Only a game? The politics of football, the English Premier League, and its wider international relations: A critical research agenda for the next 25 years

David Webber

Abstract

Despite its near-universal popularity, economic significance, and political power, football (or ‘soccer’) remains, save for a few notable exceptions, on the margins of political studies, international relations, and international political economy. This article, written to mark twenty-five years of the BJPIR, reflects upon the remarkable growth of the English Premier League during this same period, and considers how the conceptual toolkits of these disciplines might explain this growth trajectory and those fault-lines that have emerged as a result of its own dominant position across the globe.

By building the case for those working within these disciplines to take seriously the politics, IR and IPE of football, this piece offers a research agenda designed to encourage colleagues to consider ways that their own scholarship might be extended to interrogate those power relations and various sites of political struggle that will be present within football over the next twenty-five years.