ABSTRACT
As the digital revolution continues apace, emergent technologies and means of communication have presented new challenges and opportunities for football studies. In turn, researchers active across the social sciences and beyond have responded and are beginning to carve out a new field of study – digital leisure studies. However, despite the growing number of empirical and theoretical papers that consider football and its relationship with digital culture, we are still very much in the early stages of understanding the digitalization of our late modern moment. In this paper, using football as the context to explore the effects of digitalization, we argue that what we call hyper-digitalization has resulted in the emergence of four recognizable trends: (1) cultural resistance to the Murdochization of football spectatorship and news; (2) the integration of the “Internet of Things” (IoT) at every level of the football industry; (3) the naturalization of digital communication across the football industry; and (4) a deep and wide-reaching penetration of deterritorialization processes. We conclude by arguing that we are witnessing clear changes in the way audiences and workforces engage with sport, entertainment, and leisure. To this end, we argue that leisure and football studies must develop empirically, methodologically, and theoretically to better capture the nature of hyper-digitalized societies and the ways audiences are playing with and shifting the boundaries and possibilities for leisure.
