Among all types of sport, football has had the greatest capacity to promote cohesion in Europe. This is due to the extraordinary popularity and the social and cultural consequences of its unrivalled standing within popular culture. This enables it to reach a vast audience, while becoming an integral part of the national and global imagination. At the same time, it is disputed by unprecedented economic interests. Consequently, it is a multidimensional phenomenon, of rare complexity, which raises many questions and needs to be studied from various disciplinary angles. In discussing the transformations that have led to football as an industry, we are inevitably exploring one of the most engages forms of popular culture in the way it is mediated and consumed. Our aim is to disseminate knowledge, making it more adequate, and making discoveries, to provide explanations to explain why things are the way they are, and how they could be. To accomplish this, our focus is to comprehend the connection between sports organizations and the media, a relationship that has been affected by economic, political, socio-cultural, and technological factors. This leads us to the following research question: what contextual factors determine bargaining power of broadcasting rights in professional European football? Therefore, this study adopts a constructivist grounded theory methodology with the aim to providing theoretical explanations of the contextual factors that determine the bargaining power of broadcasting rights in European professional football. The research gathered rich empirical data through semi-structured interviews with experts and a heterogeneous set of documents. Data were analysed using grounded theory coding techniques to construct an abstract rendering of the interactions between the various stakeholders in the media/football complex. The findings indicate that the media/football complex is a highly dynamic system in which actors are engaged in a constant process of negotiation regarding their respective positions and power relations. Furthermore, the media system is undergoing a period of significant transformation, with traditional broadcasters potentially losing ground to large technology companies. This could result in uncertainty regarding the bargaining power of broadcasting rights in professional European football. Therefore, centralised sports rights play a key role bargaining power of broadcasting rights, but they are not the driving force. Our conclusion is that the forces of commercialisation and globalisation will continue to shape football as long as there are fans, who are inextricably linked to the capitalist social order, continue to feed the industry. Moreover, football is not a product of the sports industry or the media. The football precedes them. While the sports industry and the media feed on sporting excellence and spectacle, the irony is that they run the risk of seeing ‘neither the player nor the game’.

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Football,Media,Broadcast revenue,Fans,Culture,Europe

• Media and Communications - Social Sciences