Sport & Exercise Research Group Seminar (Online): The ‘disneyization’ of football: entertainment multinationals and global dynamics of the most popular sport in the world

Sport & Exercise Research Group Seminar (Online)

The ‘disneyization’ of football: entertainment multinationals and global dynamics of the most popular sport in the world

Dr. Xavier Ginesta, Universitat Central de Catalunya (UVic-UCC)

12pm (GMT) / 1pm (CET)

Virtual Link to join seminar: 

https://eu.bbcollab.com/guest/7156da250ca144aea3f0078f42ea7a3a

Abstract

Football has entered a vicious circle: the increase in clubs’ revenues is directly proportional to the increase in players’ salaries (Hold, Tomlinson & Young, 2011; Cleland, 2015). The need to increase revenues has forced football clubs to look for new markets and new audiences. This is taking place in a context of globalisation of sport and the digital revolution. Currently, the corporate media that clubs created during the first decade of the century, taking advantage of the Internet (Ginesta, 2020), have been overtaken by two factors: the fan’s perception that corporate media lived off “political correctness” and the emergence of OTTs that have opened up a world of possibilities for sports organisations to reach new, younger audiences with new entertainment content for on-demand consumption.

Many studies have focused on the management of corporate media in football, and even on the potential of social networks. But, research in Communication and Sport has to go one step further: we should analyze the transformation of clubs into “content factories”, into audiovisual production studios, with multiple formats, clients and strategic objectives. In Italy, Inter Milan has been a pioneer and, in Spain, Barça Studios represents a substantial change in the way the club relates to its audiences and has link the club into the new digital revolution, exemplified by the emergence of NFT. Based on a typological sample of interviewees – using a semi-structured questionnaire – linked to elite football in the Big Five leagues (Germany, Spain, England, France and Italy), this presentation conceptualises football clubs as new entertainment multinationals. They are important actors for the development of the audiovisual industry in the Western countries and they become maximum representatives of a trend that speaks to us of the disneyzation of elite sport (O’Brien, Holden & Ginesta, 2020).

Bio

Xavier Ginesta is Senior Lecturer at the University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia. He also collaborates with the Olympic Studies Centre at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain. His main research interests are Sport Management, Communication and Politics and Sport Place Branding. His research has been published in several international journals, such as Communication & Sport, Soccer & Society or the American Behavioural Scientist. He has published the book untitled Les multinacionals de l’entreteniment. Futbol, diplomàcia, identitat i tecnologia [Entertainment Multinationals. Football, diplomacy, identity and technology] (Editorial UOC, 2020) and he is the co-editor of the volume Sport, Globalisation and Identity. New Perspectives on Regions and Nations (Routledge, 2020). He is a member of the TRACTE research group at UVic-UCC [Audiovisual Translation, Communication and Territory] and is member of the Sports Management Advisory Board at Widener University (Chester, PA).