Pip: The Financial Times has compared Arsenal fans to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and honestly, for a paper that covers hedge funds without blinking, that is a remarkable editorial choice.
Mara: freerein61 digs into exactly that comparison — what it reveals about football, finance capital, and the pseudo-left's relationship to working-class culture. Let's start with what the FT piece actually says, and what it gives away.
On Arsenal, the Streets, and the Elites
Mara: The Financial Times ran a piece depicting Arsenal as an outsider menace in elite football — a sport where Gulf-state ownership is treated as the natural order of things. The question the post puts to us is: what does that framing actually reveal about who the FT is writing for, and why?
Pip: The post opens with a striking contrast. Writing about Arsenal's position in the Champions League final against a Qatar-owned PSG and a UAE-owned Manchester City in the league, the piece quotes the FT's own language: "Arsenal stand out as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of football."
Mara: And the post is clear about what that phrase is doing. The Revolutionary Guards comparison borrows from Western imperialist rhetoric that frames Iran as a rogue state defying the rules-based international order. Applying it to a football club's fanbase is not a neutral metaphor — it codes working-class passion as zealotry, as a threat.
Pip: The UAE and Qatar are absolute monarchies with documented records of suppressing their own populations and exploiting migrant labour under conditions the post describes as nearly akin to indentured servitude. The FT treats their sovereign wealth funds at the top of European football as simply how the sport works now. Arsenal's fans are the unsettling ones.
Mara: There is a third irony the post names directly: Arsenal is owned by billionaire Stan Kroenke, an American sports franchise magnate who has faced sustained protests from Arsenal's own working-class supporters over his treatment of the club as a financial asset. There is no genuine alternative ownership model here — the FT's discomfort is with the cultural resistance of fans, not with billionaire ownership itself.
Pip: The post brings in Thierry Henry, who said "I do not recognise my club," expressing dismay over modern, soulless, capitalist football — and Arsène Wenger on the unsustainability of the capitalist model. Both are symptoms of the same diagnosis the post is making.
Mara: The deeper argument is that sport functions ideologically — channelling working-class collective identity into tribal loyalties managed by billionaire owners, preventing that energy from becoming political consciousness. The Super League protests showed fans have an instinct that something is being taken from them, but instinct alone is not enough.
Pip: Which is where Alex Callinicos enters — prominent SWP theorist, known Arsenal supporter, and the man who retweeted the FT article. The post notes he has not seriously engaged with the political economy of football ownership, and that the fans protesting Kroenke carry more authentic class sentiment than the SWP has articulated in years.
Mara: Two failures, one frame: the FT dismisses working-class cultural bonds as fanaticism, and the pseudo-left has lost touch with the working-class life those bonds actually describe. The solution the post argues for is not fan ownership schemes within capitalism, but a socialist transformation in which cultural institutions serve the class that creates them.
Pip: The City of London's newspaper called Arsenal fans a militia. A Marxist theorist retweeted it. Somewhere in that gap is the whole argument.
Mara: What runs through all of this is the question of who gets to define what is normal — Gulf sovereign wealth or working-class passion — and who gets called the threat.
Pip: Next time, presumably, more things that finance capital finds alarming. We will be here.
A Trumpet of Sedition 