Football Diffusion Essay

For my paper I am going to examine how football (soccer) evolved from a small community setting in England to become the world’s largest sport played by millions across the planet. Firstly, I am going to look at how the sport spread across England by diffusion. Second, I’m going to analyze football’s worldwide diffusion geographically to find out at what speed the sport spread and how it was picked up by other nations around the world. Most studies have shown that it took around 40 years for football to become popular nationally as well as regionally; and that it spread spatially from east to west before it spread north to south. One of the main ideas for why it caught on so strongly around the world is its flexibility, equality, its strive to achieve common ideas of teamwork, and the simplicity of the game. Another key factor that I will be looking at is globalization, this has accounted immensely for the

Even after the Second World War and the great depression, media coverage of football continued to increase. As England recovered from WW2, so did its economic momentum, leading to more people owning televisions. Television broadcasting only further raised the sports profile as it was broadcasted across the oceans to other nations.

Football was eventually picked up overseas through a couple different methods. First it was played by sailors at shipping ports. From there it spread inward as football’s popularity grew, this is an example of contagious diffusion, or the spread of an idea by popularity and person-to-person contact (Rushbrook, 2014). The growth of football overseas also coincides with urbanization in most of these countries. As the infrastructure of these countries continued to grow, so did factories and public transportation, allowing the working classes to start creating teams and