Football is described as the world’s best-known and most popular ball sport, measured by the number of ‘participants and spectators,’ according to Britannica. The introduction of football as recreation is depicted by Britannica, and this is emphasized in Henry Lefebvre’s book The Critique of Everyday Life. Although he scholarly criticized capitalism, Lefebvre’s leisure theory defines leisure as a space where people can escape the oppression and fatigue of everyday life. This kind of leisure time that is not oppressed and fatigued is the fleeting peace of everyday life. This is the main premise within this essay wherein football can be seen to belong to the category of leisure, contributing towards peace and tranquility in life through release against the oppressive tendencies of the system. This, together with political economy throughout the period of capitalism, rests within a battlefield where much questioning, consideration, and opinion is involved.
We see men screaming and celebrating, seemingly releasing the negative energy they accumulate during the exhausting hours of daily life. But the critical question that could reshape our thinking is: Does football genuinely offer a solution to alleviating the struggles we face in difficult times, or is it merely a form of escapism, transitioning us from one form of exhaustion to another? To address this question in today’s context, we must consider the costs of football matches each year. According to a report published by the Manchester United official website, the team’s total losses in 2024 were £113,159. When comparing these losses to the deaths of almost 25,000 people due to hunger, unsafe water, unsafe food, and other related causes, we realize that football does not resist the very system that causes these massive human losses and challenges, which threaten human dignity and survival.
The problem also lies in the role football plays in everyday life. While it may serve as a form of catharsis for the oppression imposed by the system, the danger is that this release of tension may lead to a state of disorientation. The spontaneous anger arising from daily injustices is released without being directed meaningfully, resulting in an emotional void. This void stems from the lack of organization of this rejection in a way that aligns with the nature of the grievance. As a result, a form of falsity emerges in the release process.
If football doesn’t guarantee human survival or contribute to it in any significant way, then there seems to be a problem in the entire situation. This problem is rooted in the fact that some people view football as a cosmetic distraction from daily life, while others are fighting to survive. In the case of entertainment, there is a false, superficial feeling of survival—one that may be associated with hunger or pressure—to continue living tomorrow without addressing the implications of that pressure. Based on this argument, one can begin to question the role football plays in daily life: Is it a form of fake entertainment or a distraction rather than genuine enjoyment? Does it misrepresent the peaceful moments of daily life?
This leads us to philosophically examine this relationship through the lens of political economy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Dialectic of the Master-Slave relationship seems a useful framework for this inquiry. Jean Hyppolite, a professional reader of Hegel, described the master-slave dialectic as a relationship of “recognition” between both sides, a matter of “self-consciousness” that cannot be achieved without the self-consciousness of another. Additionally, it is a matter of external influences shaping internal realities. The interaction between the two parties continues until “unhappy consciousness” emerges, a third stage following stoicism and skepticism.
For Karl Marx and his followers, such as György Lukács, Hegel’s idealist approach to self-consciousness should be interpreted from a materialist perspective. This is why Marx reinterpreted Hegel’s dialectic, among other theories, within the context of real-life socioeconomic relations—specifically, the bourgeois-proletariat divide. Marx doesn’t just diagnose these relations; he offers a strategy for the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” where the working class no longer needs to sell its labor to the bourgeois to survive. In other words, the proletariat would no longer face alienation, exploitation, or what Lukács described as “reification” in his book History and Class Consciousness.
When people are exploited, or when their ability to survive is shaped by socioeconomic conditions, there is a misrecognition from those controlling the means of production and profit-making (i.e., the wealthy) against those who struggle to survive. Simulating the conflicts between the master-slave and bourgeois-proletariat relationships in today’s capitalized football world, there is a conflict between those who enjoy football and those who suffer just to live. This conflict shows that the clear-cut opposition of the master-slave dialectic or the division between the working class, middle class, and wealthy elites is no longer as straightforward. The contemporary world is more complex and multifaceted in terms of these conflicts. Football, for instance, has become a symbol of the interconnected nature of these conflicts, creating a reality full of contradictions and a form of schizophrenia. This is a reality where extreme poverty persists, with individuals dying despite the existence of vast resources and wealth monopolized by capitalists.
In brief, football is a core example of how a system controls human realities: players putting on a timed show for large audiences, where it is common to see people paying for a €100 ticket to watch a two-hour match. There are the players, the private companies, the football club owners, and all those who divide the enormous profits made from the middle-class audience or the labor of those who build, clean, or provide the clothing for the matches.
Football’s assimilation into the capitalist system, without resistance to its oppression, exploitation, and alienation, has turned it into a source of profit and wealth. Today, football is more associated with entertainment—whether temporary or illusory—than with maintaining peace. It denies the existence of the poor, aligning more with the wealthy bourgeois lifestyle. Although poor people can play football on the streets and in small, underdeveloped areas, these spaces are far removed from the well-constructed stadiums where wealthy football players perform.
