Beyond the big five. The Professionalization of Football in Europe, from 1960s to nowadays

Football is often presented as a genuine European success. As Brexit and current nationalistic movements in Central Europe challenge the process of Europeanisation, new neo-liberal ideologies have supported a more concentrated panel of football countries able to compete on the international scene. This concentration of money and media coverage around what is called the ‘Big Five’ (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain) creates a variety of challenges for smaller leagues and countries, (who themselves do not form a homogeneous block) and thus contributes to a widening gap between the two worlds. 

Framed during an interdisciplinary project (privileged partnerships) between the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the Université de Lausanne (UNIL) examining professionalization processes in Belgium and Switzerland,[1] two workshops were held in Lausanne (February 2019) and Brussels (September 2019), where it became clear that the Belgian and Swiss examples collected during the project needed to be placed in the wider perspective of similar cases across European countries. It is during these workshops that merged the idea to organize a conference that will help us to better understand what’s happen with the professionalization of the game since the 1960s “Beyond the Big five”.

The aim of this interdisciplinary conference is thus to better appreciate and interpret the various forms of football’s evolution via the collection of processes that often fall under the term “professionalization”. This term has to be understood as a process and can be briefly defined as the way when footballs ‘actors took decision in view to improve globally the management of the game (influenced obviously by the changes that happen with this in the whole society).

Furthermore, it is important to understand that this process involved many individual (agents, club directors-managers, journalists, players, referees, security officers and trainers) and/or collective (particularly associations, clubs, leagues) actors and crossed different scale (local, national and transnational). 

Focusing on the countries “Beyond the Big five” offers the opportunity to (re)discuss the chronology of the establishment of professionalism in European football and also to illuminate the various way (the countries Beyond the Big five do not constitute a clear homogeneity) exist when we speak about professionalism. This congress will undoubtedly broad our understanding of the whole process of the rise of professionalism in European football from the 1960s onwards.