17.09.2026

Not all about profit

Football attracts millions of devoted followers. Yet, when it comes to the bottom line, many clubs show regular losses. Despite that, narrow-minded left commentators regularly complain that money and the pursuit of profit is ruining the beautiful game. It is more complex than that, writes Carl Collins

Roman Abramovich emerged onto the global stage when he purchased Chelsea Football Club for £140 million in 2003. Starting off selling plastic toys from a market stall in Moscow, he made his money through the scams, rigged auctions and outright robbery perpetuated by the emerging capitalist class of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. By the mid-1990s he was a billionaire and one of the so-called oligarchs.

With Abramovich’s almost unlimited money available, the club spent over £2 billion on players and £90 million on managers.¹ Chelsea went on to win five league titles, five FA Cups, not to mention two Champions Leagues and two Europa League titles.

However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the UK government sanctioned him because of his “close relationship” with Vladimir Putin. Abramovich failed a “stewardship and care” test and was forced to sell his 100% share in the club in 2022 for £2.5 billion. He did not receive a penny - it was even suggested that a £1.6 billion loan owed to him as part of the overall sale should be given to a “charitable foundation”.² Interest on the funds from that sale of Chelsea have reached £175 million, with the company holding the still frozen funds, Fordstam, being described as “the most profitable football-related business in the world” (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the lack of profitability among high-spending football clubs).³

Modern professional football clubs operate with enormous debts and losses, requiring sustained injections of money, often via shadowy networks of offshore companies and loans (such as those Abramovich apparently used). In the 2024-25 season, the 20 English Premier League clubs recorded combined pre-tax losses of £948 million.⁴

This financial model should challenge the lazy assumption - held by many leftwing commentators - that wealthy owners seek nothing but profit. However, the financial relationship between owner and club cannot be reduced to such a crass calculation of purchase, production and profitable sale. That approach ignores fixes on exchange-value and ignores use-value.

For some owners, clubs have a use-value that is entirely subjective. Ownership of a globally recognised sporting institution like Chelsea can be a ‘trophy asset’, purchased to boost prestige, ego and symbolic status. It can elevate the already mega-rich into the role of an extraordinarily popular saviour, and not only for season ticket fans and hardcore followers.

Abramovich reportedly had a shortlist of clubs to purchase, settling on Chelsea due to its location in the capital. So he bought the club almost casually, at a whim. Nonetheless, he was hugely popular amongst supporters … especially when the silverware started to come in. Equally, buying a football team can bring global recognition and therefore enhanced influence (ie, Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour and his Abu Dhabi-based Newton Investment and Development fund). That is commonly called ‘soft power’ or ‘sportswashing.’ Needless to say, Abu Dhabi is a hereditary absolute monarchy where all executive, legislative and judicial power is vested in his highness, the sheik.

Straightjacket

A Marxist friend once offered an analogy for the failure of mainstream economists to foresee the 2008 crisis. Imagine a conventional economist standing on a beach, looking inland. The birds are tweeting, the sand is golden, the grass is green. All appears well. But approaching from behind is a huge tidal wave.

The point is not that the economists see nothing: they see plenty. The problem is that their conceptual framework determines what counts as significant. They look in the direction their model tells them to, while everything outside it becomes irrelevant, unknowable or simply invisible.

Crude economic reductionism makes a similar mistake when applied to football. Spend some time around almost any British football ground before kick-off and you encounter frying onions, raucous chants, pint glasses clinking, grandparents guiding grandchildren through turnstiles, friends renewing relationships through match-day rituals. Laughter, discussion and belonging. Football remains a living culture with deep historical roots.

Yet, viewed through a purely economic lens, the people disappear. Grandparents and grandchildren become just consumers; songs become monetisable entertainment; friendship, identity and memory become invisible. What remains are commodities, wages, ticket prices, ownership structures and revenue streams. The economic forms obscure the social reality. The problem is not that crass economic reductionism sees nothing: it just becomes incapable of seeing everything.

Too many so-called Marxists can commit the same error. Still looking inland (albeit from an opposite ideological viewpoint), they begin with the conclusion that capitalism is the fundamental problem and work backwards. Ownership, profit, exploitation and commodification become exclusive categories, through which everything else is interpreted. The economic structure is real, but becomes so dominant that culture and society disappear. They miss the potential tidal wave.

The left in Britain commonly argues that football was once a working class game, but capitalism has turned it into a business; billionaires commodified it. Hence, supporters became customers; prices became exploitative and television and sponsorship corrupts everything. The solution is usually ‘democratic ownership’. There is truth in each of these individual propositions, but the problem is the philistine assumptions connecting them: it is, in Marxist terms, crass economism. By collapsing culture, psychology and identity into pure pounds-and-pence economics, they misunderstand working class life.

Economistic left

Three examples: John Reid’s Reclaim the game,⁵ Peter Taaffe’s ‘Is capitalism killing football?’⁶ and the Socialist Worker’s ‘Flagging up a problem with football’.⁷ Each identifies real features of football under capitalism, but each leaves something important out.

