The spatial embeddedness of professional football clubs in Norway

Abstract

In tune with professional football in other European countries, Norwegian football has experienced increased commercialization and a growing international influence since the mid‐1990s. A conventional view is that such processes will result in a de‐coupling or dis‐embedding of the organization from its local context. By analysing the spatiality of the club–environment linkages, and the inter‐dependency between football clubs and its institutional contexts, our study puts this assumption to the test. The essay demonstrates that the practice of top football clubs is still influenced by their local context. In some aspects, the linkages between the club and its community have even been intensified. The organization of football clubs involves the recasting of social, economic and cultural processes both upwards and downwards in scale, rather than being reduced to the upscaling of processes from a local to a global scale. Clubs seem to intensify simultaneously their local anchoring and stretching their geographical scope. Thus, as the essay tries to show, it is important to identify the distinctiveness or the local flavour of this spatial rescaling in selected cases.