Dr David Webber
BA (Hons), MA, PhD, FHEA

David has around fifteen years’ experience teaching across a wide range of subjects and disciplines across all levels of the undergraduate curriculum, and in postgraduate seminars and classes on a variety of MA, MSc and MBA programmes. He has also co-supervised to successful completion one PhD, and is keen to hear from anyone who wishes to pursue a doctorate in the areas of football culture, politics and economics.

David currently leads the first year module, Football and Society, the second year Research Methods module, and the final year modules, Globalisation of Football, and Football, Sustainability and Social Change. He also guest lectures on the second year Politics, Culture and Sociology of Football module. Each year, David will also supervise several finalists as they complete their dissertations.

David’s research continues his original interest in British politics and IPE but develops it to examine the political, economic, financial, and cultural changes that English football, and the European game more broadly has undergone over the past 30 years.

Rooted in his previous studies in the subfields of British politics and IPE, David’s research has evolved to examine what Karl Polanyi might have termed the ‘great transformation’ that football has undergone over the past 30 years. Here David draws upon the frameworks of critical IPE to offer an analysis of the sport in this period of late capitalism. These accounts are used to explore the political origins of football’s increasingly global marketization, and the contested cultural politics present in the reproduction of the game’s neoliberal subjectivities. These frameworks are instructive not simply in terms of the historical analysis they offer of the contemporary football industry, but because of the possibilities they imagine of a more sustainable, inclusive and equitable post-capitalist future.

Webber, D. M. and M. Turner (2023) Standing here: rituals, rights, and the radical democratization of football spectatorship. Annals of Leisure Research. DOI: 10.1080/11745398.2023.2177179.

Webber, D. M. (2022) Towards an ‘everyday’ cultural political economy of English football: conceptualising the futures of Wembley Stadium and the grassroots game in England. New Political Economy 27(1): 47–61.

Webber, D. M. (2021) Feasting in a time of famine: the English Premier League, ‘conspicuous consumption’ and the politics of austerity. Journal of Consumer Culture 21(3): 598–617.

Webber, D. M. (2018) The Great Transformation of the English game: Karl Polanyi and the double-movement ‘Against Modern Football’. In B. Garcia and J. Zheng (eds.) Whose Game Is It? Supporter Activism and Regulation in European Football. Cham: Palgrave.

Webber, D. M. (2017) Global Statesman: How Gordon Brown took New Labour to the World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (Oxford University Press).

Webber, D. M. (2017) Playing on the break: Karl Polanyi and the double-movement ‘Against Modern Football’. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 52(7): 875–93.

David’s reading of the transformation that football has undergone has led him to develop a critical ‘cultural political economy’ approach (articulated in a recent paper published in New Political Economy), which draws upon the concepts of culture, embeddedness, and space to explore the different ways in which these (co-)constitute football beyond more orthodox readings of a ‘the political’, ‘the economic’ or even ‘the sociological’. These claims are central to his research strategy, which is based around two distinct but conjoined research projects.

In the first of these, David aims to identify, explain, and address the crises and contradictions of capitalism, or ‘pathologies’ of market failure, that have come to fracture English and European football, before mapping out four radical democratic, post-capitalist alternatives towards the building of ‘a new spirit of solidarity’ within the game.

The second strand of David’s ongoing research explores the financialization of elite football and considers the origins of this financialization, its character, its increasing digitalization, and its sustainability, and what this means for the future of the game and its place in wider society.

Developer of the EU-funded EUROCLIO and FARE ‘Making History Through Football’ project

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

ESRC ‘1+3’ grant worth £15,768 per annum to fund doctoral research (PTA-031-2006-00024)

£4,047 to finance five projects through the Warwick Undergraduate Research Support Scheme