Rev Left Radio - Socializing Sports: Reclaiming The Beautiful Game from Capital & Empire

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

In this episode, Breht speaks with Robert E. Wilson, author of The Football Manifesto and The Supporters Trust League Manifesto. Together they explore what it means to socialize sports; to reclaim the Beautiful Game from billionaire owners, corrupt institutions, and imperial powers, and return it to the people as a democratic, community-owned, and liberatory project. Together, they examine the ways professional sports in the imperial core normalize colonialism, militarism, racism, and capitalism, while grassroots football worldwide has long been a site of resistance, solidarity, and struggle. From the NFL’s “plantation economics” to the vision of supporter-owned clubs, equal pay for women’s teams, and football as a hub of political education and mutual aid, this conversation makes clear that sports are never “just games.” They are battlefields for ideology and community -- as well as an expression of our nature as social beings -- and if reclaimed, they can become engines of solidarity,healthy communities, and socialist culture. Whether you are a sports fan or not, you will get a LOT out of this fascinating and surprisingly wide-ranging conversation! Gaia Labs HERE Behind the Shield documentary on the NFL by Dave Zirin HERE Black Alliance for Peace petition to ban Israel and US HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/ Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

The timing of this episode is particularly good because, obviously, American rugby, as you call it, is starting up again, and people are kind of getting in the sport mind frame, so it'll be, I think, a really important topic to tackle. And I didn't really touch on this, and maybe we won't get to it. I didn't touch on it in the outline. And I'm just going to ask you up front if you think it's worth touching on, but kind of the gambling aspect of sports lately and how that is, like, formed people's interaction with sports. I don't know if you have done too much work on that front, but

if you had any thoughts. Well, I've certainly thought about it. I think that it's an awful thing to say, but I think that that's kind of driving toward the core essence of what capitalism is all about. You know, there's this speculative aspect of

repeating the capitalist model, you know, and it creates this expectation that somehow you are almost spiritually blessed to be able to, quote, unquote, win a lottery, you know, or win at a lottery, or somehow enhance your own notion of your ability to, quote, unquote, pick a winner. I mean, it's, I think it's, certainly in the United States, I think it's hard to erase. I don't think it's going to stop. I don't think it's going to be eradicated. I think there's a way to potentially manage it because all of it is, you know, quote unquote, revenue generating and taking revenue out of the pockets of most people who

don't have revenue to bet in the first place and channel it to, you know, a corporate entity at the top where shareholders who are at the, you know, the absolute pinnacle of the one percent of one-tenth of one percent of society is reaping the benefits. of something that is almost like an alcoholic or drug-induced state when you begin to play and bet. So I think it's a downer. I think it's not something that's constructive. And the question is, how can it be made to be constructive?

And the only thing that occurs to me is that, you know, possibly a league could create its own, quote-unquote, betting mechanism and make sure that those revenues are channeled back into the communities that support the sport. But that, you know, that's never happened. And right now, I don't have an idea for how that would work. I mean, there are some, interesting enough, there's some ideas in Brazil that potentially could work like that because Brazil has a long tradition on betting on this sport. Now, obviously, nobody's ever structured it so that the, quote, unquote, proceeds or the

revenues that are generated from betting that cut across all strata of society can somehow be channeled into the very sport that it's betting on. That's never happened. I don't see any, I don't see any reason for why that couldn't happen, to tell you the truth. But I think that that's the only potential alternative. It's kind of a, you know, kind of a transcendent and include idea in terms of how capitalism works. And in some sense, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to re-channel cash flows. I mean, that's really what's going on here with my proposal. It's not a question of not making money. The question is, while MLS was there, the idea was to literally limit the amount of revenue generated and what revenue is generated is channeled

into the pockets of, you know, the ultra-wealthy. So I'm trying to reverse that and create cash flows that basically go back in and recirculate in the communities. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's incredibly important work as a sports fan myself. I love this idea and I've often thought about it and we're going to get into it. I just wanted to say very quickly that the gambling aspect that you mentioned of like desperate people without revenue, increasingly desperate people without revenue, you know, gambling as in a lot of ways a, you know, a desperate kind of last resort to hit it big to try to create a future for

yourself, and that being just another mechanism by which money is funneled from the middle and the lower, you know, class strata and funneled to the very, very top is just a microcosm of the entire American economy at this point. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the same thing happens. I think globally, really, in the West, I'm not sure what's happening in Asia, much less in countries like Africa, where the sport is not, you know, as monetarily structured. But certainly in England and most of the European countries, and certainly in Latin America, betting is a huge aspect of the game. Here in Brazil, the betting is largely controlled by the government. It's not a private sector operation. So there's an argument that says, well, you know, most of the

proceeds are being channeled into something that is, quote-unquote, constructive. But, you know, even that is, it's weird. It's very strange because the vast majority of the people that bet are in classes C, D, and E. This is like the ranking in Brazil for classes is A, B, C, D, and E. So you could imagine the A is, you know, the top, you know, 1% or 10% or however you want to look at it. B is kind of like middle class. And then C, D, and E are basically lower, you know, lower middle class and poor and abject

poverty. And most of the betting takes place in C, D and E. That's where the money's coming from. You know, that's who bets because they're, they're desperate to try to improve their, their financial situation. And of course, every once in a while, you know, somebody wins and then that reinforces the ethos,

you know. So look, somebody won. They, they're bringing in 10 million local currency. Maybe we should do the same thing. So it kind of is a perpetual, vicious circle. Yeah. I mean, it literally is just the logic of the lottery, you know. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it's really horrendous. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. All right, on today's episode, I have a fascinatingly deep conversation with Robert E. Wilson on and around his book, The Football Manifesto and Club Handbook, Bringing the Beautiful Game to the People. This is a deep dive conversation. Honestly, the deepest conversation I've ever heard on sports and how to make them better. It's basically an argument for socializing sports, a deep critique of the sporting industry, the billionaire ownership model, and what socializing sports on behalf of the communities in which they exist would actually look like. It advances this vision called the Supporters Trust League.

It's centered around what we Americans naively call soccer. which we refer to throughout this episode in its proper nomenclature football and we call American football in this episode American Rugby and you might think well I'm not really into sports I don't really need to listen to an episode on sports

I'm sure it's good for some people but no even if you hate sports even if you've never watched a game in your life the conversation goes in so many different directions through philosophy deluz and Guatari anthropology why is it that sport manifests in every culture, regardless of the material base of that culture.

It goes into obviously Marxism, dialectical materialism, an extended discussion on the genocide in Palestine happening right now, the implications for the 2026 World Cup with Israel's participation. I mean, so many, so many things, right? The barriers to entry for impoverished youth to various sports and how that might be rectified through this new vision of what sports could be. I mean, this is just a deep, profound conversation. I want to give a huge shout out to Margaret Kimberly over at the Black Agenda Report, who I've had on where I've left before is a friend of the show and actually introduced me to Robert and made this episode possible. So I can't recommend this enough. Lock in for this long-ass two and a half plus hour conversation

and you will not regret it and you will walk out the other side with a head full of truly profound thoughts and penetrating insights into the nature of society, you know, using the lens of sports as a gateway into this much broader, deeply human conversation. I'm really excited to share that with you today. And as always, you know, RevLeft is and always will be 100% listener funded. So if you like what we do here, you can join us on patreon.com forward slash rev left radio and in exchange for a couple bucks a month, you get multiple bonus episodes. I'm introducing Rev Left patrons to our Shulis Sangha, a monthly Buddhist community where we get up and discuss Buddhist concepts and meditate together, as well as the Rev Left situation room.

So whenever really big news breaks, we have a huge Zoom call where me and the patrons of Rev Left get into a big Zoom call and in real time discuss the implications of the event and help. And help one another as a community understand what's going on in addition of course to bonus monthly episodes so there's a lot that you get for very little and it funds this show it keeps this show going we are now eight years going strong and even though i have i do have a new job it is an apprenticeship program and the wages for the apprenticeship are very very low right you're starting out in a four-year apprenticeship program and the first couple years so you know any support that you have i have All of my time is now dedicated to this full 40 hours a week work as well as going to class

twice a week for this apprenticeship program. And I'm trying to squeeze out Rev Left episodes on the weekends and continue to support my family as Dave is continuing to support his. So joining us on Patreon is a great way to help. But if you don't want to be on a monthly subscription model or don't want to support Patreon for whatever reason, we also have BuyMeaCoffee.com, which I'll link to in the show notes. one-time donation. So if you get anything out of the show, if you want to show us some love, if you want to support us materially, that's a one-off way you can do so. And we really,

really appreciate everybody who supports the show and keeps the show running. Even as my life gets unbearably busy, it is the supporters of this show that keep it afloat and keep it going. And it's the most important thing publicly I've ever done in my life. And so it means a lot to me and the relationships I have with the community of people that support the show, the listeners more broadly, the guests that have come on the show and come back on the show. It's really one of the highlights of my life and none of it would be possible without the support of our show. But if you don't have money, times are hard.

I totally get it. Sharing this episode with somebody you know who might be interested in it, leaving us positive reviews, sharing our stuff on Instagram, which is our main social media site that we are present on, all those things help enormously as well. All right, without further ado, here is my fascinating, deep, wide-ranging conversation with Robert E. Wilson on socializing sports, the supporters trust league vision for what sports could be in his book, The Football Manifesto. Enjoy.

So, Brett, it's an honor to be here. Just a quick kind of overview of my background. I'm an American. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I am old enough to remember apartheid in the United States. I grew up in a black inner-city neighborhood. Both my parents were lawyers. My house as a kid, as I grew up in the 50s and 60s, was literally a beehive of activity

because my parents were involved in the, literally in defending civil rights protesters and that kind of thing, my entire childhood. So people were coming in and out of the house the whole time. If you can believe it, when I grew up, there was no air conditioning, there was no television. and everything was segregated, including sports, which is, of course, the topic at hand. So I'm old enough to remember when the Brooklyn Dodgers would come to St. Louis, and St. Louis was the, quote, unquote, southernmost baseball club in the world of the National League and the American League. It was a very conservative team and town, and I remember distinctly when the Dodgers came to town,

you know, they had Don Newcomb and Jackie Robinson and a bunch of folks that were black that played to the Dodgers. The Dodgers could not stay in hotels in St. Louis. So they literally had to stay in the homes of people in the neighborhood, even though they were, you know, quote-unquote world-class athletes and, you know, playing at the literal peak of athletic prowess, at least during that period of time. So my world, in some sense, has been colored by that background and upbringing. I left St. Louis as a teenager to go away to a boarding school in Massachusetts, and I went to college on the West Coast and law school on the East Coast.

And I make a very long story short. After law school and working a bit, I wound up in Brazil. It's a long story, but that's a short form version. And that's where I fell in love with the beautiful game. I had grown up in St. Louis very much aware of the sport because St. Louis was a town that was overwhelmingly dominated by the Catholic Church and the Catholic school system. So when I grew up as a kid, the four sports in evidence in the city were American rugby, what I call what the NFL plays is, American rugby. baseball, basketball, and what I now call football or soccer. But it carried equal weight on the sports pages in St. Louis because of the Catholic school system

and also because of St. Louis University, which was one of the large Catholic universities in that country. And so there was a funnel of talent from K through 12 all into St. Louis University for soccer or football. and St. Louis University, interestingly enough, is still the record holder in the United States for Division I NCAA championships in football. And I will, henceforward, only use the word football, I will not work and use the word soccer because there's actually a history behind the use and nomenclature of football and soccer that most people forget. I want to leave your audience with a mantra, which is that

soccer is the sports slave name, and the history shows that, and hopefully I can bring that to light as we go forward. That's more or less my background. I was trained as a lawyer, migrated over to financial services, and I've basically spent my life in the investment world. In college, I was a philosophy major, which is a completely long and separate story. It's got a lot of anecdotes to it, but that's how I got exposed to philosophy. And in some sense, despite the, you know, the fact that I went to law school and then worked in, you know, New York City government for four years and then migrated into the quote-unquote world of finance, I basically kept at it with philosophy. And during COVID, I had an amazing experience because on Twitter,

I got involved with a group that was largely exchanging ideas about philosophy, and that group turned into be a study group for DeLuze and Guateri, two French writers slash philosophers, psychoanalyst, and those works literally transformed the way I see the world. And I want to qualify that by saying that DeLuze and Guartri added something to my world, view that had been triggered when I was in college. So when I was in college, you know, as a philosophy major, I remember distinctly, and, you know, when you're in college, you have, your ego is so absolutely huge.

