How business has radically transformed football over the last 30 years
Modern football has evolved into a phenomenon dominated by business and globalisation, with stadiums becoming increasingly profit-driven and traditional supporters playing an ever-smaller role
We didn’t realise it. It happened right under our noses, but we didn’t see it. Perhaps out of habit, perhaps out of laziness. Perhaps because it’s not easy to accept changes that take us away from our old certainties, from the football we grew up with.
It often happens in life that we are suddenly taken by surprise by an event that becomes symbolic, a watershed marking a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Think, in the grand scheme of history, of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the birth of a movement, the end of a love affair, or a ritual that, out of the blue, is never repeated again.
In this case, we’re talking about a revolution – that of football – which we struggle to remember when it took place. Or whether, as we see in these over-the-top 48-team World Cup in the US, it is still in full swing. Of course, the goals scored by Messi, Mbappé and Haaland, with their thunderous spectacle, give us the illusion that everything is as it was before, when we used to get carried away by the triumphs of our national team. Even Italia’s victory at the 2021 European Championship gently deceived us, leading us to believe that football was still the same as ever – a game where you win one day and lose the next. A game where that age-old magic endures, making us feel like children again, united by a shared sense of belonging.
It’s pointless: that football, with its naive, romantic rituals, its fixed Sunday fixtures, the rush to listen to ‘90° minuto’ – it’s gone. It’s a relic of the past, something that belongs to the twentieth century, good only for being trotted out in sports programmes where the old champions – always the same ones – tell us, for the umpteenth time, how good they were, how genuine they were. The full-back played as a full-back, the striker only had to worry about scoring; there was no VAR, and the hydration break was a devilish invention yet to be devised. If you really were thirsty, a small bottle of water tossed over by the physio was enough to leave you as fresh as a daisy.
We knew that all this was a legacy of the past. But it was two of our colleagues who gave us a real wake-up call: Bruno Bartolozzi and Enrico Currò, who, in their excellent book *Il Neocalcio*, have set out in black and white what has happened over the last thirty years – that is, since business, through the power of investment funds—which have transformed these glorious clubs into financial assets—has swept away the childlike innocence that lay at the heart of this simple and captivating game.
