football globalisation

With the current 2010 World Cup unfolding, an article on football by Branko Milanovic, a professor at the School of Policy, University of Maryland makes interesting reading and worth quoting.

Soccer embodies globalisation like no other sport. And for players, soccer embodies globalization like no other profession. The market for professional soccer players is, by far, the most globalised labour market. Out of some 2,600 professional players in the five top European leagues – England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France – almost 800 are expatriates, defined as those born and recruited in a county different from the one where they play, according to data published by Professional Football Players Observatory for the last soccer season. Today, many of the best clubs have no players at all from their “own” countries.

Globalisation of the world’s most popular game is responsible for two developments:most observers agree that the quality of the game has improved - players have greater physical stamina, with better ball control and technique. But also, global mobility of labour combined with a capitalist system, in which the richest clubs can buy the best players without salary caps or other limits, concentrates quality more than ever before. A handful of richest soccer teams buy the best players and collect the most trophies, thus boosting their popularity, developing an international fan base, selling more jerseys and advertisements, adding to their coffers and, in turn, buying better players.

During the last 15 years, all English soccer championships but one were won by the so-called Big Four: Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool [In the SPL there is, of course, the duopoly of the Old Firm]. The concentration is greater in Italy. Only once during the last 20 years has a non top-four club won the Italian Series A. It’s no surprise that the top four Italian clubs, like the top four English clubs, are on the list of the 20 richest clubs in the world. In Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona shared 17 out of the last 20 championships. In Germany, 13 out of the last 16 championships were won by two clubs. Winners of the European Champions League are consistently from a narrowing circle of top, richest clubs.

Globalisation combined with commercialisation thus produces two outcomes: better quality of the game, which is tantamount, in economics, to greater output; and greater concentration of winning clubs, which is tantamount to greater inequality.