# Posted 11:23 AM by Patrick Porter  

YET MORE APOLOGIES: Like Taylor, sorry to our readers for my lack of posts. While Taylor's computer was busy imploding, my wife and I bought a house. After a long time as a postgrad student bum doing everything in one room, having my own study is the sweetest pleasure.

Back to blogging. Historian Eric Hobsbawm has some interesting thoughts today in the Times. Hobsbawm is a 90 year old, unrepentant Stalinist who, amongst a lifetime producing some of the most powerful Marxist histories, also supported the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939-40.

However, his recent commentary on modern football as an emblem of the competing forces of nationalism and globalism, and the internal contradictions they create, is worth reading. Hobsbawm is

intrigued by the way that the game has mutated into a global business dominated by the “imperialism of a few capitalist enterprises” such as Manchester United and Real Madrid. “Neither the local nor the national identification is what defines the economy of football today,” he said.

'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.'

Indeed they do. (Although I tread lightly over his willingness to describe football corporations as agents of imperialism, given his support for Stalin's 'Winter War' on the Finns. Imperialism has varying intensity - there's spending lots of money to buy great players and price poorer clubs out of the market, and there's attempting to annex other countries with military force).

But his views on soccer themselves suggest a paradox: the nation-state is crumbling, he argues, but nationalism and national identity is integral to retaining peoples' enthusiasm and devotion to football.

Hobsbawm seems to view the globalising drive of big football clubs as a reactionary or sinister development. Looking at it from another direction, while the tendency for big clubs and corporations to overwhelm the others might be seen as a bad thing, it is also arguably a liberalising force in other ways.

Teams and clubs sign up foreign players, parochial loyalties and tribal prejudices must now mix with a sense of an international market and the nomadic movement of talent from country to country, and the very collision between new foreign players and racist fans, say, in Spain or Italy, generates tensions but also progressive results, such as the movement to 'Kick Racism Out of Football.' National identity can happily remain, but as a pleasing texture to life, not as an ugly force.

Imperialism in football? Maybe. But for my money, its better than narrow tribalism. Sometimes there are even worse things than big money. (8) opinions -- Add your opinion