The Global Football League

This book tackles issues of globalization in the English Premier League and unpicks what this means to fan groups around the world, drawing upon a range of sociological theories to tell the story of the local and global repertoires of action emanating from the popular protests at Liverpool and Manchester United football clubs.

In recent years, football’s status as "the world’s sport" has shown little sign of waning. From increasing participation at grassroots levels and to the highly lucrative media rights deals secured by the top elite clubs, the game appears to be thriving as it continues to excite and enthral billions of people around the globe. Nevertheless, there are a number of challenges and opportunities facing the football industry today that warrant further examination. This book brings together leading international researchers to survey the current state of the global football industry, exploring contemporary themes and issues in the marketing of football around the world. With contributions from Europe, Asia and the Americas, it discusses key topics such as football club management, the economics of the football industry, match-fixing, social media, fan experiences, the globalized marketplace, and the growing popularity of the women’s game. Offering insights for researchers, managers, and marketers who are looking to stay ahead of the game, The Global Football Industry: Marketing Perspectives is essential reading for anyone with an interest in international sport business.

Two veteran sports writers and editors take readers inside the history of the most-watched sports league on earth -- England's Premier League.

In recent years, football’s status as "the world’s sport" has shown little sign of waning. From increasing participation at grassroots levels and to the highly lucrative media rights deals secured by the top elite clubs, the game appears to be thriving as it continues to excite and enthral billions of people around the globe. Nevertheless, there are a number of challenges and opportunities facing the football industry today that warrant further examination. This book brings together leading international researchers to survey the current state of the global football industry, exploring contemporary themes and issues in the marketing of football around the world. With contributions from Europe, Asia and the Americas, it discusses key topics such as football club management, the economics of the football industry, match-fixing, social media, fan experiences, the globalized marketplace, and the growing popularity of the women’s game. Offering insights for researchers, managers, and marketers who are looking to stay ahead of the game, The Global Football Industry: Marketing Perspectives is essential reading for anyone with an interest in international sport business.

Football clubs across the world continue to embody many of the collective symbols, identifications and processes of connectivity which have long been associated with the notion of ‘community’. In recent years, however, the very term ‘community’ has become the focus of renewed interest within popular discourse and amongst academics, politicians and policy makers. It has become something of a ‘buzz’ word, wheeled out as both a lament to more certain times and as an appeal to a better future: a term imbued with all the richness associated with human interaction. ‘Community’ has also been employed increasingly within football, for instrumental reasons concerned with policy and stadium redevelopment, and in broader rhetoric about clubs, their localities and fans. This book brings together a range of key debates around contemporary understandings of ‘community’ in world football. Split into four sections, it considers political and theoretical debates around football and its connection with community; different national and ethnic football communities; instrumental uses of football to bridge gaps within and between groups; future directions in the football and community debate. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

Association football is now the global sport, consumed in various ways by millions of people across the world. Throughout its history, football has been a catalyst as much for social cohesion, unity, excitement and integration as it can be for division, exclusion and discrimination. A Sociology of Football in a Global Context examines the historical, political, economic, social and cultural complexities of the game across Europe, Africa, Asia and North and South America. It analyses the key developments and sociological debates within football through a topic-based approach that concentrates on the history of football and its global diffusion; the role of violence; the global governance of the game by FIFA; race, racism and whiteness; gender and homophobia; the changing nature of fans; the media and football’s financial revolution; the transformation of players into global celebrities; and the growth of football leagues across the world. Using a range of examples from all over the world, each chapter highlights the different social and cultural changes football has seen, most notably since the 1990s, when its relationship with the mass media and other transnational networks became more important and financially lucrative.

The spread of COVID-19 and the consequent pandemic since early 2020 have brought about unprecedented changes in all spheres of global life, creating a new sense of (in)security with social distancing, physical isolation, quarantine and lockdown becoming buzzwords to combat the disease. As in all spheres of life, the first wave of the pandemic posed serious challenges to the world of soccer, with diverse and intriguing responses across the globe. This book documents the early impressions and initial responses of various stakeholders of the soccer world to the challenges of COVID-19 in 2020. It reveals how the process of confrontation, negotiation, adjustment and overcoming against such challenges necessitated and inspired novel responses and strong improvisations from soccer bodies to players, referees to spectators, and journalists to sponsors. This process has revealed abrupt as well as radical changes in the organization, rules, spectatorship and telecast of the game, thereby affecting the game’s cultural dimensions, commercial prospects and political implications. The volume points out that the way soccer has adjusted to the ‘new normal’ standard of the ‘COVID Regime’ has elicited newer meanings and nuanced representations of the game. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Soccer & Society.