1. Introduction
[1.1] I supported the English Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur for more than twenty years. In 2023, after several months of indecision, I stopped. I opened Google Maps, located the football stadium closest to my house, and decided to start supporting the club that played there instead. The city was Oslo, the stadium was Bislett, and the club was Lyn 1896: a fallen giant of the Norwegian game attempting to clamber back up to its top tier thirteen years after being demoted down the divisions as a result of going bankrupt. Changing allegiance, although arguably not as significant a taboo as it was even in the recent past, was not a decision I took lightly. Even once it came to feel inevitable, it was less a decision I wanted to make than a decision I felt compelled to make. And not because of dissatisfaction at the performances of the team or manager—variables that are liable to fluctuate over time—but because of something more difficult to accept: the club's prioritization of its continued financial growth over the needs of its fans, the welfare of its employees, and the spirit of the game itself. After two decades, these developments, all of them symptomatic of the continued "hyper-commodification" (Walsh and Giulianotti 2001, 53) of the sport over the past thirty years, left me unable to muster the same enthusiasm for Spurs that I had conjured so easily for so long. As a Tottenham fan, I felt complicit in the club's actions and the corrupted values those actions seemed to represent. In this article I explore that feeling of complicity, address its provenance, speculate on its ubiquity, and, by way of response, proposesintegrating Michael Rothberg's (2019) concept of implication into the theoretical vocabulary of football fan studies—and, indeed, into the vocabulary of fan studies more generally.
[1.2] Rothberg is a literary scholar working at the intersections of memory studies, trauma studies, and human rights research, and his book The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators "emerges from a belief that our understanding of power, privilege, violence, and injustice suffers from an underdeveloped vocabulary." Rothberg offers "the category of the 'implicated subject' and the related notion of 'implication'" as starting points for the development of that vocabulary, framing his work as a response to the need for "adequate concepts for describing what Hannah Arendt called 'this vicarious responsibility for things we have not done': that is, for the manifold indirect, structural, and collective forms of agency that enable injury, exploitation, and domination but that frequently remain in the shadows." Implication, he writes, "like the proximate but not identical term 'complicity,' draws attention to how we are 'folded into'...events that at first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects" (2019, 1). Rothberg's theory addresses violences more urgent and grievous than any suffered by the average football fan, and yet its sensitivity to the manifold, complex, and ever-shifting dimensions of implication renders it an ideal tool with which to approach relations between fans and their clubs at a time when the hypercommodification of football is pressuring those relations into new, unfamiliar, and problematic forms.
[1.3] This sensitivity presupposes an attunement to the specificities of subjectivity, context, and positionality, from which it follows that no two instances of implication will be identical. It is for this reason, perhaps more than any other, that Rothberg's theory maps so elegantly onto the context of contemporary football fandom: because relations between fans and clubs—and, by extension, the modes and degrees of fans' implication in the behavior of their clubs—are no less complex or variegated than the innumerable (and often unmeasurable) factors that produce and condition those relations in the first place. Monolithic conceptions of football fans tend to be grossly oversimplified—Cornel Sandvoss (2003) observes that fans emerging "from diverse consumption contexts (organized fans, regular ground visitors, television viewers)" all "[consider] themselves fans" (16)—and, as reflections of particular communities with distinctive histories, values, and traditions, no two clubs bear exact resemblance to one another either. Paradoxically, this explains my decision to begin this article in the autoethnographic mode: not because my experience can be considered representative of the experiences of all fans but precisely because it cannot be taken as such. The nature of my implication in my club's behavior—and, indeed, the very feeling of being implicated in the first place—cannot be extrapolated or generalized, and it is the inimitability of this feeling of implication, combined with the relative novelty of the constellation of political and economic conditions that inspired it, that indicates a widespread proliferation of the modes and forms of implication that complicate—and, in many cases, compromise—fans' relationships with their clubs, the communities they represent, and even the sport itself.
