Text by Alfie Bown

The way we consume content in 2026 can be aptly described through the concept of “flow”. Flow is a term used in contemporary discussions of technology and psychology to describe a state of total absorption, in which the self seems to dissolve into the activity at hand. Action and awareness appear to merge so completely that the ordinary friction of thought falls away as we buy into the next episode, reel or advert. But a psychoanalytic reading of the term points to something less seamless: not the elimination of gaps and interruptions, but the fragile smoothing over of them, a fantasy of frictionless continuity that depends, in fact, on the very antagonisms it appears to dissolve. It would be useful to compare flow with immersion in this regard. While immersion is characterised by a temporary dreamlike experience before a return to the norm, perhaps embodied by the discrete experiences of cinema or theatre, flow is today’s state of normality, best characterised by the endless content feeds of social media. Football is a form of immersive experience that cuts against the flow of content-consumer capitalism. This tension unlocks a question that has mattered to many sports fans in recent years: what has happened to football in the hands of technological capitalism, with its relentless pursuit of flow, and what, if anything, has been lost in the process?

This shift in how we consume football – and popular media more broadly – can be characterised in two ways. First, there has been a move away from a culture of mass consumption toward one of curated, individually bespoke consumption. Second, there has been a move away from a culture of discrete consumption to one of continuous consumption. A football match poses an obvious problem to both trends, since it is, by its nature, both collective and discrete: consumed en masse at fixed intervals: one 90-minute game, two halves, 30 minutes of extra time, one penalty shootout, one World Cup every four years, one season per year, and so on. In this way, it refuses to “play ball” with current cycles of capitalist consumption.

In the 2000s, a wave of football commentary argued that the game had become what the often-misquoted Marxist phrase used for religion: the “opiate of the masses”. In this view, sport – like religion – was at best politically neutral, though that very detachment was criticised for distracting people from the social and economic realities shaping contemporary life. At its worst, when football did become political, critics argued that it risked amplifying nationalist and regionalist sentiments, providing fertile ground for right-wing or conservative values (which gained particular traction in the lead up to the 2006 World Cup when Croatian fans formed a 200-person human swastika in a match against Italy). Simon Critchley, perhaps the only living great philosopher who is also a football fanatic, described England’s exit from both the 2006 and 2026 World Cups in religious terms, referring to the solidarity of our collective mourning as a “funeral”. Critchley’s point does not replicate the predictable shibboleth against religion but the reverse: that football embodies some of the ritual and habit of a shared social life that has been eroded along with religion. It was Marx, of course, who argued that capitalism had torn asunder the old, shared traditions only to replace them with the worship of raw capital. Perhaps ritual, belief and communal euphoria had nowhere to go but into the realm of organised football. After all, we often refuse to work during the game (and even demand an extra bank holiday if we win the World Cup), carving out time for the match with the devotion of a Christian ensuring a visit to church on Sunday.

But this shared mass culture – with all its joys, furies and risks – is once again out of sync with the trends of capitalism today. It has been documented how personally curated newsfeeds, music playlists and video content can lead to a kind of social fragmentation: long gone are the days when everyone watched Coronation Street (1960-) at the same time and put the kettle on during the adverts, the electric surge from which overloaded the local grid and caused local power cuts (these were known in the UK as TV pickups). Now it is almost always the case that no two people watch the same show at the same time, and no two people see the same answer when they type into an LLM-based search engine.

According to Ofcom’s 2025 report, the viewing figures of “linear” TV – content watched in real time – have declined rapidly since at least 2019. Media theorist Andrew Hoskins refers to this as “sharded media”, an ecosystem that encourages individuals to exist “in a personally-formed and encompassed informational bubble”. In Hoskins’s understanding, a community can be thought of as a fragile glass structure, and individuals are encouraged to live as fragments of sharded glass, with few opportunities for collective alternatives. This keeps us consuming uncritically and continuously, no longer reality-testing and reflecting with each other, and without the shared solidarity of the funeral at the end.

Football is perhaps the experience that fits least comfortably within this new, bespoke mode of consumption. Social media platforms curate a personalised, continuous feed, carefully designed for each unique user. Video games boast infinite open-world optionality so that no two playthroughs are the same, and playlist curation tools have ushered in the decline of simultaneous listening through national and local radio. Football works precisely by being communitarian through its liveness. Watching live together is the religious aspect of football, whether on the terraces, in the pub or from our sofas at home, the WhatsApp group chats pinging continuously as soon as the whistle goes. Football, then, resists the move toward individual bespoke consumption, maintaining its position within a culture of mass consumption.

