Towards an ‘Everyday’ Cultural Political Economy of English Football: Conceptualising the Futures of Wembley Stadium and the Grassroots Game

ABSTRACT

The proposed sale of Wembley Stadium in 2018 raised the possibility of a windfall that could be reinvested into the grassroots tier of English football. This bid was ultimately withdrawn but, as this article demonstrates, the episode highlighted the co-constitutive relationship between the everyday cultural base of English football, and those political and economic discourses, strategies, and trajectories that have been pursued within the sport and wider society. Developing a theoretical approach conceptualised here as ‘everyday’ cultural political economy, this article considers the cultural histories, objects, spaces and practices whose futures were both at stake in this transaction – namely, Wembley and the grassroots game – and the material effects that austerity and a skewed distribution of wealth have had upon the everyday cultural production of English football. The proposed sale of Wembley, it is argued here, failed to sufficiently account for and mitigate the impact that these political and economic effects have had upon the ‘everyday culture’ of grassroots football. The concluding remarks of this article call for a strategy that foregrounds the cultural base of English football and those quotidian practices that have come to be recast by the unequal power relations extant to the contemporary game.

KEYWORDS:

• Everyday cultural political economy
• the Football Association
• Wembley Stadium
• grassroots football
• austerity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The designation of ‘English football’ is slightly misleading here. Welsh clubs, including Cardiff City, Newport County, Swansea City and Wrexham, all playing in English divisions and participating in English cup competitions, have also appeared at Wembley.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David M. Webber

Dr David Webber is the Course Leader on the Football programme at Solent University, Southampton (UK). His principal research interest lies in the political economy of football and he has published a growing number of books and journal articles in the often-intersecting fields of football fan culture, governance, globalisation, finance, British politics, and international development.