Peter Millward, "The Global Football League: Transnational Networks, Social Movements and Sport in the New Media Age" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

Summary

It's the English Premier League's birthday! On this day twenty years ago, all twenty-two clubs of the First Division resigned from the 104-year-old Football League and declared their plans to create a new, breakaway league.A lucrative television deal with Sky Sports followed soon after, bringing plenty of seed money to the new league.At the time, however, English football was not a certain investment.Attendance had been declining for decades, and in the EPL's first season stadiums were filled to less than 70 per cent of capacity. In terms of revenue and star players, the top European leagues were in Spain and Italy.In fact, the EPL couldn't even boast the biggest money-making club in Britain.That team was Rangers, playing in the Scottish league. What a difference two decades make.The EPL today is the biggest revenue-generating league in Europe, and its top clubs are among the valuable sports properties in the world.The league draws international investors, and its matches are televised in more than 200 countries.In a recent interview, EPL chief Richard Scudamore remarked on the league's worldwide popularity.The parity in American professional sports was enviable, Scudamore admitted, but "theirs is an incestuous, contained, domestic world. . . . I wouldn't swap our global appeal." But as sociologist Peter Millward points out, the Premier League's global success has had its discontents.In his book The Global Football League (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Pete looks at supporters of the league's most successful clubs, Manchester United and Liverpool, examining how they responded to the arrival of new, affluent fans and new, American owners.For many of these fans, the on-field results that this money brought was not worth the loss, as they saw it, of the clubs' traditions.In looking at these supporters and their protests, Pete's book deals with questions that go well beyond English football.This is a study of how sports fans find meaning and identity--and how the yearning for local connections can outweigh success and riches in the global market.

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