Prologue and Chapter 1
Prologue: Why Football Must Be Read Through the Lens of Political Economy
Football has long enjoyed widespread popularity across various regions. In Europe and Latin America especially, it has been a sport that sensitively reflected the political and economic conditions of its time. Nevertheless, attempts to read football in its political-economic context remain rare. It is as though the football stadium exists as a space detached from the world, and the 90 minutes of a match are a time of excitement and fervor unrelated to social change. Yet football has always been connected to the conditions of its era far more deeply than we tend to assume.
How have the rules of football changed?
When and where are matches held?
Who was allowed to play?
Who became spectators, and who cheered?
Who owned the clubs?
These questions appear at first glance to be questions about football itself. But a satisfactory answer requires consideration of political-economic context — the values of the era, the use of physical space and leisure time within local communities, the social status of players and spectators, and the flow of economic profit.
This book therefore treats football not as a simple "sporting contest" but as a historical product that interacts with the political-economic conditions of its time. The book proceeds from the following premise: football has always existed in ways made possible by the political-economic order of its era. At the same time, the passion and dynamism that football as a sport possesses has shaped social identity and has at times become a force driving political-economic change. In other words, society and football have not existed in a one-way relationship but have interacted with each other.
From this perspective, the book traces how the meaning of football has changed throughout history by dividing the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present into five stages.
1. The Era of Industrial Capitalism (1860s–1910s) (Image keyword: working-class leisure) Football was born as the leisure activity of working-class citizens in industrial cities. Clubs were not businesses but institutions of the community.
2. The Era of the Nation-State (1910s–1940s) (Image keyword: national public good, national teams, the politics of the World Cup) After the wars, football moved from being a sport of local communities and cities to a symbol of the nation. National teams and international competitions became the arenas where collective identity operated most intensely within football.
3. The Era of the Welfare State and the Birth of the Mass Public (1945–mid-1970s) (Image keyword: mass sport, World Cup broadcasts, local club enthusiasm) Within the postwar settlement, football stabilized as a mass sport accessible to all citizens. Football became public culture.
4. The Neoliberal Era (late 1970s–2000s) (Image keyword: commercialization, corporate logos on kits, advertising billboards) Under deregulation, marketization, and globalization, football was reorganized as a global commercial industry. Leagues with worldwide followings became media companies, and clubs became competing corporations.
5. The Era of Global Financialization (post-2008 financial crisis to the present) (Image keyword: surreal stadium exteriors, European kits bearing sovereign wealth fund logos) Amid low interest rates and global liquidity, football moved a step further. Football no longer remained simply "an industry that generates profit when well-managed" but became a financial asset with long-term cash flows. Clubs became investment targets incorporated into portfolios, and leagues were redefined as vehicles for global capital management. This stage lies on a continuum with neoliberalism, yet constitutes a qualitatively different phase in that football began to be perceived not as an industry but as an asset.
The character of football has thus changed with each era, reflecting its political-economic context. The purpose of this first volume is to present as a single history the sweeping transformation of football — from working-class leisure, through commercial industry, to financialized asset.
More recent developments — particularly the concrete market structures and economic mechanisms formed as major capital began flowing in earnest with the establishment of professional leagues across Europe from the 1990s onward — will be examined in greater detail in the second volume. Volume 2 will focus on three successive transformations in the European football market — from domestic sports industry, to global media and entertainment industry, to global financial investment industry — and will analyze the relationship between football and the economy with greater precision.
Chapter 1: The Birth and Institutionalization of Modern Football (1860s–1910s)
— Working-Class Leisure in the Era of Industrial Capitalism
_(14777984175).jpg?type=w773)
Unknown author, Scanned from Athletics and Football, by Montague Shearman, edited by Longmans, Greens & Co, London, 1894, public domain
football match
Introduction
October 1878, Newton Heath, Manchester. A patch of open ground beside the carriage repair depot of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Railway workers gathered during their lunch break to kick a ball. Their opponents: a team from the same company's Manchester division. According to records, they won 3–2.
