‘Up against a UAE-owned club in the Premier League and a Qatar-owned one in the Champions League final, Arsenal stand out as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of football.’
I do not recognise my club.”
Thierry Henry, expressing dismay over modern, soulless, capitalist football and club management.
“Politically, I am for efficiency. Economically first. Until the 1980s, the world was divided into two… The capitalist model in the modern world also looks to be unsustainable.”
Arsène Wenger, on individual interests and balancing maximum earnings with a “minimum amount of money for everybody”.
The Financial Times article on Arsenal’s influence in both the streets and among elites is a remarkable example of journalism. It bizarrely depicts Arsenal as an outsider challenging the status quo of elite football, where ownership by the UAE of Manchester City and by Qatar of PSG is viewed as typical. In contrast, Arsenal is portrayed as a fanatical menace. The reference to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is intentional, mirroring Western imperialist language that depicts Iran as a rogue state, defying the “rules-based international order.” That the FT, a publication aligned with global finance, uses this language to discuss a football club underscores the political symbolism embedded in the metaphor.
The initial point to highlight is the normalisation of ownership by Gulf states. The UAE and Qatar are absolute monarchies that harshly suppress their own populations, exploit migrant labour under conditions nearly akin to indentured servitude, and act as major tools of US and British imperialism in the Middle East. There is a well-documented history of repression and torture in these Gulf countries that the Western media consistently overlooks. However, according to the FT’s perspective, the presence of Emirati and Qatari sovereign wealth funds at the top of European football exemplifies how sport operates in the 21st century, sleek, modern, and globalised. Meanwhile, Arsenal is portrayed as the odd, intimidating entity.
The second point to examine is the political significance of comparing Iran in this context. The United States designates the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organisation because they oppose American imperial influence in the Middle East. Regardless of one’s opinion of the Iranian bourgeois clerical regime, the FT’s label isn’t meant to serve as a strong political argument. Instead, it seeks to evoke emotion: Arsenal fans are depicted as zealots, irrational, and potentially dangerous. This language reflects the rhetoric of the ruling class, which views the working-class cultural phenomenon with suspicion. North London has a long-standing working-class history, and Arsenal supporters are numerous, vocal, and deeply passionate about a club that predates both billionaire and sovereign-fund ownership. The FT appears unable to interpret this passionate support except as a threat.
The third and most profound irony is that Arsenal is owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke, an American whose family also owns the Los Angeles Rams and various other sports teams. There is no real alternative ownership model to compare with those in Abu Dhabi or Doha. The FT’s true concern seems to stem from the cultural resistance of fans, the feeling among some supporters that football remains more than just a commercial spectacle. Even their lingering connection to community and place is enough to earn the City of London’s newspaper a comparison to the Revolutionary Guard.
The core political message suggests that football reveals a broader truth about capitalism: it appropriates the labour of the working class, strips away its authentic social meaning. It turns it into a means for profit and societal control. Additionally, sport serves an ideological purpose for the ruling class, channelling working-class passion, energy, and collective identity into tribal loyalties tightly managed by billionaire owners. This prevents those energies from fostering political or class consciousness.
The protests by fans against the Super League revealed that working-class people have an instinctive sense that something is being taken from them. However, this instinct must be linked to a broader political outlook. The core issue isn’t just about “greedy owners’ needing tighter regulation but about the capitalist system itself, which relegates all facets of social life, including culture and sports, to the pursuit of private profit. The solution isn’t reforming UEFA or creating fan-ownership schemes within capitalism, but rather pursuing a socialist transformation of society, in which cultural institutions truly serve the working class that creates them.
The Financial Times article highlights how imperialist geopolitical language effortlessly influences its coverage of culture and sport. Gulf petrostates sanitising their global image via football clubs are depicted as part of the landscape, while mass fan culture rooted in working-class communities is portrayed as a militia. The biases of finance capital are quite evident.
This leads us to Alex Callinicos, who retweeted the FT article. Known as an Arsenal supporter, his fandom adds an interesting political irony. Callinicos is a prominent theorist of the British Socialist Workers Party, a pseudo-left group. Under Callinicos’s guidance, the SWP has often placed working-class politics behind reformist pressure groups that support Scottish nationalism, ignored Trump’s coup attempt, and praised Syriza’s concessions in Greece. The SWP is not a revolutionary force; rather, it is a faction rooted in the upper-middle class that redirects working-class unrest,
The Arsenal connection may seem minor at first glance, but it highlights a fundamental contradiction at the core of the SWP and the broader pseudo-left. Here is a man who claims to be a Marxist anti-capitalist theorist. Yet, as noted in the FT article, his club is owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke, an American sports franchise magnate who has faced ongoing protests from Arsenal’s working-class fans. These fans oppose Kroenke’s asset-stripping of the club and his view of it merely as a financial asset. Their protests—rooted in opposition to billionaire ownership of a community institution—carry more authentic class sentiment than anything the SWP has articulated in years.
To our knowledge, Callinicos has not seriously addressed the political economy of football ownership or what it indicates about modern capitalism. This gap is notable because issues such as football’s commodification, Gulf sovereign wealth funds’ role in sportswashing authoritarian regimes, and the erosion of working-class fan culture through financialisation offer valuable subjects for Marxist critique. The pseudo-left largely overlooks these topics, as engaging deeply with the cultural experiences of the working class would require moving beyond abstract seminar discussions and NGO-like activism typical of groups such as the SWP.
The FT’s comparison of Arsenal fans to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and the SWP’s deliberate indifference to what this comparison uncovers, reflect two aspects of the same issue: one a voice of financial capital dismissing working-class cultural bonds as fanaticism, and the other a pseudo-left that has long lost touch with the real nature of working-class life.
A Trumpet of Sedition 