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.
