Manchester City’s recent signing, Sergio Augero, made an unusual claim in his first Premier League interview.  He called himself “the Che Guevara of modern soccer.” The striker was reflecting on his skills on the pitch, not an ambition to gather a paramilitary band of League Two bench-warmers to wage the people’s war on Mr. Cameron and his hopey-changey sidekick.  That’s probably a wise choice from a strictly tactical standpoint.  Augero recently denied making the comments to the Sun, anyway. Given the state of British journalism, the denial sounds reasonable, but it did get me thinking about how apolitical sport in the neoliberal age has become.  What else could Augero have possibly meant? Barney Ronay beat me to the punch in a 2007 piece:

Historically, football’s politics, such as they are, have tended to loiter on the left wing. The majority of Premiership clubs have their roots in either a local church or a local pub. For 100 years these clubs existed as an extension of their local community, a living riposte – albeit an occasionally violent and shambolically administered one — to the Thatcherite notion that there is no such thing as society.

The EPL, in particular, use to play host to charismatic socialists like Brain Clough, a militant in the anti-fascist movement, supporter of the miners’ strike, and author of Jacobin-approved pronouncements like, “For me, socialism comes from the heart. I don’t see why certain sections of the community should have the franchise on champagne and big houses.”

What happened?  Blame neoliberalism, or more precisely capitalism’s natural tendency to sweep away the old “with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions.” More money flooded into the game, big TV contracts, and sponsorship deals and, most importantly, the league was internationalized in ways that would have been inconceivable to its founders.  Allegiance to a club became less rooted in community, less a birthright one couldn’t shake off, and more a display of brand preference.  Coke or Pepsi? Arsenal or United?

There’s been a backlash.  I’ll focus on Man. City, since they’ve been my brand of choice since the Claudio Reyna days.  After Sheikh Mansour’s Abu Dhabi Group bought the team from Thai populist Thaksin Shinawatra, they went on a spending spree that re-altered the entire international football transfer market.  There were critiques of the amount of money in the game and its effects on small clubs, not too different from the criticisms of the Yankees and calls for a baseball salary cap we hear here in the States, but there were other murmurs, as well. Many commentators warned of a takeover of “English” football by foreigners.  Others responded to City’s manager Mark Hughes’ replacement by Italian Roberto Mancini in similar terms.  (Worse of all are the dubious comparisons between effeminate “European” flopping and the honorable, gentlemanly form of British soccer.)

English cries of “imperialism” should rightly be mocked, but something more significant is at play.  How should the Left relate to community and criticisms of neoliberalism rooted in parochial discourses?  There seems to be two stances on offer from radicals: embrace the general spirit of such talk, though not its bigoted language, by positioning ourselves as breaks on a destructive (yet undeniably dynamic) global capitalism.  Like William F. Buckley, “[Standing] athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so . . .”

This is in stark contrast to a more orthodox Marxist perspective that sees increased economic concentration, the agony of the petit-bourgeoisie, the internationalization of capital and the division of labor, and the erosion of traditional social and cultural bonds, as historically progressive.  Isn’t demystifying the national heritage of an advanced capitalist country, even if it means setbacks for left-nationalists in the short-term, a historically progressive act?

The goal is clear — a confident, transnational movement ready to offer humanity a more democratic form of modernity.  Of course, this simple pronouncement skirts over the question of collective agency in this new climate and how left politics in the core can reconstruct itself after neoliberalism. I’m afraid, it leaves more questions than answers.