A 90-minute space in the week that was truly theirs: English football fans and the European Super League

The phrase ‘created by the poor, stolen by the rich’, could be used about many aspects of capitalism, but in summer 2020, it featured heavily on the banners held up by UK football fans protesting the creation of a European Super League. The nature of this (at least temporarily) successful popular uprising has not been given its full political due. Perhaps because whether elite football teams play in a nationally organised, highly commodified global league, or in an internationally organised one, may seem to make little difference. But I want to argue that this moment can provide an instructive way of thinking about the notion of what counts as foundational in cultural terms. What was at stake here was not just a sense of local identity, and not just a sense of class identity – though that was certainly present – but the pride that people took in the historical making of these clubs, created by working-class people in particular locales. To have them internationally owned or recognised is one thing; to have them removed from place altogether is quite another. A democratised version of arts and culture has to pay attention to what people value and what they are willing to fight for, whether it is local libraries or local football clubs. It has to re-localise culture without parochialism. And it has to make room for the spectacular as well as the everyday. The European Super League may seem an unlikely starting point, but the campaign against it offers rich material for precisely that re-examination.