Session: Soccer Across the Globe
Competing Narratives in the Institutional Takeover of Beijing Guoan Soccer Club – Identities and Politics in China’s Soccer Marketization
The Chinese professional soccer has experienced substantial transformation of marketization in recent years (Tan, Huang, & Bairner, 2016). This wave of competitive market practices is particularly led by teams such as Guangzhou Evergrande, which spends US$25 million annually to lure international players and has won seven straight domestic titles since 2010. While previous studies have examined how such practices are under the agenda of Chinese state-led corporatism as well as broader dictum of global capitalism (Lin, Newman, Xue, & Pu, 2017), this study turns attention to institutional isomorphism – the pressure coerced upon other teams to adopt practices and processes to survive (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). Taking Beijing Guoan as an example, the club used to be a traditional power of Chinese soccer, and experienced an institutional takeover in 2017 under the perception of lagging behind. In sociology, institutional theory suggests that an organization disruption is often associated with struggles of cultural identities and institutional ideologies (Washington & Patterson, 2011). With this in mind, this study collected related articles published in mainstream media as well as Chinese fans’ commentaries on soccer blogs, and conducted a framing analysis to understand the discourses used to legitimate the logics of corporate practices and market regime, as well as their conflicts with a nostalgic identity of Guoan’s past.