The team's name was Newton Heath LYR FC. "LYR" was the abbreviation of the company's name. Their kit was green and gold — the company's colors. These men were not professional sportsmen. During the week they worked in the repair depot; on Saturday afternoons and holidays they played football.
This team would eventually become Manchester United.
Manchester Mill
Antique photograph of the British Empire: English navvy at work
Railway workers, Item is held by John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland., public domain
1. The Conditions that Shaped Early Football under Industrial Capitalism
Industrial capitalism did not mean only a transformation in methods of production. As factory production and wage labor spread — displacing the agricultural and artisanal society that had moved according to the rhythms of the seasons and community — working hours became standardized, and workers came to have "working time" and "resting time" as distinct categories. Workers in English industrial cities in the mid-nineteenth century had regular, repeatable leisure time every Saturday afternoon. Football was the representative leisure activity of this moment. It was the decisive condition that gave rise to modern football.
Two important pieces of legislation drove this change. The first was the Factory Act 1850, which fixed factory working hours as Monday through Friday 6am to 6pm, and Saturday 6am to 2pm — thereby institutionally guaranteeing workers a "regular Saturday afternoon of free time." The second was the Bank Holidays Act 1871, which legally designated several public holidays throughout the year. State-mandated regular holidays provided the foundation on which football events such as inter-club fixtures, regional leagues, and cup competitions could operate reliably.
1-1. Early Clubs with Working-Class Roots
Unknown, Newton Heath FC (current Manchester United FC) team for the 1892-93 season, 1892, The Graphic newspaper, Public Domain
Baker and Son, Group photo of Aston Villa F.C., 1895–96 Football League champions, 21 October 1896, Birmingham (no individual credited), The Sketch, Vol. XV, No. 195, October 21, 1896, page 563, public domain
Newton Heath Athletic Original Team Photo 1894-5,
Unknown author, Team of Manchester City FC. 1894-1895,
Team sheet from Walsall Town Swifts vs. Ardwick Association Football Club, March 1982, (저작권 확인해야)
Certificate of incorportation for Manchester City Football Club Limited, April 1894, under the Companies Act (저작권 확인 필요)
The Newcastle United Years - 1892-93: East End head West and become United, https://www.newcastleunited.com/
Do you know what the great EPL clubs — Manchester United, Manchester City, Newcastle — looked like at their origins, over a century ago?
Manchester United traces its origins to Newton Heath LYR FC, founded in 1878 — a team formed by railway workers from the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway's carriage repair depot, gathering during their lunch breaks. The "LYR" in the team's name was the abbreviation of the company's name. The kit was green and gold, the company's colors. Their first match, in October 1878, was a friendly against another division of the same railway company, and records indicate a 3–2 victory. The venue was the open ground beside the repair depot.
Manchester City began in 1880 as St. Mark's, West Gorton — a church community organization. East Manchester's Gorton district was a densely industrial area packed with cotton mills and ironworks. The church rector Arthur Connell and members of the congregation founded the football club as a leisure activity for the area's young working men. Early practices were held in the churchyard; the original kit was black and crimson stripes.
Newcastle United was formed in 1892 by merging two clubs from the coal-mining and shipbuilding industries of the northeast — Newcastle East End and Newcastle West End. Newcastle was at that time Britain's largest coal export port and a center of the shipbuilding industry. Both clubs were centered on miners and shipyard workers, and the debate at the time of the merger was "which district's name should be used." The compromise was the neutral "United."
These clubs today feel like global media and entertainment properties with worldwide playing talent and fan bases — but at their founding in the latter half of the nineteenth century, they bore the unmistakable imprint of Britain's early industrialization. In those early days of industrialization, football had no commercial dimension; it was a social activity consumed as working-class leisure within industrial communities. Players were not professional sportsmen but wage laborers working in railways, factories, and mines, playing football in their post-work leisure hours. Spectators were fellow workers and their families; from around the late 1880s, the audience spread outward to the broader local community. As tickets began to be sold for one or two pence, football became a public event for the local community.
