So the Champions League final has once again revealed something the chattering classes would rather ignore: that beneath the gloss of globalised football lies a simmering, brutish tribalism. Hundreds arrested, scores of French police injured. The scenes from the Stade de France resemble not a celebration of sport but a reenactment of the Fall of Rome, right down to the looting and the casual violence.
But let us not feign surprise. This is what happens when you sell tickets to a spectacle without first securing the soul of the audience. The modern football fan is no longer a supporter; he is a consumer of adrenaline.
And when the supply of corporate hospitality runs dry, when the turnstiles jam and the gates close, the consumer becomes a looter. The French state, ever eager to project an image of order, has been caught napping. They invested billions in stadiums and security theatre but forgot the one thing that truly prevents chaos: a shared sense of honour.
Today’s crowd is not bound by club loyalty or national pride. They are bound by the fleeting ecstasy of the moment. And when that moment is denied, the beast awakens.
This is not an isolated incident. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that worships spectacle without discipline, that demands entertainment without ritual. The Victorians understood this.
They built their football grounds not just as arenas but as moral gymnasiums. The crowd was policed not by batons but by the quiet tyranny of respectability. We have abandoned that.
Now we reap the whirlwind. And the ironic thing? The very people who decry these scenes are the ones who cheered the commercialisation, the corporatisation, the Disneyfication of the beautiful game.
They wanted a global product. They got a global mob. The lesson is as old as Tacitus: empire can crumble in an afternoon, and civilisation is only ever nine meals deep.
Or in this case, one cancelled final away.
