Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

After the crunch: a new era for the beautiful game in Europe?

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14660970.2010.510751

1743-9590

Anthony King,

Sports Analytics and Performance

In the last two years, the global economy has suffered a major financial crisis which has precipitated a world‐wide recession. The ‘credit crunch’ has been widely seen as the end of the neo‐liberal regulatory regime introduced in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and a return to the Keynesian management of the immediate post‐War period. There is a wide consensus among scholars writing on football that the organization of the professional game has paralleled wider regulatory regimes. Accordingly, during the 1990s, professional football in Europe was organized on a neo‐liberal, transnational basis in which economic and playing power congregated among a group of super clubs. Following the credit crunch, it seems likely that a new regulatory regime will appear in football. On the basis of current debates and trends, this article explores the character of the emergent political economy of football. Against the sometimes self‐interested claims of administrators like Michel Platini or Sepp Blatter, it is proposed that football is not re‐entering an era of Keynesian management by national and international federations. Super‐clubs will remain a dominant force in European football. Rather, the new era might be characterized as one of ‘regulated transnationalism’. The major clubs and their transnational interconnections will remain central features of the new era but their activities will be monitored and controlled by a regulatory complex consisting of national and international federations, European institutions, national governments and the clubs themselves. Finally, the article explores how fan cultures are likely to change in the coming decade in the light of the new regulatory regime.