You don't know your, you don't know your ass from a hole in the ground, but you think you are the smartest motherfucker in the world, right? Yeah. And I remember my freshman year, I was, I had quote, unquote, stumbled on this idea. of nothingness from the standpoint of philosophy. And I thought it was original thinking on my part. And I remember going into the school's bookstore and just, you know, browsing through the philosophy section

and being blown away when I stumbled on Sartre's being in nothingness. And I said, oh, my God, somebody has written about nothingness. It's like, holy shit, you know. So I bought the book immediately, understood absolutely nothing. Nothing about what I was reading. Absolutely nothing. But it kind of proved to me, now looking back on it, just how absolutely absurd the ego can be out of control when you're young.

You don't know your philosophical butt from a hole in the ground. But, you know, it's one of those kinds of experiences that builds on, you know, on other things. And over time, you begin to get a perspective on things. and probably the thing that most triggered my kind of perpetual quest in the philosophical vein aside from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the 60s and 70s, which is another, you know, digression in terms of my life. But I, to make a long story short, I hitchhiked from the United States to Brazil. And on that trip, I read. I had a lot of time. I had a little bit. duffel bag, and my duffel bag was like, you know, half clothes and half books, and four of the

books that I read on that trip were the four books by Carlos Castaneda. And the reason I'm bringing up Castaneda is because I think that Castaneda brings to the table a new cocked into framework, which interestingly enough was touched on in the works of Duluz and Guatari, especially in 1,000 plateaus, the two books that they wrote about schizophrenia, psychoanalysts, and schizophrenia, capitalism, schizophrenia, is the overarching title of the two volumes of anti-edipus and a thousand plateaus, but those books I had never seen mentioned in any philosophical work in the West. But when I came across those works from Duluz and Guatari, especially in a thousand plateaus, they actually talk about, Costaneda. The first four books that Costanator read. Basically, those books lay out a new cognitive framework for our species. They introduce concepts that are amazingly overlapping with the concepts that Deleuze and Guaqadi explore in a thousand plateaus and antietapus. And that

reinforced the whole notion for me of the extent to which Marx, despite the incredible contribution that Marx made and has made and continues to make in our lives, they put Marx in a different perspective, and from my perspective, they turned Marx on his head in the sense that they critiqued materialism and the dialectic in such a way that I think that they freed Marx from the prison that capitalism creates about the notion of reality itself. And I think the freeing of what they did was to literally open the door through schizophrenia in some sense, but also through what amounts to be one of the aspects of the 60s and 70s culture, which is, you know, the new horizons that drugs opened up in theory. It's just that the 60s and 70s didn't concretize what exactly was happening with the use of drugs and the use of expanded consciousness. And when you read Costaneda's books, not just the first four but the other eight, you get an impression not just of a theoretical framework, but of a framework of praxis about how that new perspective of the world changed. changes everything. And that is, I think, the prelude and bridge that Deleuze and Guacti were literally building as they wrote those books. They were building a new bridge to a new

cognitive view of the world that overturns the parameters and restrictions that capitalism imposes on reality itself and on perception itself. So I think that Castaneda basically stumbled on a world that is a world that we need to migrate to. And I think what it does is it broadens the scope of what freedom is about. It broadens the scope of what socialism is about. And it broadens and deepens the notion of democracy's connection to communism. So I think that that's the, you know, that's the overarching message I want to give to the audience that Kostanated is an essential piece of the puzzle. And I also think that, you know, from Deleuze and Guatari's perspective, that they represent a bridge from

Marx, Lenin, and Mao to this new future. And Deleuze, you may or may not know, basically calls this new future a new earth. And in some sense, it's a different structure than the traditional notion of basin superstructure. It basically casts the earth. as the base. And the earth is quite literally alive. It is aware. And the new superstructure is all that we have, quote, unquote, constructed on top of that, but obviously in transformation toward, you know, a commensurate notion of awareness across the board. Physically speaking, there's some concepts that are, you know, somewhat new, radical for sure. One is this concept of the assemblage point, which is a point where literally perception is assembled in the context of our ontological and epistemological search in life.

So the assemblage point is basically a point behind our shoulder blades, about a yard off of our backs. and they speak to basically luminous fibers of awareness as the core ontological setting of our own respective existences. So it's kind of like taking Leibniz's monad and realizing that there are 8 billion, quote-unquote, monad-like, egg-shaped like fibers of awareness that connect all of us

and that in turn connect us to the universe. And the universe is, in a sense, you know, a massive, incalculable array of fibers of awareness. That's a very crude way of explaining it and expressing it. Constantine does a lot better job than I do. But basically what that means is that the entire edifice of what we're doing and living and breathing is the fruit of reason.

And as you read through Kastaneda's books, you realize that reason itself is really a foreign installation. It's an inorganic presence, and that all of us have been, in some sense, invaded by this foreign installation. And he calls it specifically the mind, that the mind that we all possess is, in fact, a foreign installation that has its own dialogue, that we assume is our dialogue, and that it proposes X, Y, and Z, and then agrees with itself in terms of the answers to X, Y, and Z queries.

So it's something that is masked and hard to see. but when you read through the history of Western philosophy in particular, you know, one thing that occurs to me is, you know, you think about Descartes's reasoning as he sat before that fire and went through the exercise. And I think this is in the first meditation where he literally begins to doubt everything in existence. That exercise was exactly the exercise that Kaspinita is describing. He doesn't talk about Descartes at all in any of the books. But I have looked at what Descartes said and wrote again, most recently, within the past couple of months.

And I'm absolutely convinced that it fits like a glove with the overall notion of what the mind is, that we are in fact, you know, waking up to the fact that the mind that we have is a mind that's been imposed on us. And that mind that's been imposed on us is a mind that literally, you know, suffers from and is, in fact, the origin of the dialectic, the duality that we deal with. And one of the things, Brett, that I've always admired about your, you know, your sessions is that you've juxtaposed Buddhism. And in some sense, it's, it's non-dual nature with the duality. that we literally live with day to day, whether you're a Marxist or a non-Marxist, we live in this capitalist, realist, what amounts to be, you know, stage. And I think that that juxtaposition with Buddhism is the beginning of an awakening of exactly

what is going on. So I'm just simply saying that what happens with Castaneda and with the Western tradition leading up to him through De Luz and Guartadilly begins to unveil a new set of parameters for the left to quote unquote take advantage of and think about. Last but not least, one of the things that I'm advocating and still working on is the idea that the capitalist realist notion that Mark Fisher so articulately put before us is literally reinforced day to day by capitalism and that the way that we can get out of that and I think Fisher attempted to point ways out of that prison but it's a realization that we are

in fact in a materialist prison that's been literally created by capitalism and the left is largely in a responsive mode in a reactive mode as it deals with the quote unquote capitalist realist prison that capitalism has created. I mean, we are literally at war without any stretch of the imagination. There's a war going on. And we are literally at war on the battlefield that capitalism created. And what I'm suggesting is there's a larger and essential different approach that expands the notion of reality and expands the notion of perception, which right now I think are captive and in the hands of the capitalist base and superstructure. And so we have to somehow escape that and create something new. And in large

measure, what I'm doing with this football project is exactly that. It's an attempt to create a larger vision of both reality and perception itself. Yeah, so I love that. And there is a long time listeners of Rev. F will know that you just tickled several of my core interests. And it's very, very tempting to go deeper into all of that. I will say something really quickly about it with the idea that the socially constructed mind, and I might not be on the exact same wavelength of what you're advocating, but I think they dovetail quite well that even in the Buddhist conception of the ego or the false sense of self, it literally is a programming.

It's not a unique organic response to life in the present moment as it's happening. It is a sort of collection of past. experiences imposing themselves on the present in such a way that you are kind of captive to a programming. That programming is social in nature, not only in the parents and the upbringing that you specifically had, but in the society that you grew up in. And in that ways, in the Marxist sense of a superstructure or ideology, that false sense of self that you identify, that is constantly chattering away inside your head that you take to be you, is composed and structured by a system that we fundamentally oppose.

And the ego, the thing that is always wanting and grasping and pushing away unpleasant sensations and groping for pleasant sensations and in perpetual search for a happiness that never arrives coincides perfectly with the material incentives of the capitalist system. And it's not so much that capitalism came along first and constructed the ego. they're like a mutually reinforcing psychological and material reality that feed into one another. And if we really want to liberate ourselves from the very subjectivity of capitalism, I think there's a strong argument to make that we need to transcend our identification with this false socially constructed programming that we call mind or self. Does that dovetail or resonate with what you're saying? I think it dovetails perfectly.

And I think that that's exactly the challenge before us. I think that we have to realize the extent to which capitalism has basically drawn a offense or an enclosure around the notion of reality. And to carry this into the world of sports and football, as you know, I mean, in the origins, historically speaking, of capital. capitalism, enclosure was and still is a crucial aspect of how capitalism reproduces itself. And so one of the things that's happened certainly in, you know, the world of, let's say, imperialism and colonialism is the notion of enclosure. I mean, the nation state concept is a notion of enclosure. And all enclosures at that level of the nation state work in some sense. in the same way. They are all tools of a small elite within each nation state that basically

manipulates the basin superstructure through the various apparatus that the nation state represents. What I'm suggesting is that the same thing has happened in sports. I mean, if you look at sports in the United States, we have in the top four sports leagues, the NFL, which I call American rugby, basketball, baseball and hockey. And if you add in MLS, which has 30 teams, you have 154 teams that are all not only owned by billionaires, but they all base their existence on the notion of geographic enclosure. So if you go to L.A., you know that the Dodgers have a geographic enclosure for the mass portion of the L.A. metropolitan area.

that was breached via negotiation with the creation of the angels in Southern California. But each of those leagues has, quote, unquote, a geographic area that the teams in those leagues quote unquote control. And it's not something that's been, you know, negotiated with the local municipalities or with the people in those particular areas. It's a group of small, very wealthy individuals who have decided that they want that part of the country to hold a team that they control. And so that's how the entire sports apparatus in the United States is built on that model of enclosure. And what I'm trying to do with this new sport and this new quote-unquote approach to the sport, which is the football supporters trust league, is to take a new approach to the sport.

is to take a new approach to the sport of football in the United States and in some sense challenge the billionaire ownership model along the lines of deconstructing the notion of enclosure. I love the idea of the concept of enclosure applied in this unique and novel but also a very insightful and generative way. And I share deeply your overall goal, which is to challenge the billionaire-owned, system of sports and the ways that that billionaire material structure that sports are subordinated

to distorts and morphs sports in a bad negative way. There's so many things that we're going to get into throughout this conversation that that alludes to that. But there's a way in which sports themselves, which are deeply human, could be liberated from the vice grip of capitalist incentive structures and socialized, democratized, um, and owned by. and for the people in a way that I think would not only make the experience of being a fan much more enjoyable, but could actually materially serve the interests of the people in a given community in which that sports team is active. Let's get into it then, and let's start just kind of zooming out a tad and talking about

the book itself. The book that we are discussing today is, and we're going to touch on many different things even beyond the book itself. But, you know, the center of gravity here is the book that you wrote called the Football Manifesto and Club Handbook, Bringing the Beautiful Game to the People and making the USA number one in the world. Can you talk about that book, that title, what you wanted to achieve with it, and why you chose to frame it as a manifesto instead of a commentary or a policy proposal or anything else? Yeah, absolutely. I should start, I guess, in, you know, roughly 2014, in 2014, Brazil staged the FIFA Men's World Cup.

