Your favorite soccer team is just like Red Bull Leipzig

Speaking in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last year, Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek revealed an unlikely appreciation of laissez-faire capitalist Ayn Rand. Unsurprisingly, however, it wasn’t Rand’s politics that proved appealing to Žižek, but the mechanism of the hegemonic cultural capitalist ideology exposed by the subsequent shunning of her work. According to Žižek, Rand is “over-orthodox,” an “absolute conformist in the sense that [she] spells out the secret premises of the ruling ideology in such a clear and radical way that it is an embarrassment for the ruling ideology itself.” In other words, Rand offered a glimpse into the fascinating mechanism by which capitalism serves to perpetuate itself; in short, by pretending to be something kinder and cozier than it actually is. Capitalist elites do not disagree with Rand’s brutal individualism — quite the opposite — but they cannot be seen to agree.

With this in mind, it’s possible to think of Bundesliga high-fliers Red Bull Leipzig as the Ayn Rand of the sporting world. Branded by the Guardian as “the most hated club in German football” back in September, Leipzig have risen rapidly since being taken over and re-branded by the Austrian energy drinks manufacturer in 2009. They were languishing in the fifth tier as SSV Markranstädt until Red Bull rocked up and gave the club a new name and sufficiently sizable transfer kitty to allow them to rapidly ascend the German footballing pyramid. Now they find themselves in the top tier for the first time, and have started their campaign with five wins and three draws. They’re only two points adrift of Bayern Munich, and are playing some of the most entertaining football in the league.

However, it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Leipzig, who have paid for their success with significant opprobrium. Much like Rand, Leipzig — who are essentially as much a flashing Red Bull advertising hoarding as a sports club — have been deemed too blatantly capitalistic by fellow German football supporters. A plethora of protests and boycotts have marred the team’s success, with perhaps the most notable being the crude comparison between Leipzig and the Nazis made by supporters of 2. Bundesliga outfit Erzgebirge Aue. The club were fined €35,000 for the stunt.

While most would happily concede that Aue’s supporters had gone far beyond the limits of decency, it seems the underlying sentiment is fairly widespread: Red Bull represent the unwelcome encroachment of the corporate monster in the sporting arena. On the face of things, this is a reasonable concern; a utopia of community-run clubs and cheap tickets sounds very nice indeed. But what many of Leipzig’s detractors refuse to acknowledge is that the ship has long since sailed. Much like Žižek’s interpretation of Rand, the issue of rival supporters, perhaps subconsciously, seems to be not what Leipzig are doing, but the fact that they are doing it so loudly and unapologetically. It forces supporters to acknowledge that the game they love, perhaps that the team they love, is itself a chip in the capitalist game.

Part of the difficulty in such an admission comes with the notion that clubs, once commodified, become disconnected from their history and heritage; from their founders and the community in which they are rooted. And yet it’s worth noting that Bayern Munich are owned in part by Audi and Adidas; that Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg are are works clubs, owned by Bayer and Volkswagen respectively. Borussia Dortmund, held up as a bastion of the fan-run club, play at a ground sponsored by the Signal Iduna Group; indeed, the majority of Bundesliga stadiums are named after sponsors. It goes without saying that this is not corporate generosity, with large companies sustaining our entertainment out of nothing more than the kindness of their own hearts. Stadia, kits, and clubs themselves have long since become assets with the potential to drive demand and create profit. The rebranding of an entire team name is but a further inevitable step.

There is a more technical reason that many have been opposed to Red Bull’s restructuring of Leipzig. German football has a regulatory clause popularly known as the 50+1 rule, which states that the members of Bundesliga clubs must collectively hold a majority of the decision-making rights. Leipzig, while theoretically adhering to the clause, are de facto operated by an aristocracy of Red Bull employees: The fee to become a member is over 10 times as large as that to join Bayern Munich, and the club reserves the right to reject applications.

And yet, one can’t help but again wonder whether Leipzig are actually doing anything different to the other German giants, for whom on-field success — and, by association, accruing masses of sponsorship money — is of paramount importance. The idea of fan membership appears illusory, obfuscating the authoritarian reality. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: “Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, so the modern Bundesliga clubs continue to string along supporters with the hollow promise of democratic control.” As Leipzig supporter Matthias Kiessling noted in a blog post a couple of years ago: “If you’re a fan and you’re not happy with the club hitching up ticket prices, you raise your voice on social media these days, not in the members’ meetings.”

All of this is not to say that it it is silly to be opposed to these developments; indeed, to stand in opposition is perfectly noble and reasonable. However, if one pours scorn on Leipzig as an uncritical supporter of a different club-as-commodity (which, it almost goes without saying, is almost every professional team on the planet), there is clearly a hypocrisy — conscious or otherwise — at work. It may well be difficult to acknowledge that corporate greed is the source of your weekend pastime, to acknowledge that you’re complicit in the capitalist machine, but this self-realisation is but a necessary step in any real change. As long as Leipzig remain modern football’s only whipping boys, the critique will remain nothing more than a self-congratulatory diversion from the pervasive reality.