Lower League Football in Crisis

While the field of football studies has produced an abundance of literature on professional, top-league football, there is little research output to do with the non-top level football. This book explores the relationship between the top and lower leagues, laying open the drastic schisms that exist between the different levels.

 The study links the developments at the top level of English and German football in the past 30 years to transformational processes in lower league football. Illustrating how the hegemonic status of top football weighs hard on the spheres below, it depicts how it also serves as a blueprint for lower league football clubs’ strategies in coping with a threefold dilemma of institutional legitimacy that shows itself in economic, cultural and social dimensions. Taking the different club structures in both national contexts as a starting point, it portrays both the efficacy of institutional frameworks and how these can be challenged from below. This research will be of interest to students and scholars across football studies, sports studies, the sociology of sport, and organisation studies.

• Football studies
• Sport politics
• German football
• English football
• government regulation

"Daniel Ziesche has written a very thorough, thoughtful and timely comparative analysis of lower league football and the relationship to top league football in England and Germany. This authoritative study fills an important gap in the literature. The book not only contributes to debates within football but also to those within broader society. It should be essential reading for all those interested in lower league football. It will also be of great interest for students and scholars of sport studies, the sociology of sport as well as those of the social sciences and cultural studies interested in the world’s most popular sport." — Professor Arne Niemann, University of Mainz, Germany

“Daniel Ziesche fills a major research gap by providing a superb, imaginative and rigorous analysis of lower-league football clubs in England and Germany. Ziesche’s study highlights our need to look much more closely at club-community relations, and the diverse meaningsof community, within football.  It also perceptively details how clubs seek to adapt to different economic, social, and political circumstances, and to ‘glocalise’ within the context of global football.  This is a path-breaking book on lower-level football clubs, and will also be crucial reading for anyone interested in the social, political, and economic aspects of sport organisations in different cultural contexts.”

 — Professor Richard Giulianotti, Loughborough University, UK

“While there have been numerous studies on the level of top professional football, we know very little about lower league football. Daniel Ziesche's comparative analysis of lower league football in England and Germany sheds light on the interplay between football and society in different national settings, focusing on the challenges and adaptation processes of lower league clubs. Ziesche's study is a stimulating and recommendable reading about the future of football.”

 —Jürgen Mittag, German Sport University Cologne

• Chemnitz University of Technology, Chemnitz, Germany

  Daniel Ziesche

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