A league made in the economy’s image: destabilised stability and the English Premier League’s Minsky moment

Abstract

The English Premier League (EPL) has drawn the attention of scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in recent years, yet its underlying economic model and the politics underpinning it remain underexplored within the literature. To address this gap, we situate the EPL within Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) to examine the unstable financial foundations upon which the sporting enterprise is built. As such, we contend that the EPL can be understood as a reflection of the broader pathology of British politics since the 1980s. By placing the EPL within the Minsky cycle, we demonstrate how the actors that make up the league skirt the boundaries of hedge, speculative and Ponzi financiers, as the over-leveraging of clubs becomes ever more contingent upon debt-based instruments and loss-leading broadcasters to preserve the league’s economic status. Contrary to the tendency to abstract the role of fans from the economics of football, we conclude that what prevents the league from reaching its own collapse in asset values—known as a Minsky moment—is them providing the ‘effective demand’ for football.