Evidence of the unsavory nature of modern football is endless: thousands of migrant workers dying while building air-conditioned stadiums in Qatar during the last World Cup; Man City winning the Champions league on the back of 115 breaches of UEFA’s financial fair play laws; private equity firms setting their sights on both Milan clubs so they can tear down San Siro and cash in on the new stadiums; Barcelona selling hundreds of millions in assets — not to mention actual bits of Camp Nou’s pitch — to bankroll the same reckless style of management that sent the club into disarray, on and off the pitch. Undeniably the beautiful game has of late become especially ugly.

In A People’s History of Football, French climate journalist and Le Monde diplomatique correspondent Mickaël Correia argues that things have not always been this way — or at least not to such a grotesquely indefensible extent. The world’s most popular sport has an alternative, “antiestablishment” history, which Correia seeks to uncover and defend. Though he dwells on the “subversive aspect” of football, Correia is hardly a romantic. “Globalized football,” he reminds us in the very opening of the book, “has become . . . the very embodiment of unbridled capitalism’s worst excesses.”

A People’s History of Football left this reader with the melancholic sense that an adversarial and popular vision of the game is quickly disappearing. It’s now unimaginable that a player would, as Brazil’s midfielder Sócrates did in 1984, justify their move to an Italian club by saying that doing so would provide them with an opportunity to read Antonio Gramsci in the original. At the end of last year, the European Court of Justice announced that attempts to ban the Super League — a proposal for a relegation-free league made up of the wealthiest teams — were contrary to the Court’s laws. The path ahead for the sport seems one of further consolidation: football grounds turned into shopping malls, and fans into passive consumers.