The Changing Business of Football: The Impact of the Lockdown on the English Premier League

Rahul De () and Aaromal DCruz ()
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Rahul De: Azim Premji University
Aaromal DCruz: Ambedkar University

A chapter in Sports Management in an Uncertain Environment, 2023, pp 293-312 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This paper will study the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the English Premier League (EPL) and analyse the different strategies clubs use to recover from the economic costs of the pandemic. This paper will argue that the COVID-19 lockdown crisis heightened the contradictions within traditional media broadcast and new digital media producers culminating in changing strategies by EPL clubs. The first section provides a conceptual framework to make sense of the growth of the EPL through the lens of political economy. It provides a novel conceptual grammar such as commodification, contradictions, and crisis to understand economic and institutional changes in the EPL. The second section of this paper will study the structure of the football club's business and analyse empirical trends in the EPL from 2013 to 2020. The last section of the paper analyses the different strategies used by EPL clubs to cope with the COVID-19 lockdown crisis. This includes using digital and social media technologies to access new fans such as satellite fans, using branding to compete with other sports brands, and proposing institutional changes such as ‘Project Big Picture’ and the ‘European Super League’ to change the power hierarchy in the EPL.

Keywords: English premier league; COVID-19; Political economy; Club branding; Social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:semchp:978-981-19-7010-8_13

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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-19-7010-8_13

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