Football’s grobalization or globalization? The lessons of Liverpool Football Club’s evolution in the Premier League era

Abstract

In the last two decades, the percentage of foreign players and managers in the English Premier League has increased markedly. In addition, advances in satellite technology have created a global fan base for England’s biggest clubs, with global entrepreneurs vying for club ownership. Previous academic studies highlight these changes focusing on the excessive commercialization of football while mostly ignoring clubs, which are increasingly global sociocultural, political and economic agents, yet historically the source of intense local identity. Adopting Samuel Huntington’s definition of institutions as ‘stabled, valued, recurring patterns of behavior’ and focusing mainly on the last two decades, this essay analyses how Liverpool FC as an institution dealt with the myriad challenges of globalization. Relying on qualitative interviews and archival documentation, it also tests George Ritzer’s concept of grobalization, which predicts that the effects of globalization will result in all clubs becoming increasingly similar. The study reveals through a new conceptual framework called ‘localism anew’ that globalization’s effects are not uniform but depend on institutional capacity and the local-societal setting.