Negotiating the Neoliberal Present: Football and Everyday Sociality Among Māppila Muslims

Abstract

In a distinctive turn, the article locates the everyday social action of a relatively marginalised community in its passion for football. Focusing on Māppila Muslims in Malappuram, Kerala, it examines seven football, a local football culture, to challenge received understandings of Global South societies as merely subjected to the flows and logics of contemporary neoliberalism. The article shows how football academies have produced new forms of disposition, sociality, and collective action. While the cultivation of entrepreneurial disposition enables the capacity to aspire within a globalised economy, it also reshapes and challenges neoliberal logics in specific ways. Sevens football—widely denounced as ‘anti-football’ because of its style of play and its association with the distinct Muslim body culture of the region—creates the conditions for the formation of ethically and religiously disciplined entrepreneurial masculine subjects. Rather than being subjugated by contemporary neoliberal capitalism, the sport’s recent monetary turn has led to the proliferation of residential and non-residential football academies. These mobilise the logics of commercialisation to transform what is considered an ‘abjected’ performance into a means for producing local affluence and aspiration, thereby reconstituting the political economy of everyday life in the region and the community.