Has money ruined sports?: Cultural critics

On a Saturday in the Bundesliga, you can stand in the Südtribüne at Borussia Dortmund for under fifteen euros. The Yellow Wall. 24,454 people, standing, in a single steep bank that shakes when they sing. The German fifty-plus-one rule requires that a club’s members hold a majority of voting rights. No oligarch can buy the club. No sovereign wealth fund can rename it. The beer costs three euros. The best atmosphere in world football is also the least commercially optimized. That is not a coincidence.

Then there is RB Leipzig.

Red Bull purchased the license of a fifth-division club in 2009, rebranded it, replaced the crest, installed corporate-approved members to satisfy the letter of fifty-plus-one while gutting its spirit, invested hundreds of millions, and built a Champions League contender in a decade. When the Südtribüne unfurled that banner — Football is for you and me, not for fucking industry — they were writing Leipzig’s obituary. And their own warning.

The thing that is dying had a specific shape. A club belonged to a city the way a church belongs to a parish — not as property but as inheritance. You did not choose your club. Your father took you, or your street was zoned for it, or you grew up hearing the chants through the walls. The relationship was non-transferable and non-rational. When Bill Shankly said football is not a matter of life and death — it’s much more important than that, he was describing the emotional architecture of a working-class community whose public life ran through the stadium.

That architecture is being demolished by people who understand the market value of tribalism but not the tribalism itself.

Multi-club ownership is the model’s logical endpoint. City Football Group owns Manchester City, New York City FC, Melbourne City, Yokohama F. Marinos, Girona, Palermo, and seven others — thirteen clubs across five continents. A twenty-year-old signed in Uruguay trains in Belgium, is loaned to Spain, and debuts at Manchester City. The clubs are nodes in a network. The supporters of Lommel SK — a Belgian second-division club that existed for decades as a community institution — now cheer for a subsidiary.

Manchester City under Abu Dhabi ownership has played some of the most beautiful football ever produced. The Premier League’s global entertainment product is extraordinary. We do not dispute this. Money did not make the game worse to watch. It made the game mean less. And the distinction matters, because the meaning is what created the audience the market now monetizes. Nobody starts watching football because the production values are high. They start because someone they love takes them to a ground and the ground shakes and the feeling is irreplaceable. The money is strip-mining the deposit it depends on.

Standing sections are the physical evidence. The Hillsborough disaster in 1989 killed ninety-seven Liverpool supporters. The Taylor Report mandated all-seater stadiums — a necessary safety response that also transformed the experience. Standing creates density, noise, physical communion. Seating disperses it. Premium seating economics replaced those sections with hospitality boxes that generate more revenue per square foot and less sound per human being.

The stadiums are quieter. The television broadcast pumps crowd noise through the mix. The product simulates the atmosphere the product destroyed.

Highbury became the Emirates Stadium. Candlestick Park became 3Com Park, then Monster Park, then Candlestick again briefly, then the 49ers left for Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara — forty miles from San Francisco, because the land was cheaper. The name is the last link between a physical place and the community that filled it. When the name is sold, the link is sold. The tribalism is monetized, but the tribalism was also real, and the people doing the monetizing cannot tell the difference.

Where we concede ground: We romanticize an era that was genuinely exclusionary. The football terraces of the 1970s and 1980s were sites of racism, hooliganism, and violence that we cannot honestly defend. The money that transformed the Premier League also transformed its demographics — more women, more families, more racial diversity in the stands. Pricing out the working class is a real harm, but the working-class culture we mourn was not welcoming to everyone who showed up. The nostalgia is selective. We also concede that the global audience is itself a form of community — millions of people who will never visit Anfield but whose love for Liverpool is genuine, sustained, and meaningful on its own terms. Our insistence on the primacy of local, physical fandom can shade into gatekeeping, and gatekeeping is the thing we accuse the market of doing.

What would change our mind: If a major professional sports league implemented the full commercial model — no community ownership requirements, no fan governance, no restrictions on multi-club ownership, full commercial naming rights, premium pricing at every level — and the result, measured over a generation, was a deepening rather than a thinning of fan identity, intergenerational transmission of loyalty, and communal significance, we would concede that what we call the soul of the sport was never housed where we thought it was. The test is not attendance or viewership. The test is whether your grandchild will care.

Read the full synthesis: Has money ruined sports?