[1.4] As Matt Hills (2002, 27) says, "fans are always already consumers," and this is certainly true of football fans. Sandvoss observes that although "different fans identify different practices (reading the newspaper, watching their team on television, being a season-ticket holder, or attending all home games), they all explain their fandom in terms of a series of acts of consumption" (2003, 17, emphasis in original). Football has always been an entertainment product. Nevertheless, the last three decades have witnessed a dramatic escalation in the amount of money poured into the beautiful game. As Guillaume Bodet et al. (2018, 318) explain, the move "away from the game's traditional, working-class cultural heritage and roots...towards a more commercially oriented structure" may have been first observed back in the 1960s, but "the financial and cultural transformation of professional football across Europe has accelerated exponentially" ever since. As long ago as 2001, fewer than ten years after the English top division was rebranded as the Premier League and matches became available to view on satellite television, Adrian J. Walsh and Richard Giulianotti were attuned to the prospective negative ramifications of the hypercommodification of football as characterized by "the greater professionalization and global migration of players, the corporatization of clubs, the proliferation of merchandising, rule-changes to draw in new customers, and a general redefinition of the competitive structures and ethos of the sport" (2001, 53, emphasis in original). Twenty-four years later, this list has lengthened. The development of modern communication technologies has extended the Premier League's reach to fresh and lucrative demographics around the world, lending further credence to Sandvoss's contention, made in 2003, that television is "the single most important factor behind the transformation of football in the past 50 years" (2). Clubs like Manchester City and Newcastle United are now owned by instruments of Middle Eastern nation-states with bold geopolitical aims and poor human rights records while others have been taken over by American investment funds. Meanwhile, ambitious developing nations—first China, now Saudi Arabia—have invested heavily in their own domestic leagues, tempting elite players to abandon promising careers in Europe with breathtaking salary offers and associated financial incentives, driving Premier League clubs to ever-greater levels of expenditure. According to the 2024 edition of the Deloitte Football Money League, the twenty most profitable football clubs in 2022/23 generated a combined revenue of €10.5 billion, "a 14% increase over the previous year and pre-pandemic levels" (Deloitte 2024). Eight of this top twenty, and fully six of the top ten, are clubs in the English Premier League.
[1.5] Back in 2001, Walsh and Giulianotti noted "intuitive unease among many members of the sporting community" regarding football's commodification and contended that "concerns about the commodification of sport...have considerable substance" (53), even going as far as to "identify a list of...'pathologies,' both moral and practical, which arise when sport is commodified" (54). While a thorough analysis of the status of these projected pathologies falls beyond the scope of this article, Walsh and Giulianotti's concerns were evidently well founded. Indeed, the commodification of football has now reached a pathological threshold in all the domains the authors discussed. In light of developments ranging from disproportionate increases in ticket prices to evidence of widespread malfeasance among representatives of the game's global governing body, FIFA (Fédération International de Football Association), it is hard to deny the "dominance of financial motives in the all-things-considered judgments of those in charge of development" (61), the "violation of the expressive meanings of the central culture of the game" (62), the "exclusion of traditional soccer fans from resources and activities to which they once had access" (63), or the "undue influence" of "those with money" in the sport's "development and control" (65).
[1.6] The recent takeover of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) illustrates these pathologies, the complexity of navigating them, and the modes of implication they entail particularly clearly. When Newcastle was taken over by the PIF in October 2021, a historic, underachieving club with a famously passionate local fan base became the richest club in the world (on paper) overnight. While many fans greeted the takeover with unalloyed jubilation, many others found themselves navigating a minefield of conflicting sentiments and imperatives. How could one allow oneself to celebrate the PIF takeover, and the eventual success it all but guarantees, in full knowledge of the human rights violations perpetrated by the Saudi regime? How are supporters meant to support their club without supporting its wealthy, unscrupulous benefactor-custodians? And does the legitimacy of one's answers to these questions depend on the intimacy of one's preexisting relationship with club and community? These are novel, complex questions that defy easy, coherent answers—but this should not discourage attempts to map the topography of fan-club relations as the commodification of football continues to progress. In fact, mapping that landscape is a prerequisite for any attempt to understand the emerging shapes and dimensions of football fandom at a time when the stakes of the game have never been higher. To that end, Rothberg's account of implication is a valuable, if perhaps unlikely, resource.
