Abstract
The commercial development of professional football in the two decades leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic continued apace, with club football reporting more than 20 years of revenue growth. Media income has become the dominant source of income. In this chapter the focus is on analysing implications of this sustained revenue growth for the economics and economic structure of football. These focus on the distribution of financial resources and the resultant implications in terms of the concentration of wealth and sporting success in both individual national leagues and transnational competitions like the UEFA Champions’ League. While much of the chapter is concerned with microeconomic issues—how football is produced, consumed and distributed—there is also consideration of the implications of ongoing changes in the global political world order. The analysis is set within football’s broader social and regulatory context, and hence explores areas in which conflicts exist between the social and business objectives of football’s stakeholders and communities. This chapter concludes by discussing the proposal for a European Super League.
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Morrow, S. (2023). Football’s Ever-Changing Economics. In: The People's Game?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20932-1_1
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