And that event was a, you know, a huge, as you can imagine. It's a huge event for any country. In Brazil, which is probably the country that is, in such sense, the most obsessed with the sport. If you look at it on per capita basis, I mean, people here are, they live and breathe the sport. And this is truly a quintessential example of a football. culture. Having said that, in 2014, after that World Cup was over, I began writing a blog. And the blog was really just purely, you know, exploratory essays and thoughts about the sport, not just in Brazil, but also in North America and globally. But one of the things I began to look at in the United States was why the sport of football in the United States was why the sport of football in the United States, States was not at the same level as the other four quote-unquote dominant sports. So if you look at the NFL, the NBA, baseball, and hockey, those respective sports in the United States are basically

the global standard of excellence, both on the field and off. All of those leagues are, without question, the best leagues on the planet in those respective sports. And so the question that I began to research was why in the United States isn't football at the same level as those other four leagues? And at first, I mean, it just didn't, you know, it didn't make any sense. I couldn't really figure out what was happening. I began researching and, you know, periodically interviewing people that I could find, both at, you know, the youth level of the sport in the United States, but also at the professional level of the sport in the United States. And after four years, almost five years of research, I came to the conclusion that the sport in the United

States, as it's embodied by Major League Soccer, MLS, and as it's embodied by U.S. soccer, which is the quote-unquote representative of FIFA in the United States for the sport, that I, those, both those organizations after research and after, you know, much quote-unquote testimony from third parties, came to a conclusion that nothing is by accident, that it was entirely planned and structured and part of a much larger vision for sports in the United States, generally speaking. And so the conclusion that the book reaches, which is a pretty radical conclusion, is that football in the United States, as opposed to American rugby, is the way it is because the people that run American rugby in the United States, namely the NFL, wanted football to be in exactly the position that it's in. That is, a second-class sport without the quote-unquote financial and revenue-generating muscle of any other sport in the United States.

And the reason was, well, why would they do that? Why would they waste their time attempting to control Major League Soccer, which they do? And attempting to control U.S. soccer, which they do. And the answer was, you know, clear after discussions with these third parties. And that is that they did not want football in the United States to be a sport that drained or detoured talent. out of the pipeline of talent into the NFL. In short, they didn't want blacks that are in the pipeline that funnels into the NFL,

because 75% of the players in the NFL were black. They didn't want those black athletes channeled in a different direction for football. And so what they did was they controlled MLS from the very beginning. They structured it the way they felt would be appropriate to do that. They also took control of U.S. soccer as an entity. They put people that were handpicked at both MLS and U.S. soccer to make sure that their, quote, unquote, wishes were followed. And for the next roughly 30 years, that's what's happened.

I mean, U.S. soccer today is obviously the, quote, unquote, oversight or umbrella organization for the sport in the United States. but it is structured in such a way today that it really doesn't make a difference who runs U.S. soccer. It's already structured to run in exactly the same way that they've wanted it to run, which is to basically control

the professional side of the game and the youth side of the game. So MLS is basically there as a tool to make sure that, you know, blacks and now, of course, Hispanics don't play the game in any record numbers.

and certainly the quote unquote best athletes that come out of the black community do not migrate in the direction of football. They migrate in the direction of American rugby, which that's where the money is. And there are a lot of details as to why and how that happened. But basically, this sport, in a sense, is a colonized sport in the United States. And it's controlled by the upper echelons of society, particularly owners in the NFL, who make sure that this sport never becomes a rival to the NFL in any shape, form of fashion. That's utterly fascinating. I genuinely had no clue that the NFL had really any sway, any presence, any power

within the world of what is so-called soccer, which is, of course, originally football. That is fascinating. But it actually, of course, makes total sense. The question I have next is, obviously, you're emphasizing the NFL here for obvious reasons. I think it's fair to say the NFL is the biggest sport in the United States. And so there's an obvious power dynamic and an obvious desire on behalf of the NFL to maintain that basically hegemony over that pipeline of young athletes into the NFL. But the NBA also is a very, you know, is a league that is pro-black that is, I mean, in some ways more liberal or progressive than the NFL as a whole, but certainly benefits from a pipeline that doesn't include

huge swaths of young black athletes being pushed into what is called soccer. So does the NBA play any role here at all, or is this basically an NFL thing and the NBA just happens to benefit? I think that the NBA just happens to benefit. I think from the NFL's perspective, the NFL has always been, of the four dominant leagues, has always been the league that looked, you know, the most forward in terms of its perspective on the world, in terms of strategic planning. I think by the late 80s and early 90s, it was clear that basketball, baseball, and hockey would never be a threat to the NFL. And as a

result, those leagues, and particularly with the NBA, the profile. The profile, of athlete that gravitates toward the NBA is a profile of athlete that is incredibly skilled. I would say that basketball players arguably are the best athletes of those four leagues. I think the best athletes are basketball players. Agreed. The number of American football players who can play basketball versus the number of basketball players who can play football, I mean, you know, practically every basketball player that plays in the NBA could play in the NFL.

Absolutely. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. And it just does, it just worked in reverse. So the skill sets that are involved, I mean, the most skilled players in the NFL are the players that, you know, quote unquote, the skilled positions, there's quarterback, their receivers, their cornerbacks. Those are, quote, unquote, the most gifted athletes, so to speak. And it's exactly those skilled athletes in the NFL that would be the most likely to migrate into football because football is a ball-skilled sport just like basketball. I think it takes longer to master those skills or at least as long to master those skills as any athlete in the United States that follows the basketball route.

I think when you follow football in the United States or any other country in the world that plays football, you have to start at an early age. Like you cannot become a world-class player in football and start when you're 15. You have to start when you're considerably younger than that. And, you know, there are all kinds of, I'm sure, analogies we could bring to the table to talk about that phenomenon. But generally speaking, what I'm saying is that because, you know, because. the sport has been locked out of the inner city, there is literally no chance for those inner city kids to migrate in the direction of a football. And that's not an accident. Now, you know, I've largely been focused in the book and here talking about the men. I should also mention

that the women in the United States are without question world class. They are in some sense the global standard of excellence for the sport, certainly in the United States, and increasingly globally. So the women have had a different trajectory and represent a different status globally than the men. The men are, you could even argue that the men are developing world country players. They do not have a tradition of being world class in the United States. The women do. And that's, I think, directly related to Title IX and a few other things in the United States that has to do with the, you know, the, literally the infrastructure of a first world country like the United States. So Title IX, when it was passed, I think this is in the early 70s, opened the door for, quote, unquote, equal treatment of women in the NCAA. And the mere door opening and the existence of already profoundly sophisticated infrastructure laid the framework for the women to excel, radically speaking, in comparison to women in the rest of the world.

So the women in the rest of the world did not have Title IX. They did have aspects of infrastructure availability, but in large measure, women were barred from the sport until the 30 or 40. 40 years ago. So the women in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe and in some cases in Latin America, are catching up to the American women. But I do think that the American women still have the advantage. I think they're a little bit ahead. But that that gap is closing as we speak. All right. So yeah, I think you make so many good points, in particular, I mean, going back a little bit to the point about the difference between the NBA and the NFL and that the NBA is a higher skilled league. I totally agree with that. And there's a couple other factors. that I also think limit the pool of people that end up in the NBA versus the NFL.

One of them is just the height requirement, right, especially in the modern NBA, to be a serious long-term player in the NBA. You have to be 64, 65, 66, at least in a lot of cases, there are exceptions to that rule, but already you're talking about a tiny percentage of human population that could reach the height. And then you have to have that hyper-talent and athletic ability on top of it. marrying a huge frame of, you know, six, six, eight, six, eleven, seven feet with the athleticism and the NBA has smaller teams. So much smaller amount of spaces really available in the upper echelons of basketball

as compared to the NFL where you could be, you know, five, seven, five, eleven, six foot tall and be a world class, wide receiver, quarterback, running back at these skilled positions, et cetera. So I also think that that limits the pool. and feeds into the broader pattern that you're talking about with regards to the NFL's sort of hegemony in regards to that. I also want to say I'm going to adopt your historically correct parlance going forward, so I'll talk about football as what Americans know as soccer,

and I'll use American rugby to talk about what we call football. I think it's important to do that, but you mentioned earlier that there's a history there, and you touched on it briefly, but I was hoping that you could kind of explicate why that soccer football jargon matters and kind of the history of it and I'm just personally curious and I think it'll help fill out the reasons

why we're specifically using certain words. No, absolutely. And there is an important, even crucial history to understand. When you think about sports generally, globally speaking today, you cannot ignore

the British Empire. When the Imperial Corps was in London and the British Empire extended literally around the globe. One of the principal tools they used in the context of their imperialism and colonialism was sports. They brought with them as part of their essential baggage, three sports, rugby, football, and cricket. And if you look very closely at where the British Empire laid its roots in terms of, quote-unquote, white settlers, that is to say, lands that they appropriated through imperialism and colonialism. There are certain countries on the planet that became, quote-unquote, white dominant.

In those white-dominate venues, the dominant sport that they used to, quote-unquote, mollify the natives was rugby. So Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, these are all areas where rugby became the dominant sport in those respective geographies and nations. Where the British Empire decided to focus on a given geography in terms of extraction as opposed to white settlement, they used football and cricket. those countries, not surprisingly, are all black and brown, India, the Caribbean, Latin America in particular, and of course, Africa. All of these countries largely are, quote, unquote, football countries and or cricket countries. And the issue in the United States is really

fascinating because in the UK, football, quote unquote, was a sport for the masses. It's where the poor people played. It's what the poor and the working class basically did for recreation. They played football. Whereas in the UK, in particular in England, the Oxford Cambridge crowd, the literally elite of that society played rugby. And rugby was the dominant sport of the elite. And it became the dominant sport of the elite because they felt that rugby taught managerial skills. It taught the respect for hierarchy. It taught the respect for planning and basically delegation of roles. So it's a perfect tool for quote unquote the managerial class that Oxford and Cambridge were producing.

Now, when these sports were brought, to the United States in the 1870s and 80s and 90s, the quote-unquote rugby football distinction came with it. Cricket came as well, but cricket morphed into baseball. Rugby was played in the United States primarily at Ivy League institutions. So the Harvards and Yale's and Princeton's of the world played rugby. Meanwhile, the United States had literally tens of thousands and even millions of immigrants from Europe that were mostly poor. They were not the elite of Europe that migrated to the United States. The immigration poor, the people that populated, you know, the extremes of, say, Brooklyn or Queens

or the Lower East Side Manhattan, all played football. And because they were numerous, they outnumbered by far the number of people playing rugby. in the United States, because rugby was limited to elite institutions on the East Coast for the most part. But needless to say, the elite institutions on the East Coast, the Ivy Leaguers, were positioned literally to run the society. They were being pumped out in classic Fordism style out of the Ivy League institutions to literally run the country in various aspects, all up and down the entire basin superstructure notion. So when the sport began to take hold in the Ivy League, it took hold as part of an ideological

strategy that reinforced the notion of manifest destiny. The managerial class that the United States produced in the late 1800s and into the 1900s was a class that was weaned on the sport of rugby. And by the turn of the century, and not roughly around 1900 or so, rugby had become so brutal as a sport that you had dozens of people annually dying on the field, literally dying on the field. And there were some universities like University of Chicago eventually that banned the sport in the late 20s, early 30s. I think they literally banned the sport. But Harvard in the early part of the 20th century was literally considering banning the sport because of the amount of death on the field and the amount of injury on the field. And so Teddy Roosevelt, who was president in the early part of that century and was a Harvard man himself and who loved American rugby, basically contacted Ivy League officials and said, look, you've got to do something about the game because we can't have the game killing people.

we're getting, you know, waves of protest to shut the game down entirely. But we do think that it, quote, unquote, adds value to the managerial class. It teaches them how to rule and how to bark out orders and follow orders. We think it's an important contribution to what we want to do as a country, both domestically, internationally. So you have to change the rules. The guy that was principally responsible for some of the rules changes was a guy named Walter Camp. who was the quote-unquote coach at Yale. So he introduced a number of changes

that limited the degree to which death could occur on the field, and he also introduced the forward pass, which radically changed the game. So with those combinations of rules changes, the sport became, quote-unquote, more palatable and more consumable. And at the same time, when this was happening, the late 1800s, 1900s, et cetera, the quote-unquote people who ran the media in the United States, who controlled the finance and purse strings of how the sport would be disseminated across the

United States were obviously Ivy League graduates that had been, you know, graduated and then went into the world of business and politics. So it was very easy to orchestrate a marketing campaign, and the marketing campaign, in part, included the idea of branding. So instead of, quote, unquote, American rugby, they decided to brand it as football. And they decided to brand football as something innocuous like soccer. Of course, you will hear that the, quote, unquote, origins of that came from England, et cetera, et cetera. It didn't come from England.

