Project and workshop information on The Europeanisation of Football

The project: Origin

The impact of EU policies on sports governance is quite widely researched at supranational level. Sport&EU has been involved in several events in the past years that have marked important watersheds in the development of this area of study. As a natural progression, this area of inquiry and investigation finds its natural development by asking whether sport at national level has also been affected. This is an evolution that shows the maturity of sports governance as an area for research. This research project intends to investigate the extent to which professional football has been Europeanised by analysing the structures of football in 10 different countries. The project is led by Dr. Borja Garcia (Loughborough University), Dr. Arne Niemann (University of Amsterdam) and Professor Wyn Grant (University of Warwick) and it is developed under the umbrella of Sport&EU, with the funding of Loughbourough University’s Centre for the Study of International governance (CSIG) and the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences, also at Loughborough University. The project will comprise a workshop in June 2009 were work in progress will be presented and the end result will be a collective book to be published by Manchester University Press in 2010 under the title The Transformation of European Football: A Case of Europeanisation?

Rationale and objectives

By focusing on the impact of European integration on the domestic level, this project reflects the evolution of the EU integration studies research agenda: after four decades of attention on developments of integration at the European level, in the mid-1990s (mainly political science) scholars have increasingly begun to examine the effect that EU politics and policies may have on the domestic level. The process of change in the domestic arena, in terms of policy substance and instruments, processes and politics as well as polity resulting from European integration or the European level of governance more generally has been termed ‘Europeanisation’. Even though research on Europeanisation has turned into something like an academic growth industry in recent years, it merits continued systematic academic attention, for several reasons. The Europeanisation research agenda arguably focuses on a set of very important research questions, related to where, how, why, and to what extent domestic change occurs as a consequence of European integration/governance. Second, judged against five decades that European integration studies have focused on explaining and describing the emergence and development of a supranational system of European cooperation, research on Europeanisation is still at comparatively early stages. Third, it is difficult to make firm (cause-and-effect) generalisations in this field of inquiry, given, for example, the considerable variation in national institutional histories, actor constellations and structural differentiation and the wide scope of EU policies. This has been compounded by the lack of systematic comparative research on Europeanisation.

The countries under study

The selection of cases has been made with the idea in mind that the impact of European governance/integration should be analysed across substantially diverse systems and scenarios (duration of EU membership, league size, general sport/societal model, TV marketing system, etc.), so as to allow for wide-ranging generalisations. It has also been included a country that is not EU Member State to analyse whether the external effects of EU policies also translate into Europeanisation of football.

The Workshop, University of Amsterdam: 12-13 June 2009

A workshop will be organised by the University of Amsterdam with the support of CSIG and the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences in June 2009. This workshop will bring together the authors of the 11 case studies as well as some renowned scholars in the EU field. It is expected that it will contribute to the development of the project, but also to the wider debate on Europeanisation.

Programme (tentative)

FRIDAY, 12 JUNE 2008

SATURDAY, 13 JUNE 2008

Paper givers (in alphabetical order, with professional status and affiliation)

Likely attendants (including discussants); more participants are expected