The Not-So-Great Substitution
What Would Renaud Camus Make of Manchester United’s Recent Misguided Transfer Policy?

1,935 words

This coming weekend sees the conclusion of most major football (or soccer, for US readers) leagues across Europe. I doubt whether the prominent anti-immigration French philosopher Renaud Camus, the man who coined the term “The Great Replacement”, is a big sportsball fan himself, but if he is, he should be keeping close tabs on the contrasting final-day fortunes of two distant teams: Manchester United, of the English Premier League, and SSC Napoli of Italy’s Serie A.The contrasting fates of both clubs this season seems to illustrate perfectly Camus’ key philosophical concept of “Undifferentiated Human Matter”.

United are about to record their worst top-flight season since the 1970s, potentially finishing as low as 17th in the division, only one rung above the relegation places. Napoli, however, head into the final round of games sitting on top of the Serie A table, one win away from being champions for only the second time since 1989/90.

Perhaps the key factor in Napoli’s recent rise has been their most successful summer signing, Scottish goalscoring midfielder and regular match-winner Scott McTominay, the precise kind of player Manchester United could do with having in their own rather dismal squad at present, which makes it all the more odd that United voluntarily sold McTominay to Napoli last summer, despite him having been one of their best players for several seasons.

Why would the team’s management do such a sportingly retarded thing? Because McTominay, in Camus’ terms, is no longer primarily viewed by those in charge of running the sport as a footballer at all, nor even as a human being, but as a wholly abstract and deracinated asset on a balance-sheet, yet another fungible, liquid unit of Camus’ UHM.

Great Scott!

Former Manchester United boss Ole Gunnar Solskjaer mused at the time McTominay was sold, “How you can sell Scott is beyond me … [in a squad of shirkers he was one of the few] lads you would put your hat on every day to give 100 percent.” The reason this was “beyond” Mr Solskjaer is because the only “Great Replacement” Ole was ever involved in during his one-time career as a United super-sub was when he was brought on during injury-time to score the last-minute winner against Bayern Munich in the 1999 European Cup Final.

Just because McTominay was a local lad (he only qualifies as being “Scottish” due to his ancestry) who joined the club as a trainee aged five, before going on to make 255 appearances for the first-team, and had remained loyal to it all his life, does not mean he should ever have expected to have received any local loyalty back in return in our hyper-globalized age – quite the reverse in fact.

English football today operates under a restrictive “Financial Fair Play” regime called Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR), which are supposed to ensure clubs do not spend beyond their means to such an extent they go bust. However, the specific wrong-headed way in which PSR rules are structured contains at least one major flaw which seems almost deliberately designed to sever the connections conventionally existing between the cadre of local, home-grown players who traditionally made up the core of each Premier League club’s squads, and the equally locally raised fans who attended the games to watch them play.

When buying and selling players, clubs usually exploit a financial dodge called amortization, which spreads out the fee paid for a player across the course of their contract. So, if you buy or sell a player for £25m on a five-year deal, that equates to £5m loss or £5m profit per season for either club involved, not £25m all at once.

However, when selling youth-team players like Scott McTominay, an exception is made, and the entire transfer fee received can go down on the club’s books as immediate profit for that financial year – so, when Manchester United sold McTominay to Napoli for around £25m last summer, that went down as an immediate £25m to satisfy their shareholders, kicking the club’s ever-building debt a little further down the road. Then, United could use that £25m to immediately bring in a few cheaper, yet inferior, foreign players to replace Scott – with dismal results, as seen in their subsequent record-low league table placing for the modern era.

Such pursuit of short-term profit at the likely expense of the long-term wellbeing of the club strongly mirrors the equally myopic foreign labor policies of the contemporary Western industrial-political-commercial class; rather than training up local white native workers to fill vacant roles, they prefer to import masses of non-white foreign labor to do the job instead, knowing their balance-sheets will thereby gain an immediate boost from the lower wages Africans and Arabs are willing to work for.

In the short-term, for the greedy employers, this may make some financial sense: but, in the long-term, as society begins to atomize and fall apart ever further due to the plummeting social cohesion caused by just such Great Replacement tactics, even the employers too will eventually begin to suffer negative financial consequences. Taxes will inevitably have to rise to pay for higher populations, higher welfare bills, higher policing costs, and just generally higher everything. As everyone gets poorer, so will the initial cheap labor-importing companies too. The end result? Just like Manchester United, nations like the UK will begin sliding inexorably down the financial league tables, making the boss-class’ rise in profits merely temporary.

Playing Away From Home

Last season, McTominay was United’s third-highest scorer, and the manager at the time, Erik ten Hag, did not want to sell him – but, as he explained, the money-men forced him to:

I wouldn’t prefer to lose him because he is Man United in every vein. He was so important for our team, for Manchester United. He was here for over 22 years. But unfortunately, it’s the rules. We have to discuss the rules when you have to do sales. And then obviously, homegrown players, academy players, they bring more value. That’s not the right thing to do.

