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The decade of the 1980s witnessed massive changes in the internal structure and functioning of English football.1 Several rules, instituted during the infancy of the professional game to limit profit-making, were overturned with remarkable rapidity within the space of a few years, culminating in the formation of the English Premier League (EPL) in 1992. In this paper, I engage with two questions. One, why and how was the century-old structure of English football so rapidly transformed and what were the consequences? Two, what sort of Marxian theoretical framework can we use to understand the historical trajectory of English football? With respect to the former, I follow David Harvey’s analysis of neoliberal strategies used to restore upper-class dominance to argue that the formation of the EPL can be interpreted as another instance of accumulation by dispossession, one among myriad attempts to solve the profitability crisis of the 1970s by creating an avenue for financial speculation in football clubs. Together with the deregulation of television, it converted football from a domain formerly regarded as “off-limits to the calculus of profitability” into a “business proper.” In terms of a theoretical framework, I propose that it is useful to think of football as serving global capitalism in a dual manner: as an avenue for accumulation (the accumulation function) and as a tool for legitimizing capitalist rule by producing alienated consciousness in society (the legitimation function). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I have argued elsewhere1 that the formation of the English Premier League (EPL) can be interpreted as an instance of accumulation by dispossession. This paper complements that analysis by arguing that the theory of “Social Structures of Accumulation” can also be used to locate the formation of the EPL within the modalities of the structural changes that characterized the move to neoliberalism. The conclusion remains that the role of football2 in the neoliberal restoration of capitalist class power cannot be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]