What is the impact of a Premiership football team on local universities?

UK universities have significantly higher undergraduate admissions when the English Premier League team they share a name with narrowly escapes relegation at the end of a season compared with those universities that share a name with a team that did not avoid the drop from top-flight football.

The English Premier League (EPL) is a pinnacle in professional sports, dominating both viewership and revenue in the UK. It is also the most watched annual sports league worldwide (Deloitte, 2023).

One feature of the league is that each year three of the 20 teams in the EPL are relegated, dropping into relative obscurity for at least one year. At the same time, three teams from the Championship are promoted into the EPL.

It seems reasonable to assume that the locales of the demoted teams – the towns or cities that normally share their names – would also get reduced attention. Comparably, one would expect the profile of the towns and cities of the promoted teams to get a boost.

Many universities are also located in the same places as EPL and Championship football teams. Could these institutions also be affected by this trend? Certainly, the universities in Leicester and Bournemouth have claimed that their undergraduate admissions increased following their local football team’s EPL successes.

In a recent study, we test whether this association – specifically when universities and football teams share a name – affects those universities’ undergraduate admissions (Singleton et al, 2024).

Many previous studies of what drives student recruitment have focused on factors like groupings, brand, marketing, league tables, student satisfaction and research excellence. These have used metrics such as the annual National Student Satisfaction survey and the Research Excellence Framework.

While this article looks at the effects on universities in places where the football team has dropped out of the EPL, there are also beliefs and anecdotes that universities get a boost when their local football team is doing well. This can include winning the league, winning a cup competition or gaining promotion.

This was widely discussed when Leicester City unexpectedly won the EPL in 2016. In this case, both of the associated universities – the University of Leicester and De Montfort University Leicester – reported large rises in student recruitment. Headlines in the press included: ‘Foreign students want to study in Leicester after Premier League win’, and ‘Leicester universities’ global goals after football triumph’.

Our research makes use of the sharp relegation cut-off from the EPL to compare the outcomes for universities associated by name with teams that survived relegation with those associated with teams that failed to avoid the drop (Singleton et al, 2024).

On average, having affinity with a place and team that loses EPL membership – for at least one season – subsequently leads to a significant 4-8% fall in total undergraduate admissions.

These results suggest that a place may be more attractive for prospective students when there is a local football team in the EPL. But the exact mechanism for this externality – success (or failure) in the EPL affecting local universities – is unclear.

Still, this may explain why UK universities close to three ex-EPL teams have recently aligned quite visibly with their local football teams. For example:

In the 2022/23 season, Reading FC featured the ‘climate stripes’ that were pioneered by the University of Reading’s meteorology department on their kit (‘Show your stripes and share our hoops for the future’).
Portsmouth FC have been sponsored by the University of Portsmouth since 2020: ‘University of Portsmouth renews sponsorship deal with Portsmouth Football Club in bid to raise aspirations of city children’.
In 2018, the University of Bolton purchased the naming rights to the stadium of Bolton Wanderers: ‘Welcome to the University of Bolton Stadium’.

It has also been reported that some universities make great efforts to link their brands with their city’s prominent football teams – such as the two main Manchester teams and Bayern Munich in Germany – even accompanying them on pre-season tours in Southeast Asia.

Others stress links with EPL teams in their marketing materials. For example, Bournemouth University have highlighted that some students chose to go to university in the town because of their EPL team: ‘BU students benefit from AFC Bournemouth partnership’.

Our findings, showing the drop in university admissions, contribute to wider research suggesting that universities can leverage their association with prominent sporting success.

But they also imply that universities can be somewhat beholden to that success or lack thereof. Our work only studied UK admissions numbers, rather than looking at the quality of applicants. There is evidence that the latter is also positively influenced by college athletic programmes at North American universities (see, for example, Caudill et al, 2018).

With access to finer admissions data, this could be investigated for the UK, since student quality and graduate outcomes enter into national and global rankings, which may in turn affect future admissions.

It would be interesting to investigate further the various effects that the EPL could be having on universities, for example, concerning student demographics, including gender and socio-economic background.

In general, the magnitude of effects – positive and negative – caused by major professional sports leagues on local communities, beyond their universities, remains an open research question. This is perhaps especially salient where those leagues generate huge global interest and demand. But the member teams are also intrinsic to the daily lives of local people.

In the UK, this issue has become pressing, with regards to the EPL and the rest of the football pyramid. Both major political parties have supported legislation – introduced to parliament in 2024 – to establish a new independent football regulator for English men’s elite football, ‘… to safeguard the traditional features of English football that matter most to the fans and local communities of clubs’.

Such a regulator may help to protect the sustainability of football clubs and their value as community assets, though it remains to be seen whether the financial risk-taking and creative accountancy of owners can be curtailed. For example, one challenge that a regulator will face is the common practice of owners selling stadiums to their own shell companies. This threatens the viability of the club if it enters administration, since any sale becomes more complicated and costly for new investors.

The legislation for an independent football regulator was delayed due to the dissolution of parliament for the 2024 UK general election. But the Labour government reintroduced it in the King’s speech in July.