[1.7] While it is not Rothberg's aim to develop a comprehensive typology of the different manifestations of implication, his book reflects on a variety of "types" of implicated subjects, including "the descendant, the beneficiary, and the perpetuator" (2019, 13). The descendant is one who inherits "either the legacies of property, privilege, and right or the negation of those legacies" (64). Using the example of transatlantic slavery, Rothberg distinguishes between those who are implicated genealogically—for example, the descendants of slave owners—and those who are implicated structurally, which covers all those "entwined in [slavery's] aftermath, either because of our racial privilege, our financial interests, our migration into a postslavery situation, or because we too, as scholars, trade in the archives of slavery" (78–79). The beneficiary, meanwhile, is implicated both synchronically and diachronically as a result of "[profiting] from the historical suffering of others as well as from contemporary inequality in an age of global, neoliberal capitalism" (14)—phenomena Rothberg considers undertheorized in contemporary human rights discourse—while the perpetuator, exemplified in Rothberg's work by "the relation of diasporic Jewish communities to the Israeli occupation of Palestine" (25), offers a means of conceptualizing complex forms of implication, such as those in which "past victimization" and "present affiliation with perpetration" coexist (25). These figures are neither discrete nor mutually exclusive—as Rothberg says, "different modes of implication frequently converge and overlap" (13)—but they offer useful starting points for thinking through the emerging shapes of fandom in the context of the increasingly pathological commodification of the world's most popular sport.
[1.8] Furnished with a framework of this sort, football supporters and the scholars who research them would be better placed to apprehend what it means to support one's club under one's own specific circumstances. A Newcastle fan anxious about the prospect of profiting from what is frequently described as a prime example of sportswashing—which Stephen Crossley and Adam Woolf (2024, 307) define as "the practice of (usually) undemocratic regimes using sporting investments to 'cleanse' or enhance their reputation and deflect attention away from human rights abuses"—might see themselves reflected in the figure of the beneficiary. We might say the same of any fan who watched games at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, preparations for which were blighted by reports of torturous living and working conditions for many migrant workers who helped construct stadia and other critical infrastructure. While the official death toll stands at forty, an investigation by The Guardian found that more than 6,500 migrant workers had died since Qatar was awarded the right to host the tournament back in 2010 (Dart 2022). Many fans thus approached the most recent edition of the sport's showpiece event with a blend of enthusiasm and trepidation. Could one attend the tournament without somehow also condoning the abuses perpetrated in its name? As I watched the tournament's opening match on television, my joy was certainly dampened—though not, in all honesty, extinguished—by a sense of benefiting from criminal violence and neglect.
[1.9] Unlike Newcastle, Tottenham is not (yet) owned by an instrument of a rich, ambitious nation-state. My misgivings about maintaining my support derived from a different mode of implication. In this context, I identified less with the figure of the beneficiary than with that of the perpetuator—and a brief reflection on two features of the club's behavior helps to explain why. The first was its response to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, Spurs decided to take advantage of the UK government's Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS); to do so, the club placed nonplaying employees on furlough, an arrangement whereby staff temporarily cease their duties and receive 80 percent of their salary for the duration of the period in question—money the club would later be able to reclaim from the government. The CJRS was meant to help businesses weather the economic firestorm prompted by COVID-19, giving "grants to employers so they could retain and continue to pay staff during coronavirus related [sic] lockdowns" (Frances-Devine et al. 2021)—but Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is a larger enterprise than most. In 2019, chairman Daniel Levy received a £3 million bonus in addition to a basic annual salary of £4 million, while ten of the club's players enjoyed annual salaries of £4 million or more—and yet, despite the depth of the club's pockets, Levy insisted on the need to make use of the CJRS to secure Spurs' financial future. "We may be the eighth largest club in the world by revenue," read a club statement, but "that historical data is totally irrelevant as this virus has no boundaries" (quoted in De Menezes 2020). It should be stressed that Levy took the same 20 percent pay cut as all other nonplaying employees, that Tottenham was not the only club to avail itself of this government initiative, and that the club was pressured into reversing its decision to take advantage of the CJRS two weeks later—but, for me, the episode represented evidence of the club's desire to prioritize the bottom line at all costs, up to and including the well-being of the people who make the club run.