It came from the Ivy League. And it came from a manipulation of the marketing strategy for the sport in the United States that resulted in, quote, unquote, football being called soccer and American rugby being called, quote, unquote, football. Now, I'm going back to the normal, what I feel is the correct nomenclature. What the NFL plays, as far as I'm concerned, is American rugby. And what the quote unquote people play, the global game, the beautiful game is football. And I think that's what we have to, we have to resist that temptation in the United States of calling it soccer because unconsciously what it means is that you have been basically brainwashed. That's really what happened. It's, you know, it's like going to your grocery store and buying, you know, beef when you're really buying cow muscle, you know, it's all marketing.

You buy pork and it's really pig muscle. but nobody uses those terms because if you think pig muscle and cow muscle you might start thinking about what the hell am I doing you know so the the marketing is really crucial and it's also a crucial aspect of getting football back up on its feet in the United States in terms of you know how we reclaim territory in the United States for the sport that's been lost so I think the nomenclature is crucial that history is that history is absolutely fascinating and obviously obscured, even from hardcore sports fans in the U.S. as somebody who was relatively awake and has Marxist analysis and knows the classist and racist

history of all sports in the U.S. tracing that lineage back to the British Empire and colonialism and tracing it out through that American history is just so enriching and fascinating. And, you know, this interview will never be able to cover everything. thing you cover in the book, the football manifesto and club handbook. So I'll link to that to the show notes. Encourage people to go check that out if this is at all interesting to you, you know, as it is to me. But everything you've said so far kind of speaks to what you call this. And you kind of, you've alluded to this and perhaps people can deduce that this is what's going on. But you talk about colonial implantation economics. I was hoping that you can kind of

explicate what you mean by that and then we'll we'll move into a question about the NFL specifically yeah I mean you know part of it has to do with the notion of sports as an avenue for quote unquote integration right that's the first issue is and we all know this that historically speaking you know in American rugby in basketball and in baseball there was racial discrimination. I mean, blacks were not allowed to play. Now, interestingly enough, until the 1960s, roughly, the entire social economic viewpoint of the world

was a black, white viewpoint. I mean, now today we live in a multicultural society. We have more Hispanics in the United States than we do blacks. We have a tremendous amount of Asian immigration in the United States. So things have changed. But having said that, for years, the sports were segregated. The NFL went through a few, let's say, bumps and curves and upswings. In the 1920s, they had a black, a very famous, arguably the most famous player in the NFL in the 20s,

was a guy named Fritz Pollard. He was black. But shortly thereafter, the NFL closed its doors on blacks. Blacks were completely eliminated. And so roughly from 32 or 33 until the end of the war, World War II, blacks were excluded from the league. Totally excluded from the league. The last team to open their doors to blacks were the Washington Redskins. And the Washington Redskins for decades had a policy where no blacks would play the sport.

And so that changed, you know, post-World War II. in part because, you know, thousands, tens of thousands of blacks fought in World War II in Europe. A higher percentage of blacks fought in Europe than they did in Asia, but nevertheless, they came back from the war, and there was pressure to, quote, unquote, reward them for having sacrificed or exposed their lives on behalf of the country. So things began to change. But having said that, the real issue in terms of how. how the sport evolved has to do with, you know, pressure from civil rights groups, civil rights movements, et cetera, that occurred over the course of, you know, the long history

from, you know, the Civil War through Jim Crow, through the whole, the whole horrendous story of lynching and oppression of blacks primarily in the United States and the South, but it also happened in the North. So there's a huge history of how these sports evolved to include blacks as part of their, quote-unquote, body politic, for lack of a better way to put it. I'm not sure whether I've fully answered your question. Could you reorient me again? Well, I'm just interested in this framing of a colonial implantation economics. Right.

So here's what happened. In 1996, the United States created Major League Soccer, and it was created by a number of investors. The primary drivers of that investment group were two NFL owners, Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots, and Lamar Hunt, who owns then the Kansas City Chiefs. Lamar Hunt has since passed on. And the basic idea in 1996 was to fulfill a promise that the United States had made to FIFA in the late 80s and early 90s when FIFA awarded the World Cup to the United States. FIFA awarded the World Cup to the United States on a condition subsequent that said you can stage the World Cup in 1994, but you have to promise that after 1994 you will establish a professional league. So the United States did not have a professional league. They agreed to do that.

And in that context, in that overall context from, let's say, 1990 until 1994 and 1996, there was planning going on in terms of how this league would be structured and what it would mean and what it would do. In terms of plantation economics, it worked along the following lines. When the league got started, they had something called a salary cap and they still have a salary cap. And that's a very common notion, as you know, in sport. The NFL has a salary cap, for instance. But there were substantial discrepancies between the notion of a salary cap and what eventually happened to the sport over the next 30 years.

So when the league got started in 1996, the salary cap in MLS, Major League Soccer, was $1.96 million per team. Well, you flash forward 30 years. The salary cap today is a little bit more, according to the collective bargaining agreement. It's a little bit less than $6 million. It's about $5.9 million per team. Now, if you go back to 1996 and you look at the NFL salary cap,

the NFL salary cap in 1996 per team was $40 million. Their salary cap in 2025 today is $280 million. Now, that means that there's a lot of money to spread amongst the players on a team. You have $280 million, at least theoretically, to spread amongst 55 or 60 players on an NFL team. What that meant for the sport of football, however, was devastating, because basically what it meant is that football was not allowed to compete on the global scale with the best teams and leagues in Europe. There was no way they could compete. So today, when you look back on what happened in terms of imposing what amounts to be colonial wages, basically clubs in Latin America pay more to their players than the United States does.

The United States is theoretically the richest country in the world. So the fact that the pay at MLS is so low is basically indicative of the fact that it reinforces the strategy of making sure that the sport is not attractive to inner-city black males that want to play sports as a means to get out of the ghetto, as a means to get out of dire or difficult economic circumstances that they're born into. In other words, basketball and the NFL are literally tools that gifted black athletes have before them to begin planning where they're very young, when they're five, six, seven, eight years old, they can point to stars in those respective sports and say, that's something I'm aspiring to. That's something I want to do. The NFL wanted to make

sure that that did not happen with football. And so that's why MLS's salary cap is so low. And that's why I say that they basically have imposed a set of plantation economics on the sport in the United States. The same thing is true for the sport for women. Women are paid disproportionately lower than the men even. So it's a catch-22. And one of the propositions that I have for the new league is that the men and the women should at least have the same base salary for the sport.

So that's one of the key premises of the football supporters trust league is that salaries for the men and the women will be equal. And they will be subject to a financial fair play algorithm that allows this, quote, unquote, platform of, or I should say plateau of salaries to basically compete on an equal par with Europe, which is really where the standards of excellence are today. Yeah. And we're going to get to the Supporters Trust League in that vision because I think it is, I mean, the solution to sports. Like, I love it. And it's actually a really high-level articulation of, like, base, you know, feelings and thoughts I've had around sports for a very long time. But before we do get there, let me just be a mouthpiece for somebody who might be skeptical, right?

Just kind of a critical question here and get your two cents on it. Somebody might say, well, in the U.S., yes, there is this long history, and that history is, you know, bad and racist and shitty. And the NFL, there's plenty to critique about it. But it could just be the case that in American society, sports like American rugby and basketball are there and they are more popular. And even if we could change the, I mean, maybe if we wanted to change the history, we couldn't. What about football, right, what Americans call soccer? What about football is so important to you? What makes you so passionate about introducing this sport at a higher level into this society?

Could it just be the case that other sports are more popular here? And that's just the way it is. What would you say to somebody who says that? I think that that view of the world is a manufactured view of the world. I don't think that that's the way it has to be. I think that's the way it is because that's the way it was intentionally structured. So, you know, for instance, I've lived in Brazil for over 30 years. Brazil has, you know, end number.

of negative critiques that are available to apply to this society. The reason I'm bringing up this issue with respect to the United States is that I think that the United States is an incredibly insular country, generally speaking. Obviously, there are exceptions. But I think in terms of recognizing the United States as the Imperial Corps, it is an imperial core and is what it is today largely because, of the parochialism, of the narrowness of the vision of the people that live in the United States. Now, having said that, we need to clarify what's been going on demographically in the

United States since 1990. In 1990, the population in the United States was 250 million people. In today, 2025, right, the population is 340 million. So that 90 million increase of population which is due to internal population growth and also masses of amounts of legal immigration basically means that the United States has increased its population in 40 years roughly equivalent to the size of the country of Germany. I mean, Germany's population is in roughly the mid-80s,

80 million something. So we've basically got in the United States today an immigrant population that's roughly the size of Germany, it may be a little bit larger when you consider, you know, first generation births, etc., of already existing immigrants that were here. I'm saying that to say that basically what people think about as the United States is very different today than it was 40 or 50 years ago. The United States is much more of a literal melting pot culturally than it's ever been.

And that cultural melting pot basically means, by my estimation, and conservatively speaking, that there are probably a fourth of the population, let's say 90 million, roughly, of the population, is literally from a football culture. They all come from, you know, these various parts of Europe or Asia or Latin America, and they literally come with the baggage of that culture with them. However, we're faced with a fact, and that is that in the United States today, when you look at the NBA, the NFL, the Hockey League, and baseball,

and you even take into consideration in the league soccer, those five sports are not attracting that immigrant population. And that immigrant population isn't just immigrants. It also includes, I'm shooting from the history, here in saying this, but I'd say it probably includes another 25 to 30 million of quote-unquote traditional Americans, however you want to define that. So we've got basically a third of the population that tends toward this sport, but necessarily is frustrated because there's no product on the field that they can relate to. These people are not spending their hard-earned cash

looking at the NFL games or seeing going to NFL games. They're not, they can't afford the NBA. They don't go to hockey games. And they very rarely find baseball attractive. And of course, they're not spending their money on MLS on Major League Soccer. So there's a huge portion of the population in the United States that is there. And they're basically consuming the sport by looking at the sport in Europe on TV. Or sometimes they look at the sport.

on TV, basically focused on Mexico's League, which is called League MX. So those are the two outlets, Europe and League MX, the quote-unquote real product that people would like to see, they would like to spend their money on, they don't have an option to do that in the United States. And in some sense, the league that I'm proposing, the Football Supporters Trust League is exactly here to fill that gap to offer a product that's a world-class product that they've never had the option of supporting. And that's what basically this process and this whole project is about. Yeah, and I take your point about the insularity of American culture and the way that

our sports kind of re-entrench that. Like, you know, football is an international sport. And to be a true football fan is to have that international dimension of your, honestly, your worldview. For some people, it could broaden your entire worldview to expend to have a more internationalist and global perspective in a way that, you know, the NFL, the NBA, the MLS, the

NHL, don't always have. I mean, there are the Olympics and there are these forays into different countries, like, you know, having NFL games in Mexico or whatever, but it doesn't have that internationalist core like football does, you know, for the

rest of the planet so i think that's an interesting point and then there's the the class dimensions of the barrier to entry for for youth who want to engage in sports like if you want if you're if you're if somebody young and you want to get into a sport then you were in the lower classes or just you know you come out of abject poverty something like certainly hockey but also baseball the price to get in right to buy a glove to buy a bat to buy the cleats to you know that's high to get into the NHL, I mean, a hockey stick alone is several hundred dollars of inequality these days. And that's why you do see like a actually kind of a problem within the hockey community in North America, which is saying that, you know, this league is becoming more and more

upper middle class because as prices rise and the material needed to just get into a single game goes up, I mean, it's prohibitively expensive for most people, whereas American rugby, football, and basketball, the barrier to entry is much, much, much lower. And I think there's an interesting dynamic there as well. Yeah, I think you're right. And I would qualify what you've just said and reemphasize the fact that one of the things that's distinctly American about football in the United States is that at the bottom of the pyramid, that is to say, where youth football is played, we have basically a philosophy

and a policy structure at the bottom of the pyramid called pay-to-play. Pay-to-play is a theory that literally permeates the entire bottom of the pyramid. Now, you know, when you talk about the bottom of the pyramid, we're talking literally without exaggeration. We're talking tens of millions of people. Kids that are, you know, from knee-high to a duck, four or five years old, until they're basically adolescents, are playing this sport. in huge numbers.

But there's a caveat. And the caveat is the way that the structure at the bottom of the pyramid works is that unless you are a parent that has $2,000 to $3,000 a year per kid to get your kid into this sport, you are excluded from the sport. So basically, at the bottom of the pyramid, black and brown kids, both women and men, girls and boys, are largely excluded from the sport because they can't afford it. So that is part and parcel of the legacy that Major League Soccer has, you know, imposed on the bottom of the pyramid.

