On October 5th 2007 the late Eric Hobsbawm spoke at the Cheltenham Literary Festival and touched on football. His remarks were reported in The Times and an extract is below.
He was arguing that football had become a brand, selling an identity and in the process quoted Arsene Wenger, the now former Arsenal manager who had made essentially the same point.
One wonders if Hobsbawm was an Arsenal fan? He lived in the right area of North London, as it were, for it to be his local team. However while Professor Emile Chabal has written an impressive new intellectual biography of Eric Hobsbawm he told me that he was not able to find out unfortunately.
“What defines it is that since globalisation it’s been possible for a consortium of wealthy clubs in a particular set of Western European countries to build themselves up as global brands which have relatively little contact with their original local roots and hire people from all over the world.
“They make money by selling goods, such as T-shirts, by television and to a diminishing extent by people watching [live] football.”
Logically these clubs would prefer to limit the game to a super-league of teams playing together irrespective of national leagues and local loyalties, were it not for one thing: football’s marketability is rooted in nationalism.
“You see it whenever there’s a World Cup. What keeps the whole system going is the fact that football is something noneconomic for a large number of people who use it to identify themselves and their country.”
As he once wrote: “The imagined community of millions seems more real in the form of 11 named people.”
For many Cameroonians, for example, the first time that they had a sense of themselves as members of an independent nation state was when their team played at the World Cup, Professor Hobsbawm said.
“This is a type of internal contradiction. There was a nice interview with Arsene Wenger [the manager of Arsenal] the other day which sketches it out very well. He said: ‘I’m not interested in national teams but I know we have got to have them because that’s what keeps the money coming in’.”
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