The football season is back – and we fans know it's the true opiate of the masses | Stuart Jeffries

As the Premier League kicks off, fans should realise their sport helps to keep them in their places

Football’s coming home? It never went away. The return of the Premier League on Friday night with Leicester City’s visit to Manchester United suggests we have become so hooked on football that we can’t do without it for more than a few minutes. Can it really be starting less than a month after the French teenage prodigy Kylian Mbappé broke Croatian hearts, won the World Cup and drove the Champs Elysées faithful into ecstasy and ancillary looting? Yes it can. Will his teammate Paul Pogba be able to free himself from the shackles of Manchester United manager José Mourinho’s constipated footballing philosophy long enough to demonstrate the midfield joie de vivre he showed in Moscow? Pretend you care.

I say “we” for a reason. This is not one of those articles in which someone disses the hoi polloi from Olympian heights. Rather, it’s what the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist philosophers called immanent critique, specifically one performed from within the spirit-crushing, intelligence-depleting nightmare that is the ugly game. For I am a football fan too.

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