SPORTING CHANGE: Can football help us build a different society?

Vasilis Kostakis is not your typical football fan. A Professor of Technology Governance and Sustainability at TalTech in Estonia, and a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society, he champions the idea of cosmolocalism.

This is an approach where global collaboration in design and knowledge-sharing combine with local manufacturing to create democratic, adaptive production systems that respect planetary boundaries. Vasilis’ prolific academic work is rooted in a deep conviction that we can build economies which neither immiserate people nor degrade the planet.

In his new book, Beyond the Final Whistle: Football for a Better World (Pluto Press), Vasilis turns to football as both a mirror of today’s social, political, environmental, and economic crises — and a lens for imagining how we might live, relate, and play together in more sustainable and fulfilling ways. Cool Down’s Freddie Daley sat down with him to explore these ideas further.

It would be great to understand a little more about how this book came about. What made you want to write it?

This book emerged from a deeply personal reckoning with football. My “official” work is as a university professor studying social change - how we might address inequalities and ecological breakdown. But like many academics, I found myself trapped in a bubble, writing articles that reached few readers and using language that even fewer could decipher. I wanted to create something that would resonate with a much broader audience.

The deeper story behind this book is my brother's journey through professional football. When he was 15, he moved to the Netherlands to join Ajax academy. I was 20 then, and I made the decision to drop everything in Greece and move with him to support his dream of making it in the game. I watched him rise and fall - literally and figuratively. The injuries, surgeries, recoveries, only to be injured again. It was brutal and relentless. By his early twenties, his professional career was over.

Through this journey, my brother and I experienced firsthand the dirt and stench of professional football and the industry the surrounds it. It affected me so deeply that I stopped watching football entirely. I went into a self-imposed exile from the sport that I once loved. This lasted until I became a father and my son started playing, despite my attempts to steer him away from it.

This book thus represents my reconciliation with football — learning to see beyond its commercial corruption and, instead, towards its potential as a force for genuine social change.

Why do you think football provides a useful lens for investigating social, cultural and economic issues?

Football provides an extraordinary lens because it's simultaneously universal and intimate. It reaches billions of people emotionally across all borders, languages, and social classes. But more than that, football naturally teaches us the values and the tools we need for social change.

When you watch a beautiful team goal, you witness something that couldn't happen through individual effort alone. Every player depends on teammates, and the best teams create connections that transcend their individual parts. Football doesn't just tell us about cooperation - it lets us “feel” it. When we play or watch, we do not just think about community, we experience it.

The sport also serves as both mirror and laboratory. It reflects our current social organization: the inequalities, the commodification, the prioritizing of profit over people. But within football, we can also glimpse and rehearse alternatives. As Eric Cantona says, echoing the Brazilian Sócrates, football is a laboratory for how things should be.

David Clark via Unsplash

What worries you the most about the current state of football and its trajectory?

Several trends deeply concern me about football’s current trajectory.

First is the almost complete commodification of the sport. Players have become products, fans have become consumers. We see this in players earning astronomical, almost incomprehensible salaries, while clubs raise ticket prices beyond what ordinary supporters can afford.

I'm particularly troubled by the invasion of gambling. Fans are no longer compelled to appreciate the beauty of a tactical combination, a string of passes, or a moment of pure magic. Instead, they're trained to see statistics, cards, and corners as objects for betting. Many clubs have become dependent on revenues from betting companies, creating a symbiotic relationship that's increasingly difficult to break despite the clear harms gambling poses to communities.

The dominance of individualized celebrations also worries me. Look at Cristiano Ronaldo's “I’m here and no one else” celebration that millions of children imitate around the world, or Stephen Curry calling opponents to “go to sleep.” These reflect a culture that heroizes the individual, while overlooking the fundamentally collective nature of success. Such celebrations reinforce the dangerous myth of the "self-made" person, ignoring that every goal or crucial moment emerges from collective effort—teammates, coaches, families, even the broader community that built the stadiums and nurtured the sport. 

When young children mimic these individualistic displays, we're teaching them to glorify themselves rather than recognize the web of support that makes achievement possible. This stands in stark contrast to moments like Marco Tardelli's unforgettable sprint to his team's bench in the 1982 World Cup final—his clenched fists and raw emotion immediately shared with his teammates—or Iniesta honoring his deceased colleague, Dani Jarque, in 2010 where personal triumph became an opportunity to honor memory and human connection.

Then there's the environmental destruction caused by the contemporary game. Consider Qatar's World Cup in 2022, claimed to be “carbon neutral”, but involving the construction of energy-intensive stadiums, guaranteeing the exploitation of the desert and massive amounts of international travel. Even in regular league play, teams frequently use private jets for distances they could cover by train.

Shapelined via Unsplash.

What hope do you have that football can help build a more sustainable and equitable world? And where do you see signs of hope?

Despite these concerns, I see concrete reasons for hope everywhere.

The historical example of “Democracia Corinthiana” in 1980s Brazil remains incredibly inspiring. Everyone in the club — from players to kit managers — voted on all decisions. They voted on tactics, travel arrangements, even whether a player could stay home with his girlfriend instead of traveling (although, perhaps, this was too far). Their motto was “Win or lose, but always with democracy.” And while practicing this radical democracy, they played magnificent football and won trophies.

Today I see grassroots movements across the world. Self-organized clubs operating democratically, supporter movements demanding a genuine say over club governance, fan groups taking ownership of their teams. These aren't distant dreams; they're happening now.

I'm inspired by educational initiatives like the John Moriarty Foundation in Australia, which uses football to empower Aboriginal youth, developing critical thinking and empathy alongside technical skills. Or clubs that remove individual names from scoreboards to emphasize that every goal comes from collective effort.

Beyond football, I see successful examples of cooperative organization everywhere - from digital commons like GNU/Linux to community energy cooperatives. These show that another world is possible in the here and now.

What gives me hope is recognizing that we don't have to wait for some distant revolution to change the world. Through football, we can create spaces that draw together different values, relationships, and ways of organizing that already exist. These spaces then become seeds for broader transformation.

To use a football metaphor: We're in the 89th minute and losing 4-0. Will it turn around? Probably not. But we must fight until the final whistle: for the generations that will come after us and to give meaning to our lives in the here and now.

Football won't solve our problems alone, but it can help us become the kind of people capable of creating that transformation. When a team operates democratically, when supporters organize to take ownership of their club, when players speak out against injustice — they're practicing the skills and values we need for broader social change.

The beautiful thing is that this is already happening. We just need to recognize it, support it, and connect these initiatives with each other. That's how we change the world — with a ball, but not only with a ball.