It's absurd. And I'm sure they'll say, well, well, that's not our fault. That's the way the quote-unquote system works. But the system works that way because it's been structured that way. In every other country in the world, there are basically avenues for the poor to break out of that cycle and pursue their dreams in this sport without having to pay a cent. So the rest of the world has an open door, and of course the rest of the world has something called promotion and relegation, which means that the clubs in the law, lower divisions below the top tier division of professional sports. They have clubs in all divisions below. And there is a way under the concept of promotion and relegation that if you start at say

the fifth division of Germany, for instance, you can theoretically win your way up by merit on the field, you can win your way to the fourth division, to the third, to the second, and a eventually to the first division. Now, that is doable in the rest of the world. It's not doable in the United States because the U.S. Soccer Federation and Major League Soccer have both banned the notion of promotion and relegation. Now, they, of course, will deny that. And so it's not our fault. We have billionaire investors. And now that they've invested, we can't impose that kind of burden on them. But the fact of the matter is, if you look at what's happening in the football world, all of the major private equity funds in the United States, not all, but obviously the

private equity funds that are disposed to invest in, you know, technology and sports at that particular juncture, dozens upon dozens are migrating to Europe and have been for over a decade to invest in leagues that have promotion and relegation. So the question is, well, why are those private equity funds leaving the United States to invest in Europe, why aren't they investing in the United States? And the reason they're not investing in the United States is because they know that Major League Soccer is not a league that makes money. It is literally a league that has lost money for 30 straight years. And the question is, well, how have they lost money for 30 straight years? How is it possible that they're still in business? And they're in business

because the IRS code, the Internal Revenue Code, allows for losses to be upstreamed to investors on a pro rata basis. If you have an LLC, which is what the MLS is, MLS is one legal vehicle in Delaware, the 30 investors that exist in the league all invest in that one legal vehicle. So what you see on the TV and what you read in the newspapers in terms of which team is ranked where, is almost mythological because those teams are not really competing and independently owned teams. It's basically one legal vehicle, and that one legal vehicle has lost money for 30 straight years. You said, well, that's hard to believe. How is that possible? It literally is the truth. The internal revenue code allows you to upstream those losses annually on a pro rata basis

to all of the billionaire investors above the LLC. They receive tax loss carry forwards every year that they in turn can offset against non-football-related income to reduce their tax burden with their other, quote-unquote, holdings in their, you know, in their asset portfolios. So it's basically a wash. There is no incentive to change that structure.

The only, let's say, exception to this, quote-unquote, structure is that along about 2011-2012, a very large private equity fund called Providence Equity Partners invested in another LLC that is related to MLS. MLS has an LLC called Soccer United Marketing, which they set up in the early 2000s to be the quote-unquote revenue-generating arm of the league. A private equity firm called private equity, private-ins equity, invested, we don't know the number, but supposedly in the newspapers, it was $125 to $150 million for 25% of soccer United marketing or some. And about five and a half, six years later, they exited. MLS bought them out. So they came in for 25%. They exited at 20% of some because the league

had expanded since then, and we find out that all of the owners of MLS also are pro rata owners of Soccer United Marketing. So because of the expansion, the percentage stake reduced itself from 25% to 20%. But, you know, by all accounts in the newspapers and publicly, that investment by private equity was gifted with a three to four X return, which which places you roughly in the neighborhood of, let's say, the low 20s to mid-20s in terms of an internal rate of return. It was a great investment from a private equity perspective. But it was an investment made by a private equity fund publicly into the revenue-generating

arm, which means by definition that the revenue-generating arm of MLS is more valuable than MLS itself. You have to come to that conclusion. And so we don't know, you know, other than that, we don't know or have any examples of anybody investing in MLS, except people who buy franchises. And the last franchise that was sold was San Diego. And the public information about that franchise investment was that San Diego was sold for literally a half a billion dollars, $500 million to buy the San Diego franchise. how they get that money back on a on a cash flow basis on a revenue basis I don't know how they're going to do it I don't think there is a way to do it quite frankly based on how

MLS is currently structured so I think that everything that's going on with MLS is in part smoke and mirrors it's not something that is you know foundational in the traditional finance sense of that word. It's not based on cash flow because the cash flow for the league is negative. It's not based on comparables because the only comparables that MLS compares itself against is other MLS teams. They don't compare themselves to, let's say, the top teams of Europe. Every year, Deloitte, the accounting firm, publishes something called the Football Money League Report. And that football money league report is probably the most detailed analysis of the performance of European football clubs that comes out every year. The top 20 are all in Europe.

They also publish a supplementary list of the other 10 that are after the top 20. So it's basically their top 30 list. The only team this year that is in the top 30 that's not from Europe is Flamingo from Brazil. So to compare what's going on in the United States on a cash flow basis makes no sense, on a revenue basis, or at least a multiples basis makes no sense because they're not comparing themselves to Europe. And on a comparables basis, it doesn't make any sense either because the only comparables they're using are other MLS teams.

They're not comparing themselves to the obvious examples that exist in Europe where private equity is investing on a constant basis in European clubs. So the numbers in the United States are completely distorted. I don't think they have a basis in reality, but, you know, that's part of the, that's part of the ethos that has to do with how the sport is managed in the United States. Yeah, I have comments on that, but I want to actually hold them until we get to the football supporters trust league because they feed into that very well. And I want to hit on one more question before we get into that vision, which is, you know, on the NFL specifically. I'm really interested in this kind of dialectic between American culture and the NFL in particular. I know that the NFL compared to other major sports leagues in the United States is very conservative, outright reactionary.

The only more conservative league is actually college football as far as the basic sort of ethos of the league itself, as well as the political views of the most, you know, voracious supporters of those leagues. And, you know, we can go back to Colin Kaepernick several years ago. And really, we sometimes forget that Donald Trump made a huge foray, a prelude to his presidential run during the Obama administration into the political arena in many regards. But one of the major ways was this disgusting, racist, reactionary response to Colin Kaepernick,

you know, taking a knee during the national anthem, and then all the billionaire owners of this league, most of whom, of course, are white, if not all of them, came together to basically blackball and blacklist, Kaepernick going forward. And it just, and then you talk about the 100-yard American flags and the flyovers. And, you know, this is a reactionary center of gravity of American politics. And I say that as somebody who is a, you know, a genuine fan. of American rugby and we'll get into that a little bit more in a second because my favorite team is the Green Bay Packers and they have like a unique position in their in the structuring of their team but I just want to ask about the NFL specifically representing a billionaire driven militarized and outright racist sporting order how do you see the NFL shaping not just sports culture in the U.S but U.S. society more broadly how do you see that reaction That relationship, rather? I think that the NFL is basically a form of religion. There is a fanaticism attached to it that is very astutely marketed. The connection to militarism is not covert, it's overt. The best analysis and critique of the NFL I've ever seen, is a movie by Dave Ziren

called Behind the Shield The Power and Politics of the NFL I think that that movie one, it demasks the myth that sports in the United States are apolitical. The NFL is one is probably the most political league

that we have. It is overtly political and it is overtly, supportive of a militaristic view of the world, which in turn, lamentably, supports imperialism and colonialism around the world, whether it's in Ukraine or Gaza or Yemen or wherever you're talking. It foments, I think, an anti-intellectual stance and an anti-critique of anything that's political in the United States, despite the fact that the NFL is the most political league that we have. It is overtly political. And so I think that because the United States,

generally speaking, has a long history of anti-intellectualism and a long history of not just anti-blackness, but of course today, anti-LGBQ, anti-women, anti-you-name it. The overall emphasis today, particularly with Trump in the White House, is along those lines. And so what Trump has done and does today as someone who is in the White House dictating policy is that the NFL, literally speaking, reinforces everything that Trump is doing, from immigration to war policy, from changing the Department of Defense to the Department of War, I think the NFL is basically a reinforcement mechanism for literally the absolute ugliest side of what capitalism produces.

Absolutely. And, you know, your analysis of it being sort of a religious event for a hyper-commodified, secularized, desacralized society like the U.S., where the dollar is the thing that is worshipped, the dollar and the self are the two things, if anything, that are worshipped in our society. It does have the grandeur of a religious spectacle. You know, the Super Bowl itself, but football more broadly, in college as well, I just watched the Cornhuskers play yesterday,

and they had like after the third quarter, they had this incredible display of like drones in the sky and fireworks and the whole stadium turning red. And, I mean, it was intense, but it is like this sort of religious, engagement in a society that has been reduced to, you know, dead things that can be bought and sold. And it's one of the last bastions of weirdly, in a grotesque way, one of the last bastions of, like, community in the United States. Like, it's one of the last events that no matter who you are in society, even if you don't even care about sports, you will find yourself at a Super Bowl party,

or you know you will you will become a passive fan of the local college football team if you're you know if you live in a state like nebraska without a professional sports team you'll become a sort of a fanatical fan of that of that college football team and it does offer this weird and again in a in a in a grotesquely deformed way this weird sense of of community that in all other areas of american life is increasingly missing and so at one one level it feeds into like a human need that our society has been stripped of, but in another, as you're saying, and I think in a very profound way, it reinforces all of the ugliest and worst aspects of

a capitalist, imperialist culture like the U.S. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's a shame because, I mean, you know, you go back to the issue of Colin Copernick. I mean, he was protesting police brutality.

And, of course, a few years later, the NFL came out publicly and said, technically speaking, they agreed because, you know, he preceded George Floyd. Yeah. And George Floyd, in a sense, we had the absolute cosmic serendipitous event of a woman filming live George Floyd. Floyd's murder on the street. But for that woman and the technology she was using, we wouldn't know because that happens, according to Colin Coperniccanes, right? It happens all the time and happened all the time. But it was the first time that, you know, that event with George Floyd was the first

time that we actually saw it live on TV. And so that, you know, completely synchronistic event reinforced exactly why Colin Kaepernick took a knee. But instead of the NFL saying we were wrong, they literally continued the punishment. They banned him from the lead. Now, of course, you can say, well, he was compensated. He received X amount of dollars as a settlement. But that is not the compensation. that he deserved.

You know, he deserved to be what a truth teller, technically speaking, should have received, which is more than just simply financial compensation. He should have received his position back. He should have been reinstated. And the NFL should have apologized publicly for having punished him. But it didn't. Because in that context, in the context of, you know, let's face it, this is, white male dominance, right? I mean, I don't, it's another way to put it. They felt that a quote

unquote black man who was a quarterback, that is to say, the symbolic leader on the field of this sport could not be reinstated because they didn't want to reinforce the idea that other blacks in similarly situated positions could turn the NFL into a tool of social protest. Yeah. And so they literally banished him from the sport. And of course, everybody in the United States, I think most people recognize that that's what happened, but nobody says much of anything about it. We just go about the business of, you know, asking what time the game starts. Yeah. And for the, for the NFL, as you're saying, it's much easier and better for them

to just pay him off silently than to have him re-engage with. the with the league and you know sort of re come back as a figure of kind of like black martyrdom that has reasserted his presence on the field as you said as the team's leader like it's much easier give him as much money to go away as as possible because it's much riskier to our interest to have him reemerge as as a figure of that sort and then as you said and this is in line with white supremacist U.S. culture on down the line throughout history, which is after the figure that is hostile has been neutralized, think MLK, you know, to a lesser extent Malcolm X, you know, all the figures throughout black history who have risen up and at the time

were hated by white society, then they are later, when it's safe and that figure is gone, then they are kind of agreed with, you know, even Trump now will say like he's, he likes martin luther king junior whereas we all know that if if trump was alive and conscious during the most intense actions of mok like politically conscious that he would have been on the front line spitting on him and supporting the police brutalizing him and capernick is not an m lk i mean you know that's a huge historical figure but it does repeat this pattern where once the figure has been totally neutralized then we can come around years later and say yeah you know that guy had some good points. He was right. And then the NFL will put, you know, end racism in the,

in the touchdown for the next four years as some empty signifier that they're kind of gesturing that the fact that, you know, popular opinion has shifted in a certain way. And just the, the raw fact that the NFL runs on, you know, black labor, that a huge majority of players and to some extent coaching staffs are black, they can't be a full. long you know they can't be a goddamn clans rally um it under it undermines their their bottom line at some point if you push it too far so they do have to kind of walk this line well they'll symbolically acknowledge some things but when push comes to shove and in the real moment of decision they are completely reactionary and again ran by a cohort of almost you know exclusively

white billionaires which i think feeds into that yeah i think it's um you know i mean what we've discussed so far is literally off the radar screens of nearly 100% of the NFL players. I mean, nobody in the NFL, no player in the NFL is thinking about this. They're not thinking about how 75% of the players in the NFL are black, or, you know, certainly 70%, whatever the percentage is. They're making money. The average lifespan of an NFL player is somewhere around three years. And so they're trying to make as much money as they can in the shortest period of time available to them. And then they're gone. They're literally forgotten about. And of course, nobody talks today, at least, but certainly a few years back, the issue of concussions was a

major issue. But I think that, you know, the NFL has such a marketing machine behind it. They have so much power in the media that they can weather the storm and weather the critiques. And they've done that in stellar fashion. I mean, this is 2025. So two years ago, in large measure, from my perspective, based on the strategy that they imposed on football in the United States, which was quite successful, two years ago, they signed the largest contract. in the global history of sports at $110 billion for 11 years. So from 2023 to, I think it's 2033, they are set. The average NFL franchise brings in about $400 million a year in revenue.

