New football directors in the twenty-first century: profit and revenue in the English Premier League’s transnational age

Abstract

The importance of governance in football has been underlined recently by the UK government’s cross-party enquiry which, amongst other issues, explored debt levels and ownership patterns in football. This article addresses the latter of these themes by exploring ‘new directors’ ways of developing revenue and potentially extracting profits from football in the twenty-first century. By embedding the argument into discourses about the globalisation of the English Premier League (EPL) that borrow from Castells’ notion of the ‘network society’, I critically identify four potential areas in which ‘new directors’ can make money from associations with football. These are: (i) the proliferation of deregulated television revenues; (ii) using a football club as a vessel to promote other businesses; (iii) overseas stock market floatation; and (iv) promoting a football club into the EPL.