The fate of the Portuguese winger Cristiano Ronaldo has generated a huge debate among professional footballers, administrators and pundits on a topic that has troubled academic football scholars for quite some time: football as an institution of “modern slavery.”

The story goes like this. There were rumours before the Euro 2008 that the Spanish club Real Madrid was courting the Manchester United poster boy, and the tabloid press claimed that the 23 year-old winger refused to answer the calls from his manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Ferguson, having trained generations of star players in Man United, and fired such prominent figures like Éric Cantona, Roy Keane and David Beckham simply because he believed that they were old enough to “move on,” considered Ronaldo’s act as the ultimate patricide (as he is the only “child” who dares say, “Papa, you are old enough to move on”). Man United went so far as to file a complaint to FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), and expressed that they felt annoyed by Madrid’s constant flirtation with their contracted player. During the tournament, Ronaldo finally hinted to the press that he would prefer being transferred to Madrid. Meanwhile, the castrated father continued to refuse. The president of FIFA Sepp Blatter finally made a statement on 10 July 2008 in support of Ronaldo, “I think in football there's too much modern slavery in transferring players or buying players here and there, and putting them somewhere” (BBC, 10 July 2008).

Blatter’s babble met with quite a huge response from the entire industry. Two days later, Pelé retorted, “You are a slave if you work without a contract or you don't get paid…. If you have a contract then in any job you have to finish the contract” (BBC, 12 July 2008). The father of football advised the prodigal son to finish fulfilling his contract. In fact, football pundits literally consider Ronaldo as a prodigal son of Man United. As Steven Cohen and Kenny Hassan (hosts of North America’s most popular satellite radio and webcast football show ”World Soccer Daily“) claim, how can a player who earns £119,000 a week, squanders his money on famous orgies and has at least another seven years of football career be considered a “modern slave?”

Steven and Kenny’s objection to Blatter’s comment comes down to the incommensurability between the word “slavery” and its metaphoric or literal use in our contemporary “world” marketplace. Can we imagine that a slave being rich, free of his chain and ragged clothes? Can a slave, if Ronaldo were indeed one, fully participate and enjoy the very machinery that is supposed to enslave him (his club, the football institution, its fandom, fame and glory)? More important, is it conceivable that as a slave, he “enslaves” other “players” in the marketplace (e.g. the sex workers he hired, and the opportunity of someone who could have earned £119,000 a week instead of him)?

A slave can of course be rich. In Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds, André Téchiné, 1994), Madame Alvarez, a lycée teacher, fails the essay of the French Algerian student Henri Mariani for promoting imperialism. Mariani argues that the Algerians were well-fed, that their economic and social successes were dependent on France. Alvarez answers, “But slaves are always fed.” One lesson that the Raj gave to all the imperial powers was that wealth, not open punishment, builds the strongest tie between a master and a slave. Doesn’t the idea of “sharing wealth” under the auspices of the “mother country” forms the basis of the British “Commonwealth?”

In other words, despite his wealth, Ronaldo can still be considered enslaved by the football institution. In fact, feeding him well could be part of a successful master-slave releationship ”designed“ by Man United. However, in what way is he enslaved? In the press conference, Blatter refers to the Bosman ruling in September 1995, which, according to Articles 48, 85 and 86 of the Treaty of Rome, allows players to accept or refuse transfers that their clubs proposed to them. Blatter argues that in order for the club to ensure that the players would stay, they “impose” unreasonably long-term contracts upon these players, a measure that, in Blatter’s reasoning, has enslaved these talents. Steven and Kenny argue that the contract is only an overblown autograph, which I wholeheartedly agree. However, there is a deeper relationship between the institution of football and slavery.

