The Uncertainty of Crisis in Professional Football

Abstract

The field of leisure studies has gained from interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. This trend is now being threatened by the introduction of a narrowly defined economic approach. With this view becoming increasingly pervasive, the authors attempt to highlight some of the limitations of such an approach. By concentrating on professional football in England, the authors hope to demonstrate the difficulties raised by such work in a way which makes the arguments applicable to a wide range of specific interests. Assessing the claims of the research in the area of professional football, it is demonstrated that quantifiable solutions to the economic problems of the game often suffer from loose correlations with the evidence because the problems need to be conceived more broadly than the economic formulae allow.