The beautiful game sold off: capital, power and the Manchester City verdict

 The beautiful game sold off: capital, power and the Manchester City verdict

In late September 2026 an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of nearly every charge levelled against them by the Premier League. Over nine seasons the club had used “sham” commercial contracts to disguise more than £830 million of funding from its Abu Dhabi owners as sponsorship income, understated costs, misstated accounts and systematically breached spending limits. The ruling confirmed what many supporters had long suspected: the most successful English club of the modern era had been constructed, in significant part, on the deliberate distortion of the rules that were supposed to keep competition honest. City have appealed and continue to proclaim their innocence. The deeper scandal is not whether one set of accountants outwitted another. It is that football’s governing structures have spent decades creating the conditions in which such an operation became both possible and rational.

That process did not begin in Manchester. It is the logical endpoint of a transformation that three major critical works on the game have traced from different angles: David Goldblatt’s vast global history ' The Ball Is Round', John Samuels’s 2008 warning 'The Beautiful Game Is Over', and Peter and David Kennedy’s Marxist analysis "Football in Neo-Liberal Times'

Goldblatt shows that modern football was never merely a game. It was forged in the industrial cities of Victorian Britain, where factories, railways, newspapers and regulated leisure time turned chaotic folk contests into a standardised, schedulable, saleable product. Working-class communities claimed it as their own, turning clubs into expressions of local identity and belonging. Empire then carried the game across the world; colonised peoples appropriated it, turning a British export into a vehicle of national assertion, anti-colonial resistance and, later, soft power. By the late twentieth century the same forces that industrialised football league capital, media, the state—were globalising it. Television rights replaced gate receipts as the dominant revenue stream. Clubs became brands. Players became mobile labour. The World Cup became a planetary ritual of nationalism and commerce. The ball remained round; the world around it became fiercely unequal.

Samuels, writing in 2008, focused the same analysis on the English elite. He saw a self-reinforcing cycle: success brought television money, which bought better players, which produced more success. A small group of clubs would pull away from the rest; competitive balance would wither; traditional supporters would be reduced to customers while the game’s social role eroded. The subsequent years vindicated the core of his argument. The Premier League became the richest domestic competition on earth. The identity of the elite shifted—Manchester City rose to dominate under state-backed ownership, Tottenham established themselves as a financial power—but the concentration of resources did not. Foreign and private-equity capital flooded in. Stadiums were rebuilt as consumption spaces. Kick-off times were rearranged for global television. Ticket prices, shirt prices and subscription costs soared. The European Super League proposal of 2021 was the purest expression of the logic Samuels had described: the biggest clubs attempting to lock in the most lucrative matches and guarantee revenue against the uncertainty of ordinary competition. The furious backlash from supporters forced a temporary retreat, proving that the traditional fan base still possessed residual power. Yet the underlying economic structure remained intact.

The Kennedys supply the theoretical sharpness missing from purely descriptive accounts. Drawing on Marxist political economy, they argue that neo-liberal football is not a smooth capitalist success story. Capital has transformed clubs into commercial enterprises, supporters into customers, and stadiums into controlled retail environments. Yet the commercial value of a football club still depends on social relationships that money cannot fully manufacture: generational loyalty, local identity, emotional attachment, the sense that “this is our club.” That dependence produces permanent contradiction. Owners and investors seek to extract value from the culture; the culture resists being fully commodified. Attempts at “supporter participation” through official channels risk becoming what the Kennedys call the “recolonisation” of fandom—inviting fans into governance only on terms that leave private ownership and commercial priorities unchallenged. Autonomous supporter movements, Ultras cultures and grassroots alternatives matter precisely because they refuse that incorporation and assert that football can still be organised around community, democratic control and mutual support rather than profit.

Manchester City is the purest contemporary illustration of these dynamics. A club with deep roots in a working-class city was acquired by a Gulf state projecting soft power. Enormous resources were poured in. Success followed with almost mechanical regularity. The 2026 verdict alleges that a significant portion of the commercial income that allowed the club to claim compliance with financial rules was in reality disguised owner funding. Whether or not the appeal succeeds, the episode exposes the central contradiction: a competition whose rules are designed to limit spending has been systematically gamed by those with the deepest pockets and the most sophisticated legal and financial apparatus. The result is a league in which the gap between the wealthiest clubs and the rest remains vast, smaller clubs face chronic insecurity, and the notion of a level playing field is treated as a nostalgic fiction.

None of this means football has been entirely conquered. Leicester City’s 2016 title remains the great counter-example to pure financial determinism. Supporters have organised, protested, and in the Super League case forced a retreat. Across Europe, Ultra groups and autonomous projects continue to treat the game as something more than a product. Goldblatt’s deepest insight still holds: the emotional power of football ultimately comes from ordinary people who keep recreating it across political regimes, economic crises and technological change. Governments, FIFA, broadcasters and billionaire owners can manipulate the industry; they cannot manufacture the loyalty that makes a club matter.