Historically, one might have argued that this helped football serve its purpose as the opiate of the masses, keeping the population in check. Restricted to 3pm on Saturdays with tournaments during the holidays, football could function as a regular, predictable carnival, a safety valve for cultural frustrations that eased the tension before the return to family duties on Sunday or the working week on Monday. This form of governance is particularly associated with the 19th century – when football and other sports boomed – and has been called “Victorian rational recreation” by historians who pointed out how class divides and economic mobility were managed through extra-curricular offerings such as sports.

In a form of global digital capitalism that works by encouraging individual, continuous consumption over collective, discrete rituals, football appears to have transformed from the perfect ally of the factory owner into a mode of resistance against the tech capitalist. Where factory owners might have wanted their workers immersed in sport during the newly designed “weekend” that workers had fought to secure, today the erasure of clear distinctions between weeks, weekends, work, play, consumption and production embodies the ideology of the digital capitalist class.

Football is increasingly brought into line with modes of consumption that characterise today’s curated capitalism. One strategy on show at the World Cup has been simply to add more football to the roster and to move games from shared kick-off times to staggered ones, so that football can be consumed more or less continuously throughout the year. The 2026 World Cup was the first with 48 teams, and discussions have begun regarding a 64-team tournament. If football can be spread across the calendar, it fits more easily into today’s personalised media feeds: fewer people will be doing the same thing at the same time, and more will be dipping in and out asynchronously.

The sport is also being further embedded within other media cycles, erasing the distinction between experiencing the game and everything else. We saw this clearly in the 2026 World Cup as well. This World Cup bore the innovation of mid-match advert breaks included through the “hydration break” for players, breaking up the discrete nature of the game and blending it with the continuous media cycle. This unbroken flow of content prevents us from reflecting on what we consume, sharing our build-ups, victories, defeats and disappointments collectively, and it ensures we move straight to the next suggested item on our personalised commodity feed. For the first time, the half-time break was also extended from the traditional 15 minutes (baked into the rules since the 19th century) to include a half-time show featuring pop stars and celebrities ranging from Justin Bieber to Tom Cruise.

Alongside this, reality TV shows featuring footballers’ families, footballers’ own Instagram content, season-long documentaries like Welcome to Wrexham (2022-) and endless transfer rumour content all embed football within the wider continuous media landscape. Other sports, perhaps most notably American football, have set the precedent here whereas football has only recently been touched by this trend.

Another notable feature of the latest World Cup was the encouragement of referees to understand their role as managing the flow of the game rather than strictly applying the rules. The introduction of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) was supposed to remove errors from the application of the rules, but it has, for many people, functioned to disrupt the game’s discrete and fixed structure by adding long delays and unappreciated corrections to events on the pitch. This has turned matches into spectacles whose influence on the viewer can be managed, rather than discrete rituals with fixed, non-negotiable rules. VAR itself might give us further clues to the new ways in which digital infrastructures mediate, and even override, our lived experience of reality today.

There is almost universal agreement among fans about VAR in its current form: while some defend the concept in principle, most agree that its present use is working against our enjoyment of the sport. The principle behind such technologies is that they remove human error from rule-application, producing a stronger and more consistent set of applied rules. This misses an important point: in the social context, rules only work if and when they are made and applied by humans. This may explain our universal discomfort with the handing over of rule application to technologies. While technological authorities, from autopilots to GPS tools, function well enough in certain non-social contexts, when technology intervenes to mediate between humans in inherently social activities they fall short of satisfying us. Here, our social desire to collectively construct reality overrides the idea of a fixed authority that determines reality on our behalf.

This is a critical point for psychoanalysis, which insists that we experience reality through language, beliefs and images, so that completely direct or neutral access to it would be impossible. The question is not so much, “What really happened?” but rather, “How did we experience our reality?” For Jacques Lacan in particular, this reality is not constructed by isolated individuals but is shaped through language and our relationships with others, within our shared symbolic world. The rules we agree on in a shared society ensure that we have a social series of codes and agreements that facilitate shared human life. The ability to sacrifice one’s own direct interest for the social group is, for Lacanians, what makes us human: by entering the social world, we give up on the possibility of our own personal access to reality and accept instead a partial and inadequate shared social world. We can understand this in terms of the Lacanian concept of “the Real”. The Real is not reality as it is traditionally understood, which we represent, discuss and debate with language and images. Rather, reality is always mediated through language and symbols and can never be fully or directly accessed and the Real is the part of reality that lies beyond our ability to represent it. While VAR falls into the fantasy that we can access what really happened (and the authority that is supported by such a view) it is the shared experience of approaching the limits of representation (the Real) together that makes football so appealing.

Football, then, shows us something about our collective experience of the world which psychoanalysts would take years to philosophise: that we do not simply have different subjective ways of experiencing reality but that reality itself is formed in the act of collective and subjective experience. While curated experiences of flow under contemporary capitalism encourage us to live in our atomised world while trusting the algorithmic Big Other, what our collective experience of football points to is our instinct to resist such authorities and our impulse toward shaping our reality together.