Ten Hag was subsequently sacked near the start of the current 2024/25 season, following a run of poor results. As such results had been partly caused by bloodless accountants forcing him to sell arguably his best and most committed player, though, maybe they should have been the ones getting fired, not him?

Besides the deleterious long-term economic and sporting consequences of such short-term gold-worship, there is also the equally serious issue of wider cultural demoralization at play here: the decline of the one-club player tends to erode and erase the sense of rootedness within their own native community that fans once felt when travelling towards United’s Old Trafford stadium to see one of their own, with typically Mancunian names like Gary Neville or Paul Scholes, play games as their proxies on the pitch. The occasional parachuted-in glamorous foreign superstar, like Jaap Stam or Cristiano Ronaldo, did no harm, but when lower-grade replacements for local heroes like McTominay are drafted in, fans begin to lose their historic connection to the team.

But then, who are Manchester United’s fans nowadays? The majority are not Mancunian at all, but random foreigners from places like Singapore, Nigeria, the UAE and Malaysia, and even the team’s 1910-built stadium of Old Trafford is now due for a sudden £2bn redesign in order to better accommodate such persons’ tastes as occasional tourist-visitors, not those of the local resident season-ticket holders. Appropriately enough, as I have myself complained elsewhere, the proposed New Trafford eyesore looks like some kind of novelty mosque made from spider-webs, complete with looming minaret-towers, not a football ground at all.

Asked if he thought United should ever relocate from Old Trafford, one of the club’s greatest living former players, Frenchman Eric Cantona, told journalists the following:

No, never. I think the stadium is very important. I remember the first day I came to Manchester United, I could feel the ghosts of the club, of the players, and everything. The energy of the club. The history. It’s a heritage. You can feel the soul of the club, you can feel the energy of the past strongly. It’s very important. I cannot imagine Manchester United without Old Trafford. I cannot imagine Liverpool without Anfield or Real Madrid without the Santiago Bernabeu. I think some clubs change their stadiums and lose their soul, like Arsenal for example. When they left Highbury, they lost the soul of this club.

Sadly, Eric the Red doesn’t really understand: the continual “creative destruction“, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter once put it, and subsequent reimagining of traditional symbols of community attachment like football stadiums as something wholly other than their original selves, is a constant feature of contemporary, globalized, borderless hyper-capitalism. Manchester United is no longer truly Manchester United at all in the 2020s, any more than England itself is truly England; both are merely hollowed out, inverted simulacra, keeping the same old names as before, but each having been surreptitiously hijacked as vehicles for a whole other agenda than their initial natal purposes in life.

When Scott Is No Longer a Scot

I am not paranoid enough to suggest there is a deliberate, behind-closed-doors, centralized plot going on inside Premier League HQ designed to make viewers more primed to accept the Great Replacement by financially incentivizing the constant sale of locally grown footballers to foreign climes. Instead, to return to Renaud Camus’ thinking, the Premier Plutocrats have simply absorbed one of the key socioeconomic lessons of post-industrial Western society – namely, that everything and everyone is now infinitely interchangeable and replaceable, like Lego bricks.

Modern workers are Lego made flesh, taught to aspire less towards limited but sincere vocations in life, more towards possessing those fabled “transferrable skills” which can render a man a spreadsheet-inputter one year, a computer-programmer the next … and then, perhaps inevitably, unemployed the year after. Likewise, our children are groomed that they can be male one week, female the next, and a cat or a yeti sometime next June. And immigrants are lied to that they can be Kenyans one minute, Englishmen the next, even though all available evidence suggests otherwise.

Forget Scott McTominay becoming a walking example of such ‘Undifferentiated Human Matter’ in this way by virtue of suddenly being shipped off to Italy at a moment’s notice; future allegedly ‘home-grown’ players poised to be sold on from Manchester United’s youth-academy to turn a quick book-keeping profit aren’t truly even white British natives at all, possessing obviously alien names like Kobbie Mainoo and Alejandro Garnacho, not good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon back-of-shirt-labels like Nicky Butt and David Beckham as in days of old.

Briefly paraphrasing and updating Marx, Camus sums up his UHM idea like so:

A specter is haunting Europe and the world. It is Replacism, the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized, interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers, culture by leisure activities and entertainment, knowledge by diplomas, the countryside and city by the universal suburb, the native by the non-native, Europe by Africa, men by women, men and women by robots, peoples by other peoples, humanity by a savage, undifferentiated, standardized, infinitely interchangeable posthumanity.

Obviously, there are rather worse consequences of this trend for today’s West than the decline of some stupid Premier League football club – but, if we view the man himself as a handy microcosm for the sad unfolding civilizational fate of us all, I suppose we are all in some sense Scott McTominay now.

Still, as a Liverpool supporter, at least there’s one small silver lining to all this. Man Utd are shit now.