The radical conclusion follows. The crisis of modern football is not a series of isolated scandals. It is the predictable outcome of treating a social institution as a commodity while pretending the two can coexist without conflict. The Manchester City case is not an aberration. It is the system working as designed—concentrating power, converting community assets into investment vehicles, and then expressing surprise when the rules are bent to protect the investment. Reclaiming the game requires more than better regulation or another round of financial fair play. It requires challenging the ownership model itself, building genuine democratic control by supporters and communities, and recognising that the value of football was never the television contract or the sponsorship deal. It was the collective life that people built around a simple, round ball. That life is still there. The question is whether it will be allowed to survive the corporations that now claim to own it.

Who belongs to Glasgow ?

 Glasgow’s anti-immigration protests: scapegoating, history and the fight for working-class solidarity

Glasgow’s streets have become a sharp edge of Britain’s immigration crisis. As the local authority housing more asylum seekers than any other in the UK—nearly 4,000 at recent counts, with refugees forming a large share of homelessness applications—the city’s working-class districts have seen sustained anti-migrant protests. These range from local actions outside suspected HMO (Houses in Multiple Occupancy) properties and former care homes to larger city-centre confrontations. Behind them lie genuine pressures of housing shortage, underfunded services and dispersal policies, channelled into nationalist and racial scapegoating by the far right. The mainstream left and pro-migrant campaigns have largely answered with moral condemnation and defence of managed immigration. A consistent third-camp socialist position rejects both: neither “send them home” chauvinism nor liberal defence of borders and austerity offers a working-class way forward.

From online agitation to street mobilisation.

The pattern intensified after the Southport murders of 2024 and continued through 2025–2026. Early city-centre gatherings in George Square and near City Chambers were often heavily outnumbered by Stand Up to Racism (SUTR) and trade-union counter-protests. By 2026 the focus shifted into neighbourhoods—Possilpark, Springburn, Castlemilk, Cranhill, the Gorbals, Shettleston and Parkhead—where Saltires appeared, roads were blocked and chants of “send them home” and “our streets” targeted perceived asylum accommodation. Online networks amplified claims, sometimes accurate, often rumour, about crime or housing competition.

Larger set-piece events returned to Glasgow Green. On 25 July 2026 an anti-immigration rally linked to Unite the Clans (with roots in anti-hotel protests) and activists connected to Patriotic Alternative and the Homeland Party confronted a larger SUTR-supported counter-demonstration. Disorder spread into the city centre; Police Scotland reported 15 arrests for assault, offensive weapons and related offences, later recovering evidence of premeditation. On 12 September the Pink Ladies brought hundreds to the same site, met by an SUTR and Scottish Trades Union Congress (STUC) counter-protest kept apart by police and ending without serious disorder. On 7 October a masked group marched through Shettleston and Parkhead; a 32-year-old man was charged with alleged assault on an officer. There is a kind of cat and mouse game going on between the masked youths and Police. Young Rangers Casuals also seem to be involved following a lead from events in the Six Counties.

These actions mark an evolution from scattered online campaigning and hotel protests into a visible street presence that seeks to present itself as the authentic voice of working-class communities while portraying refugees and anti-racists as threats. Organisational links between respectable protesters, electoral right-wingers and harder fascist currents should not be exaggerated, yet the process normalises harder language and provides recruitment opportunities. The central question is not whether residents may raise neighbourhood concerns, but whether those concerns are answered by collective action against the conditions producing insecurity or redirected against people with the least power—often fleeing war or severe hardship.

Glasgow’s Migration history

Glasgow has repeatedly incorporated people whom sections of the established population once regarded as alien or culturally incompatible. Irish fleeing the Famine, Highlanders escaping the Clearances, Jews escaping pogroms, Poles unwilling to return to a Stalinist state after the war,  Italians and later Pakistanis all arrived under pressure of desperate conditions.

Their experiences differed, yet none fits a simple opposition between a fixed native population and intrusive newcomers. The city’s working-class identity has been continually remade by those who arrived, settled, worked, organised and raised families. The contemporary anti-immigration movement freezes that process at a convenient moment, presenting the existing population as unquestioned owners and new arrivals as a problem to be managed. History directly challenges that picture.

Police: public order is not anti-racism

Police Scotland has treated the protests as a public-order challenge, deploying significant resources, separating rival groups, facilitating lawful protest while intervening against violence, and pursuing retrospective arrests via CCTV. After the July Green confrontation officers reported 15 arrests; further operations followed later events. Statements stress the right to protest alongside zero tolerance for intimidation or hate crime; in some cases police publicly corrected false online claims about properties or individuals.

