Provincializing Global Sport: Modernity, Capitalism, and the Politics of Difference in the Age of Super Leagues

ABSTRACT:Global sport, particularly football (soccer), provides scenes of sensuous juxtapositions from which to grasp the world, for example of global hegemonic capitalism and local histories of difference. Three events shook the elite sport world in 2021–2022: the intent to establish a European Super League, Leo Messi's departure from FC Barcelona, and Barcelona defender Gerard Piqué's involvement in selling the Spanish Super Cup to Saudi Arabia. These cases provoked widespread indignation over unbridled greed in elite sport. Fans had long been worried that global sport had become increasingly disenchanted by neoliberal business. It is still possible to find, however, sporting cultures that are not entirely posited by capital at an elite level. The Basque Athletic Bilbao "provincializes" (Chakrabarty 2000) the Spanish Liga and its global context through its unique politics of difference: for more than a hundred years, it has signed "local," "Basque" players only. As a first-division club of elite football, Basque football coexists and interacts with the mainstream narratives and exigencies of global sport. Its localist recruitment philosophy, however, punctuates and modifies the hegemonic history of elite football by defying some of its mythical assumptions. Provincializing global sport means disrupting the universalizing thrusts of modernity and capital by recognizing its subaltern histories, which is desirable for various reasons. First, local politics of belonging ensures the irreducible plurality of the political, which is our claim to difference. Second, provincializing global sport keeps it an affective history, and helps develop a keener sense of what Noyes (2016) called the "internal Others of modernity." Due to its engagement with both local histories of difference and global capitalism, sport may be uniquely positioned to re-enchant the Weberian logic of rational-secular modernity, and help us "think poetically" (see Michael D. Jackson in Romero and Gette 2019) in anthropology, and beyond.