[1.10] The second development concerned Tottenham's status as a founding member of the European Super League (ESL), a breakaway tournament that would see six English clubs leave the Premier League to join other European heavyweights in exclusively continental competition. In direct contravention of the principle of meritocracy that defines all sporting competition, participation in the ESL would be by invitation only, and the league would be a closed shop: The weakest teams would not have to reckon with the threat of relegation—and, by extension, the financial consequences of their sporting failure—because, in the absence of a second tier, there would be nowhere for a club to be relegated to (and, of course, no venue for another club to earn the opportunity to replace it). The response from fans was swift and brutal, and the ESL was quickly shelved. But the damage was done. None of the clubs involved betrayed any concerns about abandoning the national football ecosystems that enabled them, about foreclosing historic sporting traditions, or about increasing the financial and logistical burden on supporters already struggling with rises in the costs of tickets and travel. To my mind, however, the most egregious aspect of Spurs' decision was that it was utterly anticompetitive, both in a sporting sense and an economic one: guaranteed participation meant guaranteed profit, irrespective of the quality of the club's performance. I did not feel that I benefited from this behavior, but I did feel that continuing to support the club would mean perpetuating that behavior—and, like the club's treatment of its staff, this was not something I was prepared to even tacitly endorse. Easy for me to say, perhaps: As somebody with no real connection to the community the club represents, choosing to revoke my support was, in principle, a fairly straightforward moral decision. Had I been raised in the North London neighborhood of Tottenham, had a love of Spurs been handed down to me as an inheritance, the nature of my implication—and, I strongly suspect, the outcome of the decision I felt I had to make—would have been very different indeed.
[1.11] While it may be correct that "soccer's commodification has followed similar patterns around the world" (Nuhrat 2018, 393), fan responses to those patterns vary significantly from one context to another. For many Turkish fans, for example, my feeling of implication would take on a different aspect again. As Yağmur Nuhrat (2018) explains, the commodification of the Turkish game "is reflected in a new term for the sport in its hypercommercial form: endüstriyel futbol (industrial football)" (392). Unlike the "maddening or self-sacrificial love" denoted by the words aşk (roughly, romantic love) and sevda (more obsessive love), the ethos of endüstriyel futbol "reframe[s] fan love as a matter of consumption" (397). According to this ethos, fans assume a measure of a collective responsibility to maintain their club's financial health. Where, in countries like the UK, "fans have responded to the commodification of soccer by asserting that 'supporting your team [is] an emotional thing,' not 'cold-hearted business'" (397), some fan groups in Turkey actively "embrace the forms of attachment that capitalism encourages and express their fandom through consumption. For example, the Fenerbahçe team is recognized as playing a pioneering role in the development of endüstriyel futbol," with the club's fans famous for "shopping at the club's official merchandising store...to support the club" (399). Seen from this vantage, my abandonment of Tottenham appears borderline nonsensical. After all, were the club's exploitation of the CJRS and effort to join the ESL not squarely focused on strengthening its economic hand? In this light, my decision to cut ties looks less like a response to a betrayal by my club and more like a betrayal of that club: a naive refusal, perhaps, to countenance the hard reality of what it actually means to support a club in the twenty-first century.