And the cap, the salary cap is 280. So they're clearing, you know, in hard profit, $120 million per team in that league. And there's no question about the fact that that league is, has the value that it has as the most valuable sports league on the planet because of an overwhelmingly dominant presence of black labor. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Kaepernick was he was, he was. made an example of and so in the wake of capernick you're right people don't think about it don't talk about it but it was also a sure sign that you know if you want your very already fragile career to go away overnight then you know follow capernick's example but if you want to you know

try to get as much money as you can as you as you sacrifice your body and your future and your longevity for short-term gain then you shut the fuck up and fall in line and i think it's also further obscured and this is one of the beauties of sports but it's you know it's sort of weaponized in this way that on the field level between players and like coaching staff sports are actually a great way to get to get beyond racism right you get people together from diverse backgrounds that are on the same team fighting for the same goal and sports is you know known sports in general is known as a way in which you know people can come into close um alignment with one another breakdown taboos struggle together overcome challenges together and see each other as as

you know, as brothers, as sisters, as comrades, but that obscures, I think, the higher level business model of the NFL in general, which, again, is run by incredibly rich, old, white people and has a very reactionary

you know, posture towards all of these issues as a whole. But on the field, you know, if you're a player in the NFL, you don't necessarily feel that I am participating in an insanely racist business model or league because at the at the field level that is deeply obscured by the dynamics of of camaraderie does

does that make sense absolutely i think it does and uh you know i think that the there is there is that aspect of of pro sports generally you know that there's this there's a sensation of family yeah you know um and it's in a sense it's a it's a it's a sensation that is largely denied us outside of sports. Exactly. We don't really feel that outside of sports. And so what sports offers us is a chance to reconnect, not just with others, but with ourselves.

And to take that away is, you know, it's unbelievably threatening. There's no real chance that it will be taken away because sports plays this, you know, the somewhat schizophrenic dynamic of creating a sense of community at the same time treating that entire community and each individual in that community as a commodity, as a thing,

as a consumer. And so what I'm hoping to do with this idea of STL is to bring that whole notion of consumerism And, you know, the kind of the reification of a fan, the thingification of fans as simply, you know, targets to market to and to, you know, take from, hopefully we can change that dynamic and have people embrace sport for something that is not just community building, but also, you know, in a sense, an existential enhancement of your existence. on this planet, you know, to make you feel connected to the earth, to your neighbor, to the

other, and kind of do away with the negative aspects of, you know, what today we have as an ideological minefield in the United States between the left and the right. So let's go ahead and get into it then because your supporters trust league vision is radical, revolutionary in scope. it is a beautiful idea that I wholeheartedly co-signed and would love to see flourish. Can you flesh out what a supporters trust league would look like in practice and what it could mean for working class and poor communities in the United States and beyond? Yeah, I think that in a sense this takes us back to the idea of enclosure.

I think that the STL model is a model that is focused on deconstructed, the idea of enclosure, the idea of a closed league, the idea of having to be a billionaire to be involved with the sport in any kind of meaningful way, the idea, and of course, this is in particular, focused on Major League Soccer. Major League Soccer has had its upside potential tamped down. I mean, I refer to Major League Soccer in the book as the lid on the pressure cooker of demand for the sport in the United States and Canada. And I'm I say that because I think the sport's revolutionary potential as an engine that participates necessarily, because we are all embedded in capitalism, but I think that what we can do is structure this sport

so that instead of the cash flows flowing out of the league and into the pockets of billionaire investors or the ancillary aspects of, you know, media and communication that that support it, that we can structure it in such a way that for the first time, at least in the United States, a major sport has created a means by which, in fact, the cash flows can go back to the community. They can go back to the players. They can go back to reinforce a much healthier economic and socioeconomic paradigm for society as a whole. So I think that the idea of transforming the concept of consumer to owner, as in fan ownership, is important. Like earlier, I think we talked a little bit about the Bundesliga.

Bairn Munich in Germany is 75% owned by the fans. So that means that, you know, the fans literally control the club. The other 25% of that club is owned by Audi, Allianz Insurance, and Adidas. They split 25% into chunks of 8.3% each. But basically what that means is Barron Munich last year generated $800 million, the equivalent in euros, dollars, in revenue. And very few people talk about this, but Bear in Munich this year is in its 32nd straight year of generating a profit. So they've had 32 straight years of profits, the vast majority of which are given back to the club to reinforce the club's position as a sporting entity in that country. They don't just play football.

They play other sports too, basketball, et cetera, et cetera. And so that multi-sport model is something that I'm very interested in bringing to the United States. and for the first time allowing fans to be owners of a club and participate in that club. You're not being an owner in a club to siphon off profits. That's not what you're doing. You're becoming an owner of a club to create a community resource that's there 24-7 to support that particular community in whatever way it can, whether it's in education, even if it's, let's say, health care.

Whatever kind of way that club can help that community, it would be there for that. And there's no reason to think that that club wouldn't do that if it's structured properly. So that's the model that, you know, that basically the football supporters trust league is promoting. It's promoting a new model of sports ownership where fans can own the club. Real Madrid is another fan-owned club. Real Madrid is 100% owned by the fans. Barcelona is 100% owned by the fans.

Practically every team in Latin America, every club in Latin America is owned by the fans. The club that I'm a member of here in Rio, Flamingo, is a club that's owned by the fans. And just to give you an idea, in the Paris Olympics last year, Flamingo won six medals at the Paris Olympics. In rowing, judo, in gymnastics.

They won a gold medal in gymnastics. So this is a multi-sport club concept that I think is totally sportable to the United States. And there's no reason why it can't work. It has proven decade after decade after decade to be workable in Europe and in Latin America. There's absolutely no reason why it can't work in the United States. Yeah. This vision is one in which these billionaires no longer have control over what is a communal thing. Like our sports teams, people do feel deeply personally connected to their sports teams.

They're representative of kind of where they come from in the world. They are a site of community. And, you know, if you're a Cowboys fan or, you know, a fan of really any team, but, you know, I'm in the NBA. I'm a fan of the Bulls. They're owned by this 85-year-old fucking conservative billionaire asshole who doesn't invest in the team that just sees this team that means so much to people in Chicago. and beyond, that sees this team as an investment vehicle through which he can continually and conservatively extract a profit in a way that doesn't, you know, incentivize him to try to make the team better or to actually solve problems with the team or to, you know, invest in the team's

future or viability with a big market like Chicago and a brand like the Bulls. As long as you're middling, as long as you're mediocre enough, you're going to get that stadium filled you're going to get that money in your pocket and that literally just like limits the ceiling of a team like the Bulls and teams more broadly frustrates the fans it makes people not want to you know support a team with no future because this guy also has a kid he's just going to hand the team down to his to his kid the prices are just go up and up and up because again it's a vehicle of profit extraction it's not a a site of community and so we could radically reorient sports itself by having these teams owned by the community and importantly the revenue generated

from these teams funneled back into the team and the community itself instead of into the pockets of a couple assholes with way too much money already that are often you know power hungry tyrants who use their position to impose their will on teams and communities and people and then you also have this disgusting aspect where you know, public taxpayers will often be on the hook for building these stadiums that then these private ownership, shareholders or outright billionaires collect profit on on the back end. So it's another form of wealth extraction, not just from the teams, but from the entire tax base of a community itself, right? Exactly. And it, you know, interestingly

enough, and I, you know, this may not, you know, strike your audiences, you know, particularly irrelevant, but I think it is because we haven't really mentioned, you know, the words, you know, socialism or necessarily democracy or even communism here. But the fact of the matter is that the NFL, despite being the dominant sports league on the planet, I mean, their target right now is $25 billion a year in revenue. They haven't reached it yet. I think they're at 22 this year, but their goal is $25 billion in revenue. Nobody talks about the fact that the NFL is the most socialist league in sports. They split all of the revenue, practically all of the major revenue sources equally. If that's not socialism, I don't know what is. But when you talk about

socialism in the United States, it gets by definition a bad eye and bad, and bad comments and critiques, the fact of the matter is that if this league STL is structured properly, it should be able to generate substantial revenue and guide that revenue back to the communities where technically speaking it belongs. And I think that's what's missing in sports today. I think people in the United States are so used to being consumers. They're so used to being disenfranchised that the idea of. being franchised. The idea of being treated with dignity is so foreign and so kind of rare

that it's hard to believe, you know? And so I think one of the things that we've got to get over is basically convince people that this is a genuine operation that's going to put you in a situation as a fan, as a human being that you didn't have before. I mean, That is to say, you know, the capitalist model of professional sports is that kind of model. It's a model where you are literally a commodity. And, you know, you get treated very well when you're in the stands. But when you're on your way home in your car, you are literally forgotten about until next Sunday, you know? Absolutely.

And so I think that what we've got to do is to change that model, maintain the focus on generating revenue because I think what we've got to do is make sure that those revenue streams are simply redirected to where they should be, which is back to the community. Yeah, and I don't think sports will have a problem generating revenue, you know, it's just where that revenue ultimately ends up. Yeah. Exactly. And, you know, funneling this revenue in different areas out of the pockets of billionaires and shareholders and investors and into the community itself, when you go to a game and you buy a ticket and you pay $11 for a beer and whatever it is, to know that on the backside of that, that money, that revenue being generated is going to go back into the team, back into the community as opposed to the

pockets of shareholders makes that experience completely different. And I think it also could solve the youth sports problem we were talking about earlier where you could take some of that revenue and funnel it back into lowering the barrier of entry for lower class people to get into the sport itself. Some sports, even like American rugby, you need like pads and helmets and stuff like that and there are community drives and there are ways to bring the price down, but it can still be, you know, relatively expensive for people, especially on the lower echelons of the class hierarchy. So to take some of that revenue out of an asshole like Jerry Jones's pocket and put it into Dallas youth sports leagues, you know, that makes a radical difference in that community's

well-being overall and the amount of people who can actually engage with the sport at different levels. So it's a beautiful idea. And there is one exception. And I just wanted to make this known, you know, because this is my favorite team. Actually, Jacobin just wrote a little article saying if you're a socialist, you should be a fan of the Green Bay Packers. And you might ask yourself in a billionaire dominated league where population in metro areas matter so much. And a city like Omaha can't sustain a professional sports team, you know, cities like Seattle get it taken away. is like how could a tiny little city of a couple hundred thousand people like Green Bay have their sports team? And basically because they are publicly owned, the Packers are the only non-profit community-owned franchise in the NFL with hundreds of thousands of individual shareholders, you or I could go buy a stake in the team right now.

Shares can't be traded or sold on the open market. They don't increase in value. They don't pay dividends either. Essentially, buying a share just makes you part of the Packers community. you get voting rights at the annual shareholders meeting, and you can elect the team's board of directors. The NFL actually does prohibit public ownership of teams, which is fucking right on par for them. But the Packers were grandfathered in because they were already a community-owned team before the rule was established in 1960. And the name Packers actually comes out of the Indian Packing Company, which was a team put together from meatpackers, a work site, basically.