Reid is a member of the Socialist Party in England and Wales. His take on football is dominated by exchange-value - cost, prices, profits and ownership. He largely forgets football’s use-value for fans (and some owners). Taaffe - former SPEW gensec - exposes the exploitation of earlier generations of footballers, from maximum wages to restrictions on changing clubs. But, though top-flight players are nowadays multimillionaires, he argues that modern players have “lost something” - namely their identification with the communities they came from. A case of ‘you have nothing to lose but your Bentleys, mansions and gorgeous wives and girlfriends’.

The SWP, whilst identifying genuine conflicts between owners, players and supporters, reduces football’s politics to ‘capital versus labour’ - owners versus workers, profit versus fans. What gets neglected is the cultural terrain on which those conflicts are fought.

To move beyond this narrow straightjacket we need not only to return to some of Marxism’s core concepts - value, commodity fetishism, alienation - but also to reference Antonio Gramsci’s sometimes useful remarks about culture and hegemony.

When a fan purchases a football shirt, although it has exchange-value for manufacturers, sponsors and the club, for the person who wears it its use-value can be social, emotional and historical. The shirt, scarf and match ticket often represent community, regional pride and collective belonging. To reduce this to a mere con is missing the point. Fans are not simply passive objects. They routinely make their feelings and wants known: organising walkouts over ticket prices, displaying banners against owners or boycotting sponsors. They thereby assert that the club means something that cannot be reduced to its market price.

As we have seen in recent seasons, the modern transfer market offers another stable example of crude economics. Individual players are quantified: ‘Player X is worth £X million’ - as though that price were an intrinsic property of the person. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism helps explain what is concealed. The price represents a network of social labour and institutions: clubs, scouts, coaches, broadcasters, agents and governing bodies, but also families, communities, teachers and volunteers who developed a player from childhood. Modern football academies systematically take thousands of predominantly working class children and subject them to physical and psychological training and discipline in the hope of producing professional labour-power.⁸ When one emerges as the ‘finished product’, the collective labour behind them - and the 99% discarded along the way - disappear behind the price tag.

The transfer fee therefore does more than turn a footballer into a financial asset: it obscures the human labour and social relations which created that commodity.

Perhaps more controversial is applying the label ‘working class’ to elite footballers. Marx’s approach is not simply confined to those on low wages: it concerns workers’ lack of control over their labour and what it produces. Perhaps a footballer can therefore be classified as working class despite earning £150,000 a week. Their creativity and the emotional experience of the game become commodities packaged and sold by clubs, broadcasters and sponsors. Their labour is shaped by data, tactical systems (managers), fitness and performance demands, and travel schedules. The modern football calendar, expanded to generate greater revenues, means more fixtures, longer journeys and television-driven kick-off times

On the other hand, a few players become marketable brands in their own right. The likes of Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé and Erling Haaland bank many millions through highly lucrative sponsorship deals and marketing products on their own platforms. They are capitalists in their own right. The idea that they belong to the same class as the low paid club staff (stewards, caterers, etc) and that all they are is just workers selling their labour-power within the same enterprise is questionable to say the least.

Ownership

The wider problem for organisations like SPEW and the SWP is that their view of the working class is one dimensional: basically wages, hours and conditions. But there is more to life than being a wage-slave for seven or eight hours a day. Outside the workplace workers have the chance to be free and assert themselves as human beings (albeit tightly confined by relative poverty and lack of social control).

This is where football comes in. On the one hand, owners and governing bodies attempt to establish a ‘common sense’ when it comes to setting ticket prices, deciding on transfer sales and the hiring and firing of managers. But because supporters are not just passive consumers, they make their feelings known - and in no uncertain terms - when it comes to failing managers, unsuccessful strikers and owners who are deemed greedy, arrogant and out-of-touch. The battle over what a football club means is therefore a small but not insignificant war over culture, identity and, potentially, control.

Economics is not irrelevant. We are in favour of fan ownership, caps on ticket prices and easy access. Corporate and royal boxes are certainly an affront to any democrat.

Of course, it is easy to over-egg what can be achieved under capitalism. For most fans what matters above all is the success of their team. That is why many positively welcome ‘super benefactors’ such as Sheikh Mansour (Manchester City), Yasir Al-Rumayyan (Newcastle United) and Roman Abramovich (Chelsea). They get joy, self-fulfilment and bask in the glory of what huge wealth can buy.

That said, for all their limitations, it is worth noting that FC Barcelona, Real Madrid, Athletic Bilbao, Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund operate under fan-owned or member-controlled systems - the socio model (Spain) and the 50+1 rule (Germany). Highly successful clubs all. Their ownership models can be copied, adapted, developed and extended.

www.espn.co.uk/football/story/_/id/37628905/roman-abramovich-sold-chelsea-his-legacy-club-england.↩︎
Ibid.↩︎
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/11/roman-abramovich-frozen-chelsea-sale-proceeds-earnings.↩︎
www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jul/08/premier-league-clubs-pre-tax-losses-2024-25-deloitte-annual-review-football-finance.↩︎
J Reid Reclaim the game Socialist Publications 2005.↩︎
www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/1729/16-11-2006/is-capitalism-killing-football.↩︎
socialistworker.co.uk/comment/flagging-up-a-problem-with-football.↩︎
S Kuper and S Szymanski Soccernomics London 2012.↩︎