The Bosman ruling is intimately related to the establishment of professionalism in 1895. Football historian Tony Mason has shown us that football players and spectators in the late 19th century were primarily from the working class, while the “old boys” from the public schools imagined that they were the ones who invented the game, and finally institutionalised it in 1863. Middle-class players at that time insisted that one should only play football for the love of the game without payment. However, as early as the 1870s, there were rumours and evidence that skilled players from the working class accepted payments and played for rich clubs in their crucial matches. The “old boys” considered this rise of “professionalism” as a threat to the integrity of the game, sportsmanship and a sportsman’s proper loyalty to the club, a barbarian invasion of the middle-class ethical values. Of course, professionalism also meant that wealthier clubs could now hire skilled players to dominate the leagues. In 1895, the FA (Football Association) legalised professionalism with a price tag on the players. Under the law, which still applies today, a player must remain in the club for at least one season (unless the club decides to loan him out to another club), and can only be traded between clubs during the transfer windows (summer and January). The club to which the player is transferred would need to pay a transfer fee to his former club as compensation. The law ensures that the owners would be the only agents who could control the buying and selling of the players, a notion that the Bosman ruling aimed to relax, not to resolve, because in order to dismantle this transfer system, the FA must abolish the transfer fee. The transfer fee, which can be an astronomical sum of money nowadays, requires the buying club to think twice before they make the purchase, for the fee reflects not only how competent the player is at the moment of the transaction; it reflects the anticipated value of the player during the period of time he will serve the new club. Hence, even though a player is given the right to accept or refuse a transfer, the decision to initiate a transfer is still made by the club administration, based on the anticipated value of the player. In other words, the legislation in 1895 has in effect set up a market of exchange, in which able-bodied men are bought and sold for the anticipated values of their biological or animal lives, a future commodity like sugar, coffee, cotton and opium.

Moreover, Blatter’s objection stems from another area of the Bosman ruling, which guarantees the free mobility of labour within the European Union, and in fact, on a global basis. The Bosman ruling abrogates the pre-1995 rule that each club could only have three foreign players, thus opening the door for clubs to form their best teams by hiring players in the global market. Clubs in the Premier League (England) have benefited immensely from this ruling, under which rich clubs could purchase players from continental Europe and Africa. In this sense, like sugar, coffee, cotton and opium, players are now grown in other parts of Europe and in the former colonies, and imported into the ”empire.“

The Bosman ruling seems to have given players their freedom to be hired globally, but as Blatter claims, it simply gives the clubs the right to trade them ”here and there, and putting them somewhere.“ Kenny is correct that Blatter’s comment has everything to do with British imperialism, but it is not about the historical trauma of British imperialism. Rather, Man United exemplifies a form of “English” dominance of the world, whose mode of operation is based on the ”old“ economic machinery of the post-Raj empire, or the “Commonwealth,” but its impact on how we perceive this machinery in football is not fully materialised until the Bosman ruling.

Having said this, Man United’s success with Ronaldo is one of the best examples of how the Bosman ruling has opened up a new kind of world market, which has significantly challenged the ”traditional“ concept of “national” and “class” imagination. Man United is undoubtedly the first and largest “global” club in the world (if you love United—not me, I am a Chelsea fan, by the way—you don’t live in Manchester). This “new” mode of cultural dominance also allows over a million fans around the world to develop their own windows of resistance, their own lines of escape, by reconfiguring an “English” club as their own personalised commodity. Through Man United, ”England“ or ”Europe“ is now open to be bought and sold ”everywhere“ for consumers' pleasure. Finally, while being ”enslaved“ as an animal life and being traded in the world market, Ronaldo can fully use this buying-and-selling machinery to turn around the master-and-slave relationship, castrating the very father who brought him up as a slave. In other words, what trouble us are the co-existence of this essentially old mode of dominance and a new sense of imaginary freedom, and a total disintegration of the boundary between master and slave, the empire and the colonised, Europe and the ”world.“

Is Ronaldo a “modern slave” after all? Historically, I would say yes, but such slavery is as “modern” and as “old” as the Enlightenment project itself, and his impasse is just a symptom of a much larger question related to how the game was institutionalised at the first place in the late 19th century. However, Blatter's anxiety goes deeper than that. His anxiety, and the anxiety of those who critique him, is this “strange” co-existence of an increasingly controlling and exploitative “world” (“global”) market dominated by old empires with a different set of relationships (producers: England, France; consumers: China and India), a new sense of freedom that disintegrates regional and national boundaries, and the relationship between master and slave. In some sense, Ronaldo is the objet petit a of a system of pleasure, a piece of the real that reminds us the inexistence of the anal father once he is removed from the imaginary; by the same token, his powerful Antigone's ”No" suspends and disintegrates our established boundaries and social relations. Nevertheless, as long as he stays within the system, this little piece of the real continues to enjoy its symptom, and he continues to act as the symptom for consumers to enjoy.

Slavery is perhaps not a bad thing with £119,000 a week. I will consider it (if I have the freedom to choose).