And so they were kind of grandfathered into this to this whole situation. And so shareholders, they don't get financial returns. Their ownership is real in terms of like governance and tradition, though. And I think it's, you know, maybe not perfect. I'm sure there are some aspects of it that could be open to critique. But it really does stand out as an incredibly unique model. And if it didn't have this community-owned structure, you would not have an NFL team in a city the size of Green Bay. And so I think it speaks to your point that even small,

communities, you know, based on this model could actually create a successful revenue bringing in team, despite it being a relatively small city. Yeah, I think that that's true. I think that the, I mean, you're right. I think that the real kind of the key distinction with Green Bay is a twofold distinction, one, that they were grandfathered in. And two, the NFL has explicitly barred any further, quote unquote, business models like this as being, you know, being able to come into the league. So the billionaire model is, is without

questions, solidified within the context of the five leagues we're talking about, you know, the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, Midgerly Baseball, and MLS. All of those leagues are, quote, unquote, the threshold to get in is billionaire status. If you can't bring together, you know, eight or nine figures, you can't get into the sport. And in a sense, when you look at the sport globally, football is exactly the opposite. I mean, football has always been available to the masses. And the way we are proposing this idea to the United States is that we want to break that mold. I mean, there's no reason why you can't have fan-owned clubs that are world-class clubs and that simultaneously benefit the community and empower the community.

Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, football, I love this history aspect of it, too, because football has always been a site of resistance, right? From the FLN team in Algeria to anti-apartheid prison leagues in South Africa, today many clubs around the world are explicitly revolutionary, left-wing, pro-Palestine. We see these huge spectacles of Palestinian flags thrown up by certain clubs. clubs around the world. So how do you situate the Supporters Trust League within that global history of football as a tool of liberation? Yeah, I think that the league, and this is something

that we have put into a document called the Football Supporters Trust manifesto, the league has a literally a core set of values that support without reservation, you know, groups, that are oppressed around the world, whatever your circumstances. So, for instance, you just mentioned that there's certain football clubs around the world that are protesting the Gaza genocide. That is a core value of what this league stands for. We are against imperialism. We are anti-capitalist in that sense.

We want to, you know, literally check where we can from an ethical and moral basis if not a financial basis, what is happening in the world today in terms of imperialism and colonialism and exploitation. And so being anti, you know, let's say LGBTQ, which is what so many people in the United States are today. It's a right-wing move. I know that. But this is clearly a league that would ideologically situate itself to allow for freedom of speech to protest the Gaza genocide or, you know, imperialism in Yemen. There is no venue in the United States today in the sports world that allows that, much less encourages it. And so this league would be without question on the cutting edge of pushing that message in a broader and deeper way

in the context of football globally. I love that aspect of it for sure. And it's beautiful, and I would love to see something like that flourish here and continue to flourish around the world. And you're right. And it speaks to that the insularity, as you were mentioning earlier, of American culture broadly and the way that sports manifest in the American context. I mean, it's almost a cliche to say that, you know,

Americans only learn geography through wars and stuff like that. There's some truth to it. I think it is a product of hegem. where you don't necessarily need to learn about the world. It's somewhat a product of geographical isolation from, you know, major civilizational population centers throughout the world. Like if you're in Europe or Asia or Africa, you are just smushed against the rest of the world in some sense that, you know,

North America is kind of separated by two giant oceans. But it's also just a product of a very anti-intellectual culture that is fostered in many different arenas and to open that aperture up and to have to engage with even just other clubs around the world that are like that and that basic value system within international football I think would be beneficial for the American culture for sure. But I want to talk about a current issue a little bit here and it speaks to the point about the genocide going on in Palestine, which is zooming out to the international stage, the Black Alliance for Peace, an organization that has been on this podcast many, many times who I have deep, deep respect for and I think is one of

the best organizations in the U.S. is calling for FIFA and the IOC to ban the U.S. and Israel from hosting or participating in upcoming tournaments because of their obvious and grotesque human rights violations. Why do you think campaigns like this matter? And what do they reveal about the political function of global sport? I think that I think there's several issues. that kind of frame what movements like this stand for. I think one is it's a public display of putting hypocrisy on on center stage. It basically shows us that, you know, the IOC and FIFA are not, quote, unquote, politically neutral. They are not neutral at all.

they are overwhelmingly dominated as instruments of capital and so because they're dominated by capital the ability to appeal to morality is at or near zero I'm not saying that you know the initiative for the Black Lions for Peace is absurd at all because it demonstrates you know exactly the juxtaposition of how capitalism works in sports. But the question is what's going

to happen, you know, like practically speaking, I think one of the things that the left has to face in a sense is that there is a profound sense of impotence that has to be dealt with almost daily if you're on the left. And one of the things that we, I think, tend to do is focus on measures and political positions that carry a moral weight. And one of the problems with morality in the context of capitalism is that it does not have enough weight, generally speaking, to sway you know, changes that we would like to see from a revolutionary perspective. My guess about this initiative for the World Cup, even if they get 20 or 30,000 signies, my guess is that because so much money is involved with the World Cup,

that it will not impact whether or not the World Cup bans Israel in the United States. Now, if I'm wrong, I could be wrong, but I think Israel plays either this week or next. I think they're playing Italy, possibly for a birth in the World Cup. Cup. In my mind, it's difficult to separate Israel from the United States. I think that in a sense, Israel and the United States are one country. I think we're overly obsessed with the concept of the nation state, and it tends to obscure the underlying relationships that link countries together, that link the elites of respective countries together. And so I think that the United States and Israel, based on what's happened not just since October 7th, but for 40 or 50 years prior to

October the 7th. I mean, there are documented cases now of what the United States has done in the world in terms of toppling democratically elected countries around the world. There are, you know, there's ample evidence of what's been going on globally in terms of you know, what clandestine services in the United States have done. And needless to say, we have now ample evidence of what's been going on for the past 50 years in Israel. So the question is, from a moral standpoint, should they be banned? Absolutely. But from a practical standpoint, is that going to happen? I don't know. I do know that, and this is, I think, you know, this is my perception of, you know, the current regime in the White House, I do believe that

in the circles of the supporters of Donald Trump in the White House today and in Congress, there's no dearth of individuals who view football as a socialist or a communist sport. And it hasn't really come out in the newspapers yet. But I would not be surprised if that did come out in the newspapers between now and next June when the World Cup begins, that there is a solid, quote-unquote, right-wing movement against this sport in the United States because they think it's a socialist sport or a communist sport. And, of course, that was automatically, without stating it, it's juxtaposed against American football, which is, you know, by far and away, the most individualistic and militaristic sport that's

ever been invented by our species. But I think that, you know, the real issue is whether or not Donald Trump's immigration policy is going to impact the World Cup in 2026. So if he keeps the immigration policy as it stands and makes, you know, the obtaining of visas difficult, and of course, his target in terms of visa difficulty and barring visas is largely focused on black and brown countries and without black and brown countries in the in the in the in the in the FIFA world cup next year the World Cup will be a fiasco i mean it literally will be it won't happen um so i think FIFA is in a situation where they have got to anticipate you know one a right-wing backlash against the sport in the United States, which really hasn't surfaced yet,

it may or may not surface because there's a lot of money to be made in the World Cup. For instance, nobody talks about this, but all of the stadia in World Cup 26, every stadia in World Cup 26 that's based in the United States and they're 11 stadia. All of those stadia are NFL stadia. That's not a coincidence. That can't be a coincidence. incidents. So the NFL owners, even though they quote unquote, you know, are, you know, the owners of another sport, behind the scenes, they are literally the puppet masters of football in the

United States. And so one of the questions you've got to ask yourself is what, in fact, does the NFL want to have happened? They certainly want it to be a success because they're going to make money from the World Cup. But the other question, question that's at foot and nobody talks about is the fact that if FIFA, at least theoretically, wanted to maximize revenue, they could have contracted, and they didn't, but they could have contracted the 11 largest NCAA Division I football stadium in the United States and used those stadia to stage the World Cup in 2026. If they took the largest 11 stadia from the NCAA and use Zosos platforms for the World Cup.

The average NFL stadium size in the World Cup next year is 70,000 seats. The average of the top 11 stadia at the NCAA Division I level is a bit more than 90,000 seats on average. So they're leaving, they're leaving, you know, a piece of change on the table by deciding to go with the NFL. You know, you could argue, oh, well, you know, the NFL. stadium are more technically advanced. I'm not so sure that it's that much more technically advanced because today college football is a juggernaut of a juggernaut of revenue generation.

Absolutely. So, you know, there are all these open issues. I think what, you know, the Black Alliance for Peace is doing is absolutely essential. I sign the petition. But I, you know, from a practical standpoint, I've got to, I've got to question, you know, what really is going to happen? Which impact will it, will it in fact generate? And I think, quite frankly, that the biggest threat to the World Cup comes from Donald Trump himself and the people surrounding Donald Trump. I think there are people that would like to, you know, sabotage the event. I don't know if you saw this, but earlier this summer, the United States staged FIFA's first World Club of Championships competition. It was like a World Cup for clubs.

It was the first time that they did this in the United States. And it was a decent success, but after the award ceremony, and this was on literally on live TV, so there were several hundreds of millions, if not over a billion people watching the award ceremony after the final game. They were awarding the medals, the gold medals, to the winning team, Chelsea. And in the middle of the warning of the of the medals, Donald Trump pocketed one of the medals. Oh, yeah. This was on TV. Yeah.

So I think, I think from Trump's perspective, this is a money-making event, and he would like potentially to be involved in the money-making aspect of it. Now, I don't know how, you know, he's created a task force in the White House to focus on this. I'm not sure what their role will be, but maybe, maybe, just maybe, his interest in wanting to participate in the money-making aspects of the sport next summer for the World Cup may mitigate against the, you know, the quote-unquote, you know, exclusion of the United States and Israel from the event. I mean, obviously, you know, Israel, almost by any definition, would have to be excluded if you look historically and what's happened with sports in the United, in the United States. the world. The IOC barred South Africa for apartheid. They barred Russia because of the invasion of Afghanistan. So Gaza is clearly at that level of egregiousness. The fact that they haven't been barred indicates to me that the United States and the capital that the United States represents, including Europe, et cetera, et cetera, basically means that capital.

would dictate the results of whatever happens with the World Cup, and that probably means that Israel does not get banned and that the United States also obviously does not get banned. But I think that in general, the fact that, you know, we've got this issue on the table is important. I mean, it's, it's crucial. It's frustrating that, you know, the democracy that we have, whatever definition of democracy you embrace, we don't have a democracy that basically reflects in our foreign policy because there is no question about the fact the vast majority of Americans

are against the genocide in Gaza. But that genocide and the response to it does not get triggered by the democratic impulse in the United States as it's currently structured. We have no power to stop that, you know, military industrial complex exercise that has killed, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of people, over half of which are children, we can't stop it. And that's incredibly frustrating because it basically means that

democracy in the United States is really a figment of our imagination. Absolutely. There is no democracy in the United States. It's not a structure that adheres to democratic impulses. Absolutely. Absolutely. It is a dictatorship. of capital masquerading as a democracy and that masquerade is increasingly transparent to more and more people. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. It's sad, but that's that's a reality. Absolutely. And if we want an actual democracy, that's going to take radical change, revolutionary action because the system, as it currently is instantiated, is so corrupt, so rotten to the core that voting for one of its two arms is not going to be anywhere near sufficient to dislodge that corruption and open up new

you know vistas for for democratic possibilities um i love your response i think is incredibly not only insightful but but prescient i love that the black alliance for peace is doing this right they're the exact sort of organization that would try to push this contradiction forward but we understand that the international system politically as well as on this level of sport is highly skewed in favor of hegemonic powers like the u.s so i don't think that we will see a ban of either Israel or the U.S. for obvious reasons and all the reasons you stated. I think you're pointing out the contradiction between the money-making capacity here and the right-wing backlash is really interesting. I think what could very well happen, though, is not

so much the U.S. because I think the world sees the U.S. rightly or wrongly as kind of in a bad period that Trump can sometimes be seen, especially by liberals in America and outside of it as the problem and it's not really, you know, systemic, although you and I would disagree with that. In fact, the very existence of Trump as the president reveals the systemic failures of this system. But I think Israel won't get officially banned, but will face things like booing when the team comes out, pro-Palestine flags being flown at these events that Israel is playing at, probably some weird confrontations between fans. or athletes during or after before the games,

you could see a situation where the world, which is definitely true, has turned against Israel. And even though these organizations won't outright ban Israel from participating, their presence there will be disdained. And that disdain will be apparent. And that will then put pressure on Trump

to, as you were saying, kind of lash out in that way. like, you know, this is, you know, even if the organization, the IOC and FIFA themselves don't do it, the reaction from the masses against Israel could spark some sort of reactionary lashing out on behalf of the Trump administration, what form that will take and how deep that will go and how much that will bump up against the other incentives on the other side of that. Who knows? But I think something like that is very likely to play out because Israel is a pariah to the, in the eyes of, of the world. And, you know, even if governments don't come around to it or the UN can't do much about it or the U.S. backs them to such an extent that they don't really suffer those global consequences that, you know, they should suffer. I think the disdain of the people of the world will certainly be apparent during these events. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I totally agree with it. And I would just add, too, and, you know, this in some sense has to do with my own background, having grown up in the United States, but, you know, there is no doubt, and this has

actually been confirmed by the, you know, the International Court of Justice, but there's no doubt about the fact that Israel has structured itself with laws that are on the books as an apartheid state. And so that cannot be avoided. Like, that has to be dealt with. at some point. The fact that the United States is supporting an apartheid regime is just simply unacceptable, particularly after, you know, we can say symbolically fought a civil war over this issue. But the irony of all of this is the whole concept of Zionism and how after World War II and the Holocaust and the, you know, the promotion of Hitler as the worst human being possible for this to occur in a country like Israel is like it's just damning.

