The changing business of football: The impact of the lockdown on the English premier league

De, Rahul and DCruz, Aaromal (2023) The changing business of football: The impact of the lockdown on the English premier league. In: Sports Management in an uncertain Environment. Springer: Singapore., XX-309. ISBN 978-981-19-7009-2 (Submitted)

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Abstract

This paper will study the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the English Premier League (EPL) and analyze the different strategies used by clubs to recover from the economic costs of the pandemic. This paper will argue that the COVID 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 and 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 analyze 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 lockdown crisis. This includes using digital and social media technologies to access new fans such as satellite fans, use of 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.

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De, Rahul and DCruz, Aaromal

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