By Jorge Majfud on July 7, 2026
It is nothing short of ironic (and, at the same time, part of the capitalist logic and the dominant systems that co-opt everything) that modern soccer teams emerged in the 19th century from workers’ guilds, from the proletariat organized into unions. Due to the political and social significance of workers’ organizations in the 19th century, soccer leagues became confederations of working-class clubs and, a century later, for-profit enterprises owned by billionaires.
All of this, essentially, took place in England, the kingdom where capitalism was born in the 16th century, the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, workers’ demands in the 19th century, and the commercialization of existence and its emotions in the 20th century.
As a result, popular passion there, too, was fragmented, alienated, demobilized, controlled, and stripped of all political and social content to produce two distillates: on the one hand, individual passion based on primitive, ahistorical emotions (the horde behind the totem) and, on the other, the profit of the powerful investor, whose driving passion is the increase of his own capital through the exploitation of the emotions of the poorest masses.
In turn, the masses (a grouping of individuals under a foreign banner or dogma) pay fortunes without receiving a single cent of their investment. Their only aspiration is to see their tribe win, which does not happen very often. Except for the owner of the totem that the tribe venerates.
Jorge Majfud is a Uruguayan writer and professor living in the United States who is the author of the foreword for Noam Chomsky’s Illusionists and Eduardo Galeano’s Windows.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English