Shaping a “Glocal” Premier League in Distinct Markets: Localisation and Hybridisation

Abstract

The modern English Premier League (EPL) has become an institution with global reach. EPL has achieved substantive global success since its inception in 1992, bringing significant revenue from overseas markets. Given EPL’s worldwide market footprint, this dissertation focuses on the processes of EPL’s global market development, primarily in the distant locales of South Korea and China. These processes will be situated in the existing sociological framework on the nature of neoliberal globalisation/glocalisation as a “two way flow” model between the global and the local. This dissertation identifies that existing literature on football globalisation possesses significant distinctions in patterns and analyses pre and post 2010. It will demonstrate these thematic differences by organising existing literature into two waves of globalisation/glocalisation. Though existing literature has identified glocalisation as the primary framework of understanding contemporary EPL overseas market development, the actual mechanisms of the market encounter and “captation” processes remain unestablished and unconsolidated. This dissertation selects prominent case studies on English, Chinese, and Korean social media that demonstrate these mechanisms. It collects social media discourses and uses multimodal discourse analysis to concretise the mechanisms of EPL glocalisation. This dissertation argues that EPL clubs use social media localisation strategies through virtuality, products and values to cater to local market preferences in market encounters. It further argues that EPL clubs hybridise themselves with local spaces, personalities and symbolisms to facilitate market “captation”. These strategies of glocalisation bring with them new implications for the status of local UK supporters and the images of EPL clubs. These new findings result in the proposition of a further specified model of neoliberal glocalisation with layered, detailed dynamics between market actors, and contribute towards an up-to-date sociological understanding of the globally expansive contemporary EPL and neoliberal glocalisation.