Manchester Central Station opened on 1st July, 1880., public domain
Victoria Station
Railway Platform
(The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway ) L&YR lok 853, Digital museum, Public domain
world war one locomotive cleaners, public domain
1-2. The Railway and the Spread of Football
Football earned growing popularity among workers through its own inherent dynamism, but it was the expansion of the railway network that had a decisive influence on football's spread. The expansion of railways — the central infrastructure of industrial capitalism — made it possible for players and spectators to travel, and football matches that had taken place around each group's home base — factories, mines, railway companies, local church communities — expanded into inter-regional fixtures, away matches, and national competitions.
Players traveled by rail to away matches. As railways were laid densely across England throughout the 1840s to 1870s, workers could board an inexpensive third-class carriage on a Saturday afternoon and travel to nearby towns. Once the FA Cup (1871) and regional leagues were being held regularly, reports of workers from the same factory or neighborhood boarding trains together for away trips appeared repeatedly in newspapers.
Did passionate away supporters exist even in this period? They did.
In March 1889, the Manchester Guardian reported ahead of an FA Cup semi-final:
"1,200 boarded the 'supporters' special train' from Manchester to London."
A third-class return fare was five shillings. As the weekly wage of a skilled worker at the time was around 25 to 30 shillings, these fans were spending roughly a sixth of their weekly wages on attending an away match. This indicates that football had already become a mass entertainment that assumed travel.
It is not an exaggeration to describe the popularity of football at this time as "explosive." By the late 1880s, FA Cup Finals were beginning to draw crowds of over 60,000, and by the 1890s it was not unusual for league matches to attract tens of thousands. The fact that working men — whose wages were modest — were willing to pay even one or two pence for admission demonstrates that football was not a casual pastime but a high-priority item of consumption.
Football was a social product shaped by political-economic institutions, but the reason it spread so rapidly among the working class is that it was, on its own merits, a sport with sufficient excitement and appeal to generate genuine passion. The latter half of the nineteenth century was a period in which that internal momentum of football accelerated dramatically, carried forward by the industrial infrastructure of the railway.
1890년대 FA Cup 경기 장면
Aston Villa v Everton FA Cup Final 1897 Crystal Palace Antique Print 1897 , 출처 여기저기
1898_fa_cup_final, 16 April 1898, public domain
1872 Scotland v England football match ticket, public domain
1872 Scotland v England football match ticket, public domain
1872 Scotland v England football match ticket, public domain (The 1872 association football match between the national teams of Scotland and England is officially recognised by FIFA as the first international. It took place on 30 November 1872 at Hamilton Crescent, the West of Scotland Cricket Club's ground in Partick, Glasgow. The match was watched by 4,000 spectators and finished as a 0–0 draw.)
1-3. Football as the Form Chosen by Industrial Society
The process examined above is difficult to explain adequately by saying only that football spread because it was "a fun game." The space in which football took root was not a product of chance but was the new living conditions created by industrial society.
As David Harvey explains, industrial capitalism was a system that operated by tying capital to "fixed spaces" — factories, railways, urban infrastructure. The nineteenth-century English city was a space of production and a space of movement, and simultaneously the stage of daily life for workers. Football found its footing precisely in the spaces between these sites. On patches of open ground beside factories, in churchyards, on vacant lots near railway stations, the ball began to roll; and on weekends, those spaces were converted from places of labor into places of leisure. Football was a culture that naturally filled the new times and spaces opened up in the interstices of industrial society.
Through a Schumpeterian lens, this change resembles not merely the spread of a preference but something closer to a "social innovation." Just as the railway transformed how people moved, the regular league fixture, the away match, and the recurring weekly schedule transformed people's sense of leisure. Football was no longer an improvised game but a shared event experienced communally at a pre-appointed time. This aligned precisely with the organized rhythms of life that industrial society had created.
David Goldblatt does not view modern football as the natural evolution of medieval ball games. He sees football as a "form that was chosen" within the social and economic conditions of industrial England. This is also why rugby and football — which shared a common root — diverged. Rugby remained embedded in the culture of private schools and elite education, while football adopted rules and rhythms that were better suited to the working-class society of the industrial city. Foot over hand, collective over individual, repetition over improvisation. Football was a game that more naturally permeated the sensibilities and ways of life that industrial society demanded.
