“WHAT is football? It’s about solidarity, it’s about teamwork, it’s about subsuming yourself within a team of equals.

“They all wear the same shirt, of the same colour, doing something together. And that’s actually what the left is about, it’s about collectivism; it’s about doing something with a higher ideal, working towards the same goal.

“It’s about working together,” waxed author of Football Italia and university lecturer Mark Doidge.

“But without uniformity as well. The joy of football is that the division of labour is so complex and there is still place for individual brilliance. It embraces diversity, variety individual genius etc. and that makes it a really powerful tool,” added writer and broadcaster David Goldblatt.

This is just a taste of the impassioned discussion about the people’s game that took place at the Dangerous Times Festival session hosted by Mark Perryman of Philosophy Football on Saturday.

With a top-quality panel that saw Doidge and Goldblatt take their seats alongside author Nick Davidson and Football Beyond Boarders’s Sanaa Qureshi to discuss “Fifa and the future of modern football,” the small audience were in for a treat.

Taking place — rather aptly — at the under threat but much-loved vibrant east London community venue the RichMix, the assembled guests tore into crumbling Fifa.

Perryman highlighted the huge power of the sport in his opening remarks, pointing out that “more countries are affiliated to the Fifa than the UN.”

In dissecting the legitimacy of Fifa to govern football Goldblatt — who recently penned a “manifesto for a better game” in the Guardian — pointed out that football associations should also fall under scrutiny and be criticised for their lack of representation.

“The kind of people that coach it [football], play it and invest it with meaning by supporting it, are what makes this thing valuable. Culturally, economically and politically, without that, it’s just a silly game that’s fun to play. And those are precisely the people who are never represented in the institutions of power that organise the game,” he slammed.

“Why do fans have no representation? Why do players have no representation? Why does the University of Cambridge have more representation than the whole of women’s football?”

Goldblatt went on to say that we should passionately celebrate and wholeheartedly back the calls for Fifa reform, but that the left has a responsibility to push questions about the nature of that reform and demand discussion on who and how that reform will be managed.

“We’re with you [Fifa], but your political, judicial structures are farcical. They need rewriting. So who is going to do it?

“It is going to be the same old dudes who voted for Blatter that are going to be the people responsible for reform and revision. How are we going to open this process up?”

The speakers then looked beyond the crisis in football’s global governing body to the very nature and context of the sport as a whole and what we can do to change things.

Qureshi made the critical point that the goings on in football were a reflection of the developments taking place in wider society and that “because of the nature of the sport and its global popularity, it is a really fertile ground for resistance.

There’s a lot of opportunity there because it does in many ways produce some of the very worst ills, it can be the most sexist, most violently homophobic, most violently racist, but as a result it also then has the most opportunity to subvert those things.”

Having been inspired by Hamburg side FC Saint Pauli, Davidson offered a glimpse of the grassroots football fightback, with influence from Europe, that is taking place in Britain.

The “biggest influence is being felt in places like FC United of Manchester who are doing it on their own terms. AFC Wimbledon, Clapton, Dulwich, all of these places are actually reclaiming, for me, football how I want it to be with that left-wing political slant to it as well.”

The safe standing campaign, the success of United Glasgow on its fourth birthday, co-operatives, fan democracy and more, were all put forward as beacons of hope in an increasingly isolating and commercialised football world.

Yet the overwhelming feeling was that these pockets of resistance mirror the low-level of struggle against the Tory’s brutal austerity agenda in Britain. Reaching a wider layer and building a much more potent force of struggle is the task ahead.

Unlike in many European countries, the working class of Britain has lacked a clear political voice. One that says No to this vicious individualistic system and puts forward the programme of and demand for a society run in the interests of the majority.

Ideas of the collective, of public ownership for the benefit of all and of community have been ideologically attacked from the right. Thatcherism ushered in the free-market economy and a new era of globalisation and football, not immune to that, was exploited for its popularity and potential profitability.

But these attacks can’t undo the fundamental and inherent ideals within football and we can use the passion and collectivism of the game to unite and fight societies’ ills.

Philosphopy Football should be praised for organsing this quality discussion. Here’s to many more.