There is a legitimate role for policing in preventing assaults and protecting people from intimidation. Migrants and asylum seekers have the same right to physical safety as anyone else. Yet the police are not an anti-racist force. Their task is managing public order, not transforming the social relations that produce racism. Separating demonstrators may prevent immediate confrontation; it cannot challenge the narratives that cast neighbours as enemies. A masked group attempting to intimidate a neighbourhood and a peaceful crowd opposing racism are not politically interchangeable simply because both occupy the same street. Anti-racists must demand protection for those facing racist threats while retaining political independence from the police and opposing unnecessary restrictions on peaceful protest. Democratic freedoms cannot depend on whether the authorities approve of the politics being expressed.

Stand Up to Racism, the STUC and the limits of mobilisation

SUTR, supported by the STUC, individual unions and community organisations, has organised the larger counter-demonstrations. The September Green event, attended by STUC general secretary Roz Foyer and politicians, showed the potential breadth of response. Trade-union involvement is especially valuable: unions can link opposition to racism with the daily experiences of workers, including migrants facing insecure employment, wage theft and barriers to organising, and can challenge employers who profit from workforce division.

Yet counter-mobilisation risks remaining a series of defensive demonstrations. There is a danger that anti-racism becomes confined to rallies, declarations and appeals for tolerance. These have their place, but they cannot substitute for sustained organisation in workplaces and neighbourhoods. Not every person drawn to an anti-immigration protest is an irredeemable fascist; openly racist organisers must be confronted, but those influenced by their arguments can be won through political engagement and practical solidarity. The STUC and affiliates have the capacity to go further: public meetings in affected areas, support for migrant workers in disputes, campaigns for properly funded services, and alliances between established residents and newer arrivals. That would make anti-racism a material force in working-class life rather than a position affirmed only on demonstration days.

A Third-Camp Assessment

Capitalism produces both mass migration—driven by war, climate disruption, imperialist predation and unequal development—and the housing and service crises that turn newcomers into scapegoats. The far-right response is reactionary: it divides the working class along national and racial lines, diverting anger from landlords, bosses and the state onto the most vulnerable. The liberal and soft-left response is inadequate: it treats borders as a neutral administrative question and reduces politics to anti-racism without a programme for workers’ control of housing, jobs and services. The result is polarisation in which working-class anger is left largely to nationalists while the left appears as defender of the existing border regime.

An independent socialist response rejects both camps. It includes:

- Defending migrants and asylum seekers against racist intimidation, discriminatory treatment and collective punishment, while upholding the right to seek asylum and opposing immigration controls that restrict the free movement of labour.  

- Confronting material insecurity through campaigns for social housing, requisition of empty properties, massive public house-building under workers’ control, properly funded services, secure employment and decent wages—rather than allowing scarce resources to be framed as competition between racial or national groups.  

- Organising across workplaces to unite migrant and non-migrant workers against exploitative employers, underpayment and insecure conditions, and against private contractors such as those who profit from asylum accommodation.  

- Defending democratic rights consistently: opposing political violence and intimidation while resisting unjustified restrictions on peaceful protest.  

- Building independent political organisation with a clear socialist programme, rather than allowing anti-racist campaigning to become an appendage of the Labour Party, the SNP or other established forces. Trade unions should mobilise under their own banners rather than outsourcing anti-racist work.

Socialists need not pretend every question of population change or public-service capacity has an automatic answer. They must, however, reject the presumption that migrants should bear the costs of policy failures for which they are not responsible. Resources questions are answered through democratic planning, investment and redistribution, not racial exclusion.

From the Gorbals to Glasgow 

The historical Gorbals—shaped by generations of migration, poverty and industrial change—was also a place where communities built institutions, mutual support and participation in the city’s wider life. The far right offers a story of dispossession in which migrants explain the loss of security and belonging, promising that exclusion can restore what has been lost. Exclusion cannot rebuild housing, reverse deindustrialisation or improve wages; it can only redirect anger away from those with power.

Anti-racist organisations have shown the far right can be challenged in the streets. The next task is to make that challenge durable: turning demonstration-day solidarity into year-round collective organisation. That requires a labour movement prepared to organise all workers, an anti-racist movement willing to confront economic inequality, and a socialist politics that refuses to divide the working class along national lines. Glasgow’s history does not guarantee such an outcome, but it demonstrates that the city’s communities have repeatedly been transformed by migration and that those transformations have become part of its collective life. The choice is whether to defend that shared history through active solidarity or allow the far right to rewrite it as a story of competing peoples.