Seen in this light, modern football was not "a game that happened to succeed." It was a cultural form selected and embedded in the time, space, movement, and communal experience that industrial society had produced. Football was a product of industrial capitalism and, simultaneously, the language of leisure that that society needed.
2. The Identities of Players and Spectators
2-1. The Identity of the Players
Roughly from the 1860s to the 1880s — the period when football was working-class leisure on a Saturday afternoon — the identity of football players was unambiguously that of "workers." English football at the time adhered in principle to amateurism, meaning the Football Association (FA) prohibited "receiving payment in exchange for playing." Players received no official wages for football. During the week they worked in factories, on railways, in mines and shipyards, earning weekly wages; on Saturday afternoons and holidays they took to the pitch. Football was regarded, legally and socially, not as a profession but as a leisure activity.
As football's popularity grew through the 1870s and 1880s, however, successful clubs began quietly to favor skilled players. Factory owners would assign them "light duties," or adjust working hours to accommodate training and away trips, or provide accommodation and meals, or subsidize travel costs. Informal bonuses — "broken-time payments" — were also paid. Players received no official wages for football, but their identity and actual circumstances were closer to those of a footballer than a laborer.
In 1885, the FA officially recognized professionalism, legalizing "the receipt of payment in exchange for playing." This was the historical threshold at which football — previously working-class leisure — became a "profession."
Shortly thereafter, in 1888, the Football League was established. Clubs now had regular league schedules and fixed income streams, and players became "permanently employed labor." Changes within football itself corresponded to this development. The fixture schedule and mass popularity had exceeded the stage of pure leisure, and given the physical demands and time commitment of matches, it had become impossible to sustain football as a purely unpaid hobby. Players now became professional footballers.
From this point, players at clubs such as Manchester United, Manchester City, and Newcastle were no longer "men who work in factories and also play football" but "professional players" — contracted to clubs, paid wages, living by football as a profession. From the 1890s onward, players signed contracts directly with clubs, received wages directly from clubs, and lived as professional footballers. The wages of early professionals are understood to have been comparable to, or slightly higher than, those of a skilled laborer. It was not yet the star profession it is today.
2-2-1. The Expansion of the Spectator Base (Workers → Families → Local Community)
Unknown author, F. A.-Cup-Finale 1893: Wolverhampton Wanderers - FC Everton 1:0 vor 45.067 Zuschauern; Fallowfield, Manchester, 1893, public domain
Cup Final Crowds
The spectators of early modern football (1870s–1890s) were not a single homogeneous group but expanded progressively — from workers, to families, to the broader local community.
First, fellow workers (workmates) were the most central group of spectators in the earliest period. Because early clubs originated in teams based in workplaces and institutions — railway companies, factories, mines, churches, schools — colleagues from the same factory, or people belonging to the same trade union, church, or neighborhood network, naturally became supporters. Newton Heath (the forerunner of Manchester United) was a team of railway workers, and its spectators were fellow railway workers.
Gradually, the spectator base expanded to include family groups — wives and children. After the 1850 Factory Act limited the working hours of women and children, Saturday afternoons freed up, and a pattern of leisure emerged in which male workers went out accompanied by wives and children. From the 1880s onward in particular, images of wives bringing children to watch their husbands' matches or local team fixtures appear repeatedly in records and photographs. This was a sign that football was moving beyond male working-class leisure toward mass entertainment for family units.
The spectator pool then expanded further to encompass the entire local community (neighborhood public). From the late 1880s, the combination of entrance fees (1–2 pence), enclosed grounds with fencing, and regular league schedules transformed football from an in-house company fixture into a public event for the local area. From this point, spectators extended beyond the colleagues of a particular workplace to encompass all the residents of the same street, the same neighborhood, the same city.
