Spatial mobilities, football players and the World Cup: evidence from the English premier league

Abstract

The mobilities of elite football players has become one of the defining features of football in the contemporary age, where an international transfer market has been lubricated by the ‘Bosman’ ruling (1995) but made a reality by ‘pull’ factors – such as high salaries and the global esteem offered by globally renowned leagues across the world. This article uses data drawn from players’ domicile across the 1986, 1998 and 2010 World Cups to test two hypotheses. The first of these is that on a global scale, leagues recruit from local regions, and the second is that the English premier league falls behind other major European leagues (in Italy, Spain, France and Germany) in the recruitment of the transnational capitalist class of elite players. Of these hypotheses, the first was refuted and the second accepted.