David Goldblatt’s The Age of Football and what the beautiful game tells us about the society we are becoming.
Football has always been more than a game.
It is memory and identity, neighbourhood and nation, ritual and belonging.
It gives strangers something to share, children heroes to imitate and communities a language that can cross social, cultural and political boundaries.
Yet the extraordinary success of football has also transformed it.
In The Age of Football: Soccer and the 21st Century, David Goldblatt examines that transformation on a remarkable global scale. His subject is football, but his real territory is much larger: money, politics, power, inequality, identity, globalisation and the changing character of modern society.
The result is not simply a history of the contemporary game. It is a portrait of our age seen through football.
Goldblatt travels across continents and political systems, showing how deeply the sport has become connected with governments, corporations, broadcasters, wealthy investors and political interests. Football appears everywhere, but rarely in isolation. It reflects the societies in which it is played and, increasingly, the economic and political forces that shape them.
This is where the book becomes particularly interesting.
The commercialisation of football is not merely a story of rising ticket prices, television contracts, sponsorship or enormous transfer fees. It raises a deeper question about what happens to something that belongs culturally to millions of people once its financial value becomes impossible to ignore.
Modern football is extraordinarily successful.
Players have become global celebrities. Clubs once associated mainly with particular neighbourhoods or cities now have supporters across continents. Matches are broadcast around the world. Sponsors, broadcasters, investors and digital platforms have helped turn football into one of the most visible cultural products on earth.
There is much to celebrate in that success.
Globalisation has allowed supporters to encounter teams, players and cultures they might otherwise never have known. Professionalisation has improved training, facilities, medical care and, in many places, the quality of the spectacle itself. Football has become one of the few genuinely global languages.
But success carries consequences.
A supporter is also increasingly a customer.
A club is increasingly a brand.
A stadium becomes an entertainment venue.
A player becomes an asset with a market value.
A shirt becomes advertising space.
A competition becomes content.
Even loyalty, one of sport’s most emotional qualities, acquires measurable commercial worth.
None of these developments individually destroys football. Together, however, they invite an uncomfortable question:
At what point does the business surrounding the game begin to change the meaning of the game itself?
Goldblatt is especially valuable because he allows us to see that this question extends far beyond sport.
Football becomes a lens through which we can examine one of the central tensions of contemporary society: the difference between price and value.
Markets are remarkably effective at discovering prices. They are less capable of deciding what should matter to us.
The worth of a football club cannot be fully expressed by its balance sheet. A club may carry memories across generations. A stadium may represent decades of shared experience. A local team may provide identity to a community that has lost industries, institutions or other sources of collective belonging.
These things have value.
But they do not have an obvious price.
That distinction matters.
A wealthy investor can purchase a football club. It is less clear whether anyone can purchase what generations of supporters have invested emotionally in that club.
The institution may be privately owned while much of its meaning has been collectively created.
And here football leads us towards a much larger question.
What should money be allowed to buy?
The question is not whether markets should exist. Modern sport could hardly operate on its present scale without investment, broadcasting, sponsorship and professional organisation. Nor should commercial success automatically be regarded with suspicion.
The more difficult question is whether there are parts of human life whose character begins to change once market values become dominant.
A seat in a stadium can be bought.
Can belonging?
A club can be bought.
Can its history?
Broadcasting rights can be sold.
Can the shared cultural experience surrounding the game be treated in exactly the same way?
These are not questions about football alone.
Housing is both a home and an investment.
Education can be both a public good and a commercial service.
Art can be cultural expression and a financial asset.
Personal information can connect people while also becoming commercially valuable data.
Nature can be something we inherit together and something to which markets assign a price.
Again and again, modern societies face the same difficulty: how do we benefit from markets without allowing market values to become the measure of everything?
This is ultimately a question about the Good Society.
A good society cannot be defined simply by how much wealth it creates. It must also ask what kinds of relationships, institutions and common experiences it wants to protect.
Sport deserves a place in that conversation.
At its best, football creates something increasingly rare in individualised societies: a shared public experience.
People of different incomes, professions, generations and backgrounds can support the same team, celebrate the same goal and suffer the same defeat. For a brief period, distinctions that dominate much of ordinary life can become less important.
The stadium can therefore be more than a commercial venue. It can be a civic space.
The supporter can be more than a consumer. The supporter can be a participant in a community.
And the club can be more than a company. It can be a custodian of something it did not entirely create and does not entirely own.
This does not mean romanticising the past.
There was no golden age in which football was free from money, politics, exclusion, corruption or violence. Nostalgia can distort history as easily as commerce can distort sport.
The important question is not how football can return to a world that no longer exists.
It is what we want football to become.
Can a global sport remain commercially successful while preserving meaningful connections with local communities?
Can clubs attract international investment without reducing supporters to customers?
Can professional athletes receive the rewards generated by their extraordinary abilities while preserving some sense that sport involves values beyond financial return?
Can governing bodies protect genuine competition against the concentration of economic power?
Can supporters have a meaningful voice in institutions whose identity they helped create?
And, ultimately, who owns the game?
Goldblatt does not give us simple answers. That is one of the strengths of the book.
Its importance lies less in telling us what to think than in revealing how much there is to think about.
Football remains beautiful precisely because its deepest attraction cannot easily be monetised.
The unexpected goal.
The child kicking a ball against a wall.
The lifelong supporter returning to the same ground.
The joy of victory shared with strangers.
The disappointment that somehow makes people return the following week.
The strange feeling that, for ninety minutes, thousands of separate lives have become part of one experience.
Commerce can surround these things.
It can broadcast them, sponsor them, package them and profit from them.
But it did not create them.
Perhaps that is the most important question raised by The Age of Football. The danger is not simply that money enters sport. Money has long been part of sport.
The deeper danger begins when we forget that some of the things that make sport worth having existed before the market discovered their price.
And that leaves us with a question that reaches far beyond the football ground:
What kind of society do we create if everything we value eventually becomes something we learn to sell?
The Age of Football is therefore worth reading not simply because it helps us understand football.
It helps us think about the boundaries between market and society, ownership and belonging, individual wealth and common goods.
And, ultimately, about the kind of society we want to share.
- Celia Paule is an independent writer and contributor to Agora Dialogue, exploring philosophy, culture and contemporary social questions, with a particular interest in the relationship between markets and society, the changing meaning of public and common goods, and the ways economic, political and technological change reshape community, human values and our understanding of the Good Society.