I mean, obviously, when Israel was founded, it was founded with a program and strategy of Levin's Rome. It's basically a land grab in the same way that Hitler was land grabbing Eastern Europe. So the parallels are just striking. And of course, there are millions of Jewish people out there who are against what's happening, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox. But the question I think is, how does it ever stop? You know, what exactly happens to stop this? and I think as long as Trump is in the White House, there's no stopping it.

I think it's on a, you know, it's a juggernaut, it's a bullet train into oblivion. And it very well may mean, I hope not, but certainly it may mean, you know, taking us to the edge of World War III. I mean, I think that's literally the potential of what this means. So it's a sad state of affairs, and, you know, we are, you know, hands tied looking at the United States as the, you know, in some sense, as the perpetrator. If the United States decided tomorrow to stop the arms and to stop the money, it would be over. But right now, that's not, that doesn't look to be in the cards. Absolutely. And building on your analysis, which I wholeheartedly agree with, I think the leaders of Israel right now, Netanyahu, for personal and political reasons and legacy reasons,

as well as the Lakud Party and the far right formation and coalition that is supporting and propping up the Netanyahu regime, I think there's a death drive element here, but I think that they see that the tide is turning globally against them, that their window for completing Laban's realm, for completing the Nakhba, for taking over and building out the basic foundations of greater Israel, have to speed run it right now. They think like even a Democrat in four years could prop up more resistance depending on how things go because the latent disdain for Israel, the revealing of what Israel is actually all about. That's been revealed to the entire world. And I think they know that they are more or less on the clock, that if they don't get this done, more or less in the next four years, maybe they get a presidency in four years, Democrat or Republicans,

like a Biden administration that allows them to finish it out, but they can't necessarily bank on that. That they see the Trump administration in these next four years as their last real chance to go all the way with this thing. Because after that, it's too ambiguous as to whether or not they'll have the support of the U.S., this bipartisan support that they've relied on for so long to continue propping them up.

And you're right, if that support even halfway collapses, they are in a real dire situation. So I think this death drive accelerationism, as I've called it, coming out of Israel, is in part driven by a realization that this might be their last real shot under this Trump administration to go all out and make this thing a reality, right? Yeah, I think you're right. You know, it's, I don't know if you, if you've seen this in the same kind of way that I'm seeing it, but this whole concept of Levin's Rome is, I mean, obviously that's, you know, that was that was Hitler's nomenclature. for his move into the into the quote unquote into eastern Europe, right? There was this attempt to expand the living room, so to speak. Nobody talks about the fact, historically speaking, that the inspiration for Levin's Rome

came from the United States. It came from the concept of manifest destiny. And nobody talks about the fact that up to World War II in the 1930s that there were and there was ample support for Hitler from Wall Street.

Nobody talks about that. So not only that, nobody talks about the quote-unquote attempted coup d'etat against FDR during the 1930s. So there's, you know, there's all kinds of history that has been marginalized or erased as a key component of how capitalism operates. Capitalism, I think, in part, reproduces itself by erasing history. And so the more that we can do to preserve history, to recuperate history,

particularly from societies and cultures that have been either partially or entirely extinguished, the more we have in the way of hope and, and in some sense, ammunition in the broadest and deepest sense of the word, not just simply in terms of armaments, but in terms of ideological ammunition, to recalibrate the future. Absolutely beautifully, beautifully said. And yeah, incredibly important understanding of history, this grotesque straight line from the brutalities of European colonialism through U.S. slavery and genocide, up through the Third Reich under Hitler, all the way to what Israel is doing today. These are not different movements, but they are this reoccurring emergence of capitalism, imperial colonialism, coming to its logical conclusion in these different iterations. And if we ever want to break out of that cycle, we have to break out of the material foundations of it, which is capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and that requires, I believe, transcendence to socialism and ultimately toward communism, the liberation of human civilization from the cage of class society, of exploitation, of slave and slave owner, of colonizer and colonized.

that's our only hope where we will continue to revisit these horrors and i think you're right world war three is on the horizon um the great depression 2.0 is on the horizon i think in the next 10 to 15 to 20 years perhaps we're going to be faced with a lot of history to put it to put it gently and um we have to make ourselves you know ready for that reality because there's no way that this system as it is currently situated goes out without a bad There's no way that this system hands over power that Israel in the U.S. and the global imperialist order simply accepts multipolarity or accepts becoming equals in the world, right? It can only happen, unfortunately, I believe, through some sort of horrific violence, revolution or collapse or world war, who knows. But that's where this whole train is headed.

And we do ourselves an injustice if we're naive about that. Yeah, it's really interesting you're saying that because it kind of, in a sense, it makes me want to return to the discussion about DeLuze and Guautei and the two books that they wrote anti-edipus and a thousand plateaus. I mean, one of the things that I didn't, I think, emphasize enough when I began, you know, my own introduction was the crucial role of what I think they mean by a cognitive revolution. And I think that there's no question about the fact that right now the tea leaves seem pretty clear that, you know, that violence is somehow in the future, you know, if not in the present, because it is in the present for, of course, many, many people. But I think that the issue of expanding the definition of reality and expanding the definition of reality and expanding, the notion of perception beyond the simple conceptual framework of sight, which is the overwhelming sense pattern that determines our worldview, I think it's crucial. And I think, you know, if I have one message to communicate to people in the United States or globally in terms of,

in terms of critique, I think that what Marx-Lennon and Mao have done is simply set the stage for deeper and broader critiques that exist below the dialectic. And I think that that's really a crucial aspect. In some sense, I see the task of leftists in the United States and globally as a task of recuperating the metaphysical, of recuperating animus. religions of recuperating the spiritual, because that's been appropriated by the right. And I think that one of the ways we can do that is to pay more attention to indigenous religions and indigenous cultures and reconnect to the earth, reconnect to ourselves, obviously, both as individuals

and as a collective. And I think the way to do that is to incorporate, in some sense, transcend and include so that those cultures in religions and an indigenity generally that has been erased or at least attempted to be obliterated is recuperated. And that has to do, I think, both with the African diaspora that was brought to this part of the world, as well as the indigenous diaspora that is still here. You know, that somehow we have to integrate everything that we've done, historically speaking, across all those respective diasporas

and create something new to follow into the future. Wonderfully said, and that framework of transcendent include is precisely the correct one, I think, and one that I've used many, many times myself. I could not agree more. So, you know, I have some questions on here about De Luz and Guatari, I would like to actually invite you back on to give that discussion its full breadth, right? Because I think there's so much we can talk about there and it would almost

be an injustice to try to squeeze it into one or two questions here. I think, yeah, you've laid the foundation for a future conversation, a part two, if you will, that I think we can follow up on. But you've been so generous with your time. We're already two and a half hours. So let me ask this one last question. It's not even on the outline, but just as a way to wrap this up, I find it fascinating. And you've alluded to this throughout this conversation that there's something deep within our human nature that gives rise to sport. Right. Like every culture throughout human history has had some version of what we could call sport.

And so it's clear to me that there's something about our nature as social beings that gives rise to this cultural product, regardless of the. of the material base of that society, right? In every society, something like sport has seemed to appear. I think it's fascinating and still somewhat ambiguous as to where exactly that comes from within our nature. I'm sure you're not an anthropologist, and I don't mean to spring such a big question on you at the end, but I was wondering if you have any thoughts about what about our humanity seems to give rise to this sort of cultural product regardless of the material.

base of society. Yeah, I think that's a great question, particularly to kind of tie all up the conversation. You know, in the book, The Football Manifesto, I think this is in chapter three, I make reference to a number of, you know, kind of books that provided inspiration for me to write the book. And one of those books is a book called Homo Ludens, L-U-D as-N-D- as-and-dog, E-N-N- as- Nancy S.es and Sam, Homo Ludens. And I, the name of the author, I think, is Hunzika, but I'd have to go back and look. But that book is basically an anthropological critique of our species relationship to games and sports. And, and that I think is something that

is literally an ontological core of our collective. and individual beings. I think that there is something about sports and games that goes to our essence. And so one of the things if you permit me to do is to refer you to the

Football Manifesto, and I think that's chapter three. And the other thing, I would love to get back to talk with you about DeLuze and Guaetti, generally speaking. But if you permit me, I'd also like to make clear that what I'm doing with this project for the

Football Supporters Trust League is basically being done by me alone. Eventually, of course, I want to raise money to be able to do something at scale. But for the time being, what I do and need is support from the grassroots. And for me, the grassroots are people that are, you know, literally mom and dad and uncle and aunt and all the commoners we can imagine. who could potentially support us with five bucks here, 10 bucks here, whatever it is. So I would like to be able to refer people to my GoFundMe campaign, and you can find that at Urban Refugee.com.

So everything that we've talked about today in some sense is at that website, Urban Refugee.com. And if you go there, you'll see the tab for the GoFundMe. So please support us. I'm thinking about, you know, all the, you know, the disparate left-wing groups out there that are vying to change the world. And I'm hoping that we can serve as an umbrella organization for all those groups to change the world. So having made that pitch, I hope we can set up a date soon to talk about delus and Guantédi. Absolutely.

I so look forward to it. This conversation has been absolutely fascinating. There's so many threads we could pick up on and go for hours and hours. I really, really appreciate you not being generous, not only with your time, but with the depth of your insight and your analysis. It's really refreshing to see that applied to something that is kind of sometimes often even just dismissed on the left, like sports is like, that's nonsense, that's a distraction, that's bread and circuses.

Exactly. Yeah, but I think because it is something so core to our species, because it manifests in every culture that is something that is worth taking incredibly seriously and you are one of the only people with the drive to do that and to articulate this vision of what sports could be which I think if it is explained to regular people,

regular sports fans, they'll immediately see the value in it, right? I don't think it is something that will take a lot of convincing for people to see because people are already kind of fed up with the exorbitant prices, with the billionaire assholes, you know, with the increasing cost to just be a fan to watch the games on TV,

you need 17 apps with the infiltration of gambling. I mean, people are kind of like fed up with the way sports are going in general. And so I think if you present them with this vision, people will really pick up on it. And my call to listeners who are sports fans is this is something that should be supported. Go to the website, check it out,

buy the book, deepen your knowledge, support, and donate to the GoFundMe if you can, but as people who love sports and that are on the liberatory left, I think we have a responsibility to advance this vision any way we can. And thank you so much, Robert, for taking the lead on that. Can I leave you with a quote?

Please do. There's a quote from a guy named Michael Murphy, who is up in age now, but he was the founder of something called the Esselon Institute in Big Sur, California, which is an institute that promotes itself as a consciousness-raising venue,

kind of a humanistic approach to raising consciousness. And he has this quote, this great quote, that basically, if I'm paraphrasing, it says meditation is to the east, what sports is to the west. So hopefully we can use sports to raise consciousness. Hell yeah. Beautiful. All right, my friend, thank you again so much,

and I will reach out to you immediately after this and we'll set up a part two where we can talk about. more philosophy, delusioned Guatari, and much more. Thanks much, Brett. It's been great. Thank you. Much appreciated. You know, I'm going to be.