On a summer's day in 2008 I was walking around Reykjavik when I heard football chanting. Following the sounds, I located the ground of KR Reykjavik and went in to watch the match. Without knowing a word of Icelandic I was able to understand immediately what was happening in the game and to respond to the local fans around me. Football is a universal language, shared everywhere, and participating in a game whether as a spectator or a player creates mutual understanding.

Football has become a global sport and is subject to the forces of globalization that have shaped the world economy over the last 40 years. The experience of globalization has sparked considerable debate and led to the creation of a variety of theoretical perspectives that seek to explain the phenomenon and understand its effects on the economy and society. Globalization itself is a contested concept, not least because it has been used normatively as well as analytically. Competing definitions of globalization abound and it is important to note that it has a number of dimensions: principally economic, cultural and political. In broad terms, it is a process that reduces the significance of national boundaries as an impediment to the free movement of capital, goods and services and (to a far lesser and more contested extent) of labour. It is a process in which international trade grows faster than national output; foreign direct investment grows faster than national trade; and there is a transformation in response of international financial markets. These trends have been facilitated by advances in communication and digital technology, which Goldblatt (2019: 26) argues “have been the key to the economic globalization of football, multiplying the game's audience many times over, and forging the basis of the phenomenal income it now generates”. However, it is more than a single economic dynamic, or even a set of them, but “a syndrome of changes of social relations that also produce deep tension” (Markovits & Rensman 2010: 27n).

How far football has been globalized is a more complex and nuanced question than it may first appear.