Skill and value in professional football

I’ve been meaning to try and get back blogging for a while, but have been distracted a lot recently. After the really enjoyable Football Collective conference, I really wanted to go into a bit more details about one of the ideas in my talk I was trying to explain while at the conference.

Just before the summer, there was a goal that caused a curious amount of chat and debate within my football friends. Daniel Sturridge scored a great goal for Liverpool in the Europa League final.

During my talk I tried to link labour process theory, Bourdieu and notions of political economy. I have worked with labour process theory for some time and provided me with the building blocks to moving towards sociology. Based on Marx’s work, LPT is predicated on the notion that employers buy in an employee’s capacity to work: not necessarily the work itself. The job of employer’s is therefore to put that ‘labour power’ to work, to extract the maximum amount of value from that capacity. To extract that value, employers direct the labour of employees — they tell them what to do, or set up bureaucracy to control the labour of employees, or even get employees to buy in to the company so that the employees control themselves.

My PhD was an attempt to show that while many of the core propositions of LPT are conceptually useful, LPT doesn’t really consider what ‘value’ is produced in the workplace and what forms ‘labour power’ takes. To illustrate this I examined musicians, and how the apparent conflict between art and commerce is not so much a case of saying no to money, but a case of wanting to make a contribution considered ‘valuable’ in terms of music, but not necessarily something that gives economic value.

In a similar way, I feel labour process theory can make a contribution to understanding football, but again, how it considers value and how this value is produced needs to be reconsidered. Artistic merit is not something that just happens once the work is produced, but is something that is mediated: people decide the work has artistic merit. Likewise, the skills of footballers produce a form of non-economic value but that this is mediated.

Using Bourdieu’s work, I argue that ‘labour power’ can be considered in terms of use and exchange values of the ‘forms of capital’ (see Bourdieu, 1986: the forms of capital, as well as Beverley Skeggs work). The embodied cultural capital — the most directly linked form of capital to the concept of habitus — is generally the labour power that employer’s in football are buying: the capacities to perform the work. The labour of footballers is generally quite expensive, with the highest skilled footballers’ labour power prohibitively expensive to buy (an exchange between cultural capital and economic capital).

Yet when Arsenal fans clamour for a signing every summer — they are not (necessarily) asking for the embodied cultural capital of a highly skilled player. Arsenal fans are are asking for the ‘name’ or reputation that goes with this cultural capital: symbolic capital. Symbolic capital that is considered ‘legitimate’ or the most ‘prestigious’ within the field. So while Arsene has a reputation for developing cheap sources of labour power — e.g. Fabregas — what Arsenal fans are looking for is a reputation for already established skills, and this involves an exchange of economic capital for both cultural and symbolic capitals.

How this reputation is established is on the field: being established as a winner through trophies and awards, goal and assist records, the transfer fee itself, and most importantly, the skills themselves. A moment of genius on the pitch is accorded symbolic capital through the views of fans and observers (what Bourdieu called cultural intermediaries) — it is not automatically accorded value. So while Daniel Sturridge scores, to what many people think, an extraordinary goal, these things are mediated and contested with other fans and observers.

(Another reason I bring up the disagreements over Daniel Sturridge’s goal is another element that is a question I’m still trying to think through: does evaluating the skills of a footballer have to be embodied? By that I mean, when I evaluate a goal, is it based on my own (previous, limited) footballing practice? When I explained my view on Sturridge’s goal, I had to put it in terms of kicking the ball, the outside of the boot, the precision, etc. And how much I appreciate a goal often depends on how far away I can imagine it is from my capacities. That’s probably an unanswerable question for me!)

So, basically my talk was predicated on this notion of symbolic capital being produced. The collective production of symbolic capital — through teams, tactics and style – and the accumulation of this symbolic capital, provided me the links to the wider ‘political economy’. I’m hoping to work through these ideas over the next few years. I found the conference very inspiring, and really hope to maybe collaborate with others in developing these ideas and the methods to research them.