Oct 24, 2020
There is Nothing Capitalism Won’t Monetize
If you’ve watched MLS, particularly Minnesota United FC, over the past few months and have scrolled Twitter during that watching, you may have noticed something of a trend.
Every game, at the 8:46 mark or there-abouts, the team’s social media posts the below tweet. They have a GIF and everything!
When the season first restarted, back in July in the middle of a Florida bubble, it was the first action for the league since the uprising in Minneapolis following George Floyd’s execution at the hands of the Minneapolis police department, and it was clearly on top of the league’s mind: there were demonstrations, jerseys, tee-shirts. It felt like a moment of recognition.
Fast forward to October, and the teams are back playing in home markets (some with fans, for some reason) and for some clubs the shirts and the messages continue, including MNUFC. It makes sense — a team based in the heart of the uprising should be active and involved with the league’s initiatives. They should be at the forefront of the discussion around rebuilding communities, and initiating change within their own organization, which has made what has happened since incredibly disappointing.
The social media statements, as well as various other shows of support such as sideline banners, have continued, but MNUFC’s involvement within the community has been barely there. To their credit, they have done some food drives, as well as shared resources, and hosted a community concert livestream on their stadium grounds. But that’s been the extent of it, at least as far as things listed on their website go. That would be disappointing enough, but an excellent article posted by The Athletic this week (link, subscription required but reading highly recommended) shows that their ownership also donated $50k to GOP candidates in the previous two years. The same GOP, which insists that organizations like Black Lives Matter are terrorist organizations and that protestors deserve to be punished by the law, not to mention what they think about LGBTQ+ folks in general, things that stand in direct contrast with messages being put out by the team and the league.
The Athletic article shows that this is nothing specific to Minnesota; rather, this is a league-wide issue. Still, the use of social media grandstanding in the face of these facts seems especially gross given MNUFC’s proximity to the start of this summer’s protests. While it may have been understandable at first, the repeated tweets, posts, and everything else seems to make a meme out of a man’s death, and without the action to back it up — and a history of actions that directly counter that message — it is especially heinous. What good does it serve anyone that the team does this?
Some would argue this is for awareness, which is a noble argument from a good place that gives corporations the benefit of the doubt. While there is some awareness factor to it, or at least there was at first, at this point these gestures aren’t really adding much to the conversation. To add insult to injury, in the sports world there is already a good example of awareness in action that’s unfolded, and it requires looking no further than the WNBA. Instead of making a point to make the same statement at all times, every game highlighted a different victim of police brutality, ones that many may not have been aware of. The league also announced at first the use of Breonna Taylors name on all jerseys, and though these usually were mentioned on broadcasts, the repeated social media push was not. I’m sure this wasn’t an easy idea or activation to play out on such a large scale, but they did it, and on a shorter turnaround than MLS’s return to home markets. But if MNUFC’s posts are not for awareness, then what are they for?
Well, it’s simple, really: it’s marketing. MLS fans are generally younger, and more vocal about societal issues. Unlike say, the NFL, where someone taking a knee led to people burning their own property as some sort of ‘gotcha’, MLS has traditionally had efforts that appeal more to the left — from Pride games to players grabbing sideline mics and saying ‘end gun violence’ which, let’s be real, fucking ruled and is probably the most organic moment of activism from the league yet. If a team can signal that they align with these efforts, even if those efforts aren’t matched in any tangible way within the organization, it’s a way to let their audience know that they are super cool and that they can be supported. After all, they’re way better than all those other straight-laced, conservative leagues, right? If these social media posts and banners can translate into one more jersey sale, one more follower gained because they respect the club’s statements, then it’s completely worth it. After all, there’s almost no effort in copying and pasting and hitting ‘tweet’.
As much as I and so many others will stand up and say that this kind of operation is insulting at best and absolutely abhorrent at worst, the end result will be the same. The team, the league, or other companies might realize that their return on investment on taking a stand against police brutality and systemic racism isn’t high enough with the extra work that is demanded of them to support that message, and stop supporting that message, but they’ll just find another message to use as a path to profit. Like Pride, which has, I imagine, been a lucrative effort for teams and leagues to support through merchandise sales and the aforementioned marketing, but rainbow capitalism has already been covered by much smarter people in much greater detail than I want to go into here, and I have also already shared some opinions about it in the past.
The core issue isn’t so much with MLS or even with MNUFC — it’s with capitalism itself. A system that serves to generate profits for the ultra wealthy has always, and will always, strive for that purpose. While it’s rooted in slavery, and unsafe and unethical working conditions, both of which are unacceptable to most people today (as long as it’s being carried out from behind bars, out of sight), today’s capitalism is still subversive and insidious. It plays out in where companies choose to build and how they choose to support those communities, in who gets lifted up when they choose to do something and who is crushed down. And in this case, as with so many others, it gets down to simple emotional manipulation.
If there’s one thing that our current hell in the US has brought to an even brighter light, it’s that there’s really nothing companies won’t use to make money. Whether that’s a social justice movement, or an illness that has claimed over a million lives worldwide and will likely take at least a million more before it subsides, companies have found new and dire ways to take a chunk of people’s change, if they even have any left to take. The pandemic, arguably the worst global crisis that most of the world has lived through to this point, has companies selling marked-up branded face masks and hand sanitizers, as though saying, ‘hey, life has gone to shit, but at least you can still make us some money!’
Companies can claim good intentions — and some can even perform good acts! But eventually, the people in charge will switch over, and no one can guarantee that everyone else will be in it for good, and even those who are considered ‘good’ can and will cause collateral damage for the sake of their pocketbooks. Building things on a fractured base will always result in an unstable structure — and with the system of capitalism, where profits and wealth are always the end goal, one thing will always be true: if a company hasn’t profited off something, it’s only because they haven’t yet figured out a way to.
