Football And Globalization

Ever since the late 1900s, advance on TV, satellites, communication network among global football clubs, and the transfer market led to a boom of transfer of foreign football players to the English Premier League. From the fact that 69% of the player playing in the English Premier League are non-British football players, it is easy to see ho global English football has become. This is globalization of football, which is the main topic of this paper. Based on McGovern’s definition, globalization in football is players from all around the world forming a team of unity. (25) Although players are come from regions of different cultures and ethnicities, as long as they come to England and play football as a team. This is globalization, and it is

My research question is as follows; How does British media portray foreign footballers in the English Premier League? I decided to explore globalization of football because, as David Storey puts it, “the migration of sports people is a relatively under-explored phenomenon.” (86-94) Moreover, this topic had a lot to do with language as media’s intervention had a massive influence on globalization of football in England. To fully answer my research question, I divided the main topic into a few sub-topics. Firstly, I have examined globalization in English football and how British media reacted to this globalization. Secondly, I analyzed how British and non-British footballers were being described in British media. Later, patterns such as similarities and differences between the languages used to describe British and foreign footballers were examined in depth. Lastly, by analyzing three different categories: culture, media and fans, I explained the globalization of football.

In order to answer my research question, I gathered primary sources from BBC match reports, post match analyses, interviews, and more additional readings from the Guardian and Sky Sports to diversify the sources as well as not to be biased by taking information solely from one type of source. I have chosen 15 British players and 15 foreign players to conduct

English football no longer stuck to Celtic periphery but formed a global community since the 1990s. (Thibault ) As proportion of foreign players increased, English football has gone through globalization. Athletes’ diversities via globalization broke barriers of gender, ethnicity, religions, and climates. However, the greater the number of foreign players in the Premier League, the more the fans’ dissatisfactions toward the national football league. As Peter Millward mentioned “unfavorable attitudes towards foreigners exist in English football culture”. (Millward 608) As the quotation suggest, xenophobia exists in English football based on Millward. Actually, it is the fans who build this atmosphere of xenophobia, but they say that they have nothing to do with xenophobia. The fans say this because society’s perception of xenophobia is negative. Since people do not want to be viewed as xenophobic, football fans did not admit that they are xenophobic if the degree of them being xenophobic was not as serious as others that they could see on other