[1.12] Individually and collectively, these examples illuminate the complex of overlapping, interlocking social, political, economic, cultural, and ethical vectors with which fans are now compelled to reckon—and, by extension, a proliferation of new and uncomfortable positions that fans occupy in relation to their clubs—in the era of football's hypercommodification. The immense value and influence of the football industry worldwide renders these matters highly consequential. Fandom is seldom trivial—supporting a club entails negotiating crucial questions of identity, community, and belonging—and, as we have seen, the football industry is now inseparable from forms of violence and injustice that also fuel Rothberg's scholarship. Whether or not one chooses to acknowledge it, supporting a football club is always a political act; and as the stakes of investing in football extend further beyond the boundaries of the playing field, it is essential to reckon with the multitude of indirect ways in which fans are implicated in the actions of the game's most influential stakeholders. This reckoning will not be neat, easy, or conclusive, but it is only by attempting to conceptualize the shifting tides of implication that meaningful forms of solidarity and resistance can emerge. This is the telos of Rothberg's The Implicated Subject, which "traces a conceptual arc from what Part I calls 'Long-Distance Legacies' to what Part III calls 'Long-Distance Solidarity'" (2019, 22). Its ensemble of figures includes "those who—like the internationalist—seek to overcome implication (if often with mixed results)" (13), and the fifth chapter follows a filmmaker and Holocaust survivor who, in Rothberg's words, "leaves behind the position of surviving victim and fosters surprising new multidirectional forms of solidarity" (26). Without for a moment wishing to assert any kind of equivalence between the gravity of these circumstances, we might ask what "multidirectional forms of solidarity" become possible when we account for the implicated supporter.
[1.13] Or, indeed, the implicated fan. After all, Rothberg's theory has implications far beyond football. The problematic consequences of the hypercommodification of football can also be identified in other sports; as Crossley and Woolf argue, the rise of the term "sportswashing" has been powered not only by the Qatar World Cup and the Saudi takeover of Newcastle but also by Saudi Arabia's "investments around golf, boxing, and Formula 1 racing, the Winter Olympics in Beijing" (2024, 309), and comparable developments across the sporting firmament. Similar questions also plague fandom beyond sport, and Rothberg's account promises to lend welcome precision and nuance to familiar debates regarding the extent to which the merits of an artwork can be separated from the biography of its author—a debate spectacularly reignited in the case of J. K. Rowling, whose comments regarding the use of public toilets by transgender people have been met with accusations of transphobia by many Harry Potter fans (Duggan 2021, 160–62). This variety of implication is complicated further by the myriad ways in which fans engage creatively with Rowling's work, including "queer readings" (160) and other "transformative interpretations" (153). In this context, like so many others, forms of implication abound.
[1.14] Looking back, it occurs to me that my rationale for abandoning Spurs could in fact be described as an attempt to extricate myself from any kind of implication in what I considered to be some of the uglier features of the beautiful game. If that was in fact my intention, consciously or otherwise, the attempt was unsuccessful. If Rothberg's account of implication is as broadly relevant to fan studies as I have suggested, it should be little wonder that, even in the depths of the Norwegian second division, I remain implicated. I still watch Premier League matches on television; I still pour money into the coffers of the local pub that screens them; I still check the sport headlines immediately after waking up and again immediately before going to sleep. Though Lyn occupies an entirely different locus to Spurs in the global footballing ecosystem, choosing to support Lyn does not divorce me from that ecosystem; I am still implicated, albeit in a certain way and at a certain remove. But my choice to break the golden rule of football fandom has changed my mode of implication in ways that allow me to once again love the sport the way I want. Knowing how we are implicated helps us know how to support, how to care for, how to love—and football is ultimately a thing to love, a thing that inspires love in an unprecedented number of people. As David Goldblatt (2019, 3) says in The Age of Football: The Global Game in the Twenty-First Century, football is "the most global and most popular of popular cultural phenomenon [sic] in the twenty-first century." Billions of people support football clubs, and that is not about to change. The question is, when we do this, what else are we supporting—and how?