Non-Football: The Hyperrationalized Nothingness of Sporting Late Capitalism

Over the past four decades, the origination and remarkable growth of the English Premier League (EPL, has transformed English football from what was a relatively parochial expression of a predominantly urban working class culture, into a mass entertainment-driven, multiple revenue-streamed, and globally consumed sport spectacle. As such, this discussion engages and extends the voluminous critical scholarship on the EPL as an instructive object of cultural economic inquiry. This is realized through a contextual model of the EPL as a hyper-rationalized non-football assemblage, largely based on a synthetic reading of Manuel DeLanda, Marc Augé, and George Ritzer’s conceptualizing. This model forges an understanding of the relationship between the EPL and the operations of power and power relations within the broader contextual formation, and highlights how contemporary sport forms serve to normalize conjoined late capitalist, neoliberal, and transnational logics. Moreover, the non-football model identifies how (in various ways: non-clubs; non-fans; non-stadia; non-events; and, non-spectacles) the hyper-rationalizing forces driving the EPL create facsimiles or simulations of the game’s traditional passions, relations, and communities. In short, the EPL has come to evoke an expression of football nothingess: a formation rooted in the determining structures, and determined experiences, of late capitalist cultural standardization and superficiality. The new football model epitomized by the EPL thus cynically compromises–as it aggressively financializes, commercializes, and spectacularizes–the game’s cultural, social, and political histories and possibilities, while efficiently reproducing the ideological and affective commitments of the prevailing political economic order.