Tony Mason summarizes this as follows:
"The early spectators came from the same workshop, the same class, the same street as the players. But from the late 1880s, football rapidly transformed into 'entertainment for the whole locality.'" (Tony Mason, Association Football and English Society, 1980)
Thus the spectators of early football expanded in stages — from workplace-based community, to family unit, to local society as a whole. But this was not yet a stage of commercial profit-making. It would be most accurate to describe the audience of this period as a transitional mass — one that had moved beyond the stage of fellow workers and family supporters, but had not yet become a fully commercialized public.
2-2-2. Changes in the Class Composition of Spectators (Flat Cap → Bowler Hat)
Crowds at Football Match
Hats And Caps
(캡션: 1895년 FA컵 준결승, 에버턴 vs 애스턴 빌라 경기 관중석. 앞쪽 스탠딩석(1~2펜스)은 플랫캡 일색이지만, 뒤쪽 시팅석(6펜스)에는 중절모가 약 15% 섞여 있다. 출처: British Library, Public Domain)
The class composition of football spectators also underwent a visible change. The spectators of early football were almost entirely working class. In photographs of matches from the 1870s and 1880s, the overwhelming majority of spectators standing along an unfenced touchline are men wearing flat caps. The flat cap was, in Britain at the time, the typical dress of factory, railway, and dock workers. Up to this point, football was working-class leisure and entertainment, and its spectators came from the same workplaces, the same neighborhoods, the same class.
The FA's 1885 formal recognition of professionalism — permitting "the receipt of payment in exchange for playing" — brought a major change. From this point, football players were not workers but professional athletes. They were not hobbyists but individuals contracted to clubs, paid to play, and football's quality and sophistication increased accordingly. Differentials in ability between teams appeared, competition intensified, star players emerged, and the "unpredictable narrative of the match" was heightened. As football became more specialized and refined, the number of genuinely compelling matches grew, and the early seeds of commercialization began to sprout — the sense that a match was worth paying to watch.
As if reflecting these internal changes within football, the photographic record begins to shift from the late 1880s. Scattered among the sea of flat caps, bowler hats begin to appear. The bowler hat was at the time the symbolic headwear of office workers, middle managers, small traders, teachers, and lower-level professionals. They appear primarily in photographs of the seated stands rather than the standing enclosures near the touchline.
The photographs and records in which flat caps and bowler hats intermingle carry layered significance. They show that football was no longer the exclusive domain of the working class but had become a shared experience absorbing the English middle classes as well. Modern football had moved from the entertainment of the working class to a broad urban mass entertainment.
3. The Social Meaning of Football: A Civic Leisure Institution
3-1. The Stage Before the Nation
Football in this period was not directly connected to national symbols. The importance of the national team was limited, and patriotic mobilization and international competition were not central features. The primary unit of football was not the nation but the city and local community. It is therefore most accurate to characterize the early stage of modern football — which began in the leisure culture of the working class and developed into a public event of the community — as "the sport of civil society," prior to its move toward becoming a "national sport."
3-2. Football Before Commercialization
Early football did not aim to maximize commercial revenue. Admission prices were low, players were not full-time professionals, and clubs were not organized for the purpose of generating profit. Football's function lay not in economic gain but in the formation of a sense of belonging, community identity, and collective experience.
3-3. Football as a Historical and Social Product
Modern football was not mere entertainment but a social construct existing organically within society — shaped by political-economic conditions and legal frameworks. It structured the relationship between labor and leisure; it created a culture of regular, repeatable sporting participation and spectatorship in urban space; and it provided a venue in which the citizens of industrial society could affirm their working-class identity. As football's dynamism grew and it gained mass popularity, it spread into the middle classes as well and became a public event for the local community. In this respect, modern football was a civic leisure institution existing in the stage before commercialization.
Conclusion
Modern football transformed — within the combination of working hours, urban space, and transport infrastructure produced by industrial capitalism — from the leisure culture of the working class into a domain of professional occupation, and from a culture claimed by the working class into a popular public event for the wider community. But it had not yet been commercialized, nor did it yet function as a symbol of the nation-state. Football in this period existed as civic leisure in the age of industrial capitalism, and was preparing to meet the transformations of the era to come.
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