Nobody ever accused Liam Rosenior of being the sharpest tool in the shed. But If his Poundland etymology of the word manager was anything to go by (man-age becomes aging men?), football people always manage to disappoint you. In moments like these, it’s difficult not to contrast it against the most alluring and charismatic of managerial introductions: Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea introduction in 2004 (speaking of aging men). Now that was an introduction. On football twitter you’d probably see it described as box office, or, you just had to be there; or, as Mourinho described it himself, a special moment fitting of a special one. Perhaps more than anything, what it was… was a spectacle.
See, Mourinho had a bit of that special juice (not the type Jamie Foxx had in Any Given Sunday), what Pierre Bourdieu would call social capital. a former translator, freshly minted European champion, former assistant to Sir Bryan Robson, a sort of Mediterranean cosmopolitan operating somewhere between a Venetian (aura) merchant and Johan Cruyff; The drop off it takes to appoint someone like Rosenior, someone you’d best describe as performing a haphazard mimicry of management consultant speak for an audience of football streamers and the luminaries at TalkSPORT, highlights something about the big change in football and society at large: FINANCIALIZATION. In its simplest terms, financialization is when a society that once produced things suddenly finds itself sending a lot of emails between banks, but in a kind of evil and extractivist way (only slightly joking).
Now if it feels like I’m piling on Rosenior (I am), that’s not the point of what we’re discussing here. See, Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea from Ken Bates, a British businessman and hotelier who for all intents and purposes was a career football man. When the club ran into some financial trouble, the Russian oligarch jumped at the opportunity to park some of his illicitly acquired wealth in a visible asset, in one of the world’s burgeoning financial capitals. It must be safe there, right? Surely? Anyway, I won’t bore you with the details of what happens next but after a couple erratic yet successful decades owning the club, bringing multiple Champions League titles, Premier League titles, FA Cups, the lot; all while overseeing multiple squad overhauls and managerial appointments (Ancelotti era very underrated). The Ukraine war and subsequent sanctions meant Abramovich was out, in stepped another type of capital.
Without much by way of introduction, Todd Boehly and the Patagonia vests were on the scene in West London, it was Chelsea’s turn to be owned by a set of America’s finest finance bros. Poor Roman, if only he’d made headway into the world of early noughties derivatives markets and didn’t bother himself with pesky things like oil production and sportswashing. The new owners came under an investment vehicle called BlueCo, Chelsea and Strasbourg fans shutter at the mere mention of the group. Now if you thought they were a subsidiary of Pepsi or something, you’d be forgiven. It sounds like an off brand cola you’d get at a moderately successful fast-food chain in a country that has had at least one IMF bailout during the last decade. I’ll have one BlueCo please! What they are actually is a front for Clearlake Capital. And what is Clearlake Capital again? Nothing too bad, just the bane (bain capital?) of your existence, a private equity firm (PE). If you’ve ever wondered why an extremely random service in your life suddenly sucks, there’s usually a private equity firm involved in the story somewhere. In her book Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, Megan Greenwell highlights how what’s unique about PE is that they’re really not about long-term value creation at all, only thing they’re interested in is value extraction. Even worse, that’s for a normal business, you know, where you gotta make profit. Football isn’t exactly a normal business, the point, at least until very recently, was to win, and to provide the fans with a spectacle while you’re at it.
This is where we have to emphasize the importance of Maranza. Financialization isn’t apolitical. It rips out everything that’s valuable, and much of that was football culture. Maranza is the antithesis of this. It’s youth culture, resistance, and an emergent antagonism to football’s death spiral. Legendary football manager Marcelo Bielsa recently said he is sure “football is in a process of decline.” His reasoning was that that the spectacle of football had been replaced by the needs of financiers and their balance sheets. “If you let people watch football, but you don’t protect the pleasure of what they watch” then, what you get is a profitable farce. Or in other words, Liam Rosenior (sorry last one).
And yet, there may still be room to be hopeful. For example, Strasbourg fans (also part of BlueCo) are in the awkward position of being better than they’ve ever been (on paper), for the small price of losing their club’s soul. As a result, some of the Strasbourg ultras have decided to cross the English Channel and protest against BlueCo’s ownership in London, alongside furious Chelsea fans, despite their relative on pitch success. A curious situation where cross border solidarity against financialization is happening because of *checks note*…football? Todd Boehly, you’re not even safe in your own ends! (if you get this reference you get one free pair of PURO shorts). All of which is to say, even though financialization gave us the much maligned multiclub model, it might also give us a multiclub Maranza. Globalize the Maranza? Anyone? Okay, we can workshop that last part.
Consultant(e)