the commodification of elite football as an abstract performance imperative. At present this reality suffocates much of what passes for ‘beauty’ in elite football.
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See G Debord Comments on the society of the spectacle London 1998.↩︎
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www.theguardian.com/football/2021/nov/19/premier-league-returns-title-race-chelsea-manchester-city-liverpool.↩︎
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www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/scott-mctominay-napoli-parade-smoking-35297151.↩︎
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T Reilly and AM Williams Science and soccer London 2004, p1.↩︎
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www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010937.↩︎
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www.rightpatient.com/guest-blog-posts/how-biometric-technology-is-used-to-monitor-athletic-potential.↩︎
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www.theguardian.com/football/2024/jan/08/feel-the-burnout-the-curse-of-too-much-football-can-only-be-cured-by-player-power.↩︎
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F Kew Sport, social problems and issues London 1997.↩︎