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Paper short abstract

The "pleasure principles" of elite sport are that winning is always desirable and losing undesirable; that the more capital a sport club has, the more they win; and the more they win, the more they enjoy sport. This paper questions these truisms by examining losing as a source of enjoyment.

Paper long abstract

In a memorable interview at the height of his career, soccer coach José Mourinho presented his famous omelet metaphor for sport success: ""It is omelets and eggs. No eggs - no omelets! It depends on the quality of the eggs. In the supermarket you have class one, two or class three eggs and some are more expensive than others and some give you better omelets."" Besides the laws of sport capitalism, Mourinho implied the ""pleasure principles"" of elite sport: that winning is always desirable and losing is undesirable; that the more capital a club has, the more they will win; and the more they win, the more they enjoy sport. This paper aims to challenge these truisms by examining losing as a source of enjoyment. The desire to win is fundamentally a capitalist desire: it accumulates sport commodities like victories, championship titles, or celebrity players. This is nourished by the promise that the next new player, championship title, and then the next, will bring greater satisfaction. But will it? This paper proposes that one way to defy the mandate of capitalist accumulation is to acknowledge loss as a source of enjoyment and integrate it in social life. Through examples from the Spanish Liga, it shows that 1. fans misrecognize how they gain satisfaction when they think it's only by winning; 2. satisfaction lies in the act of desiring, not what one obtains; 3. to be a desiring subject and therefore enjoy oneself, one must lack, fail, and acknowledge their obstacles.