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Success Across Borders: Globalization in Football and Movies

Writer's picture: Emil JerslingEmil Jersling

Updated: Sep 1, 2024

Globalization is complex.


As a European I’ve enjoyed the fruits of the economic growth, technological advancements, employment opportunities, and cultural exchanges as a student in Spain, the UK, Germany and France and work in different countries. The world has become more connected but thankfully local differences are still celebrated and respected.


What is Globalization?


Definition: The increased transfer of commodities, people, capital and labor within and between countries and continents.


The Bosman Ruling and the national league divide


AC Milan team holding trophy from winning the 1994 Championship league final
AC Milan team celebrating winning the 1994 Champions League Final.

AC Milan winning the 1994 Champions League


In 1993-94 AC Milan enjoyed perhaps its greatest season ever when it won 3 trophies culminating in its 4-0 against FC Barcelona in the Championship League Final. Even more suprising it did so without the 3 Dutch footballing legends Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gulit and Frank Rijkaard who had played a combined total of 79 games in the previous season.


Back then the Italian league only allowed each team to field 3 foreign players at a time. The same was true for other European leagues. This changed in 1995 when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled in favor of a move of a Belgian player, Jean-Marc Bosman, who had been blocked by his Dutch club, RFC Liège, to transfer to a French club, Dunkerque, after his contract ran out. The ECJ ruled it was in violation of the free movement of workers. This ruling also outlawed quotas on foreign players if it discriminated against EU state nationals.


The ruling was great news for talent, and audiences of the larger leagues, as teams could acquire more talent outside of their own countries, but made it harder for teams from smaller leagues, like the Swedish and Austrian, to retain talent and compete with larger ones. For two Swedish teams, Malmö FF who lost to Nottingham Forest in the 1978 European Cup final and IFK Göteborg who won the UEFA Cup in 1982 and 1987, the glory days were in the past.


Tableau line graph showing average audience attendance in the 5 European football leagues of England, Spain, Italy, Austria and Sweden from 1977 to 2023.
Average attendance in major and minor leagues remained relatively consistent from 1977 to 2023.

The data on league attendance courtesy of the European Football Statistics website.


The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) runs national and club competitions for teams in Europe. It uses a set of rules to generate the UEFA coefficients which considers the teams' previous performances in international club competitions to rank and seed each team. The average of seeded teams from one league govern the number of participating teams. I use the averge to illustrate the relative strenght of each national league.


Tableau line graph of UEFA coefficients of the 5 European leagues, England, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Austria from 1977 to 2023.
UEFA coefficients for major leagues grew and separated out from minor leagues after the Bosman Ruling.

FC Barcelona winning the 2006 Champions League


As examples of the proliferation of foreign players in February 2005 Arsenal FC, under the stewardship manager Arsène Wenger, became the first team in the English Premier league to field a team, including subsitutes, made exclusively of foreign players. The following season it also became the first London club to reach the UEFA Champions League final, where it lost 2–1 to Barcelona FC, a team with 10 foreign players participating in the final.


Photo of the FC Barcelona team that won the 2006 Championship League Final taken on the pitch ahead of the game.
The FC Barcelona team that won the 2006 Championship League Final with 8 foreign players in the starting 11.

Globalization on regional movie box office winners


As a movie fan I wanted to see how globalisation is expressed in the homogenization of cultural preferences of movie audience from different countries. I analyzed the origin countries of box office winners from top movie producing markets and Sweden as ranked by TheatreSeatStore.


But there were some challenges.


  • Data availability: Using Box Office Mojo I found US box office winners from 1977 for the US but for other markets only from 2000 at the earliest. So I've focused only used data from 2002 onwards where only 5 datapoints are missing (NA).


Tableau line graph showing the box office receipts of the highest grossing movies of the year of major cinema markets from 1977 to 2023.
Data availability picks up between 2000 and 2002 shown here with total box office receipts of winners the year they won.

  • Origin country definition: To attract global audiences, movies and their productions are increasingly international. Filming location, actors, director, producer and production company nationality, may all be different. So I’ve taken the first country, in the IMDB list of countries, as country of origin. Below example for The Lego Movie.


Screenshot of the details section of the The Lego Movie IMDB page .
The Lego Movie from 2014 has 4 countries listed as countries of origin. I allocated it to US.

I collated each regions movie box office winners with regions of origin presented below.


Table with flags showing the box office movie winner region of origin from 2002 to 2023 for 15 markets.
Region box office winner film region of origin from 2002 to 2023.

Key insights


  • English dominates: US has 60% of all winners with Great Britain second with 8.5%. Across all markets only movies from English speaking countries, the US, the UK, and New Zealand, won top spots over domestically produced.

  • Cultural connection: The US and Australia showed a 100% match in box office origin country. They also had the most winner from a single region, the US. Hong Kong had the longest US film streak with 15-years of consecutive winners.

  • Indian language diversity: Bollywood produced 20 (91%) domestic winners, the most outside of the US. They used 11 different langauges with Hindi the most common.

  • Small region diversity: 6 markets (China, Germany, Japan, Italy, Hong Kong and Sweden) all had winners from 4 different regions.

  • European production decline: Spain and France had it's most recent domestic winner 2014, Germany 2015, and Sweden 2016. Italy is an exception with the European audience most loyal to its own movies, 8 over period with 3 in the last 10 years.

  • Asia stronger domestic preference: South Korea had 17 (73%) domestic winners, and Japan and China both had 10 (45%).

The many languages and cultures of India


India is one of the most diverse countries linguistically with over 1600 different spoken languages and dialects. English is a universal language widely used in science and business. Hindi is the official government language and the most widely spoken, but it does not have a national language. This diversity can be seen in the languages used in its box office winners.


A world cloud image of the languages used in the 20 Indian box office winners frmo 2002 to 2023 with size indicating frequency with Hindi, English, Tamil, and Telugu being the most common.
11 languages in Indian box office winners with Hindi, English and Tamil the most common.

Localization increases cultural relevance


Movie production is big business. And it increasingly considers preferences of major markets in the production, sometimes going so far as to localize content to appease local audiences.


Some examples:


  • In Sweden the name of the excellent 1984 movie "Beverly Hills Cop" starring 80s rockstar comedian Eddie Murphy was changed to "The Cop in Hollywood".

  • In Japan's version of "Inside Out", the character Riley is disgusted when fed broccoli but broccoli is highly enjoyed in Japan so it was replaced with green peppers.

  • In the French version of the Star Wars films the character of Han Solo was given a more sarcastic and cynical personality, which was closer to the French cultural stereotype of a rebel while the Japanese version of the films emphasized the honor and duty of the Jedi, a central value in Japanese culture.

  • The Chinese version of "Iron Man 3" included scenes from China. Dr. Wu played by Xueqi Wang were given additional scenes and an assistant played by Fan Bingbing appeared. It also includes a product placement of the Chinese milk brand Gu Li Duo.


Some of the movies can be seen here among the top grossing movies that were placed first by box office receipts. This excludes sales from markets and periods when they did not place first.


Tableau treemap chart showing the box office returns of top grossing from markets they placed first, in the year they placed first.
Top grossing movies box office returns from markets they placed first, in the year they placed first.

When done well the results are higher local market box office returns by respecting cultural differences and integrating content that resonates with local audiences at the cost of losing some of the original context of the movie.


For all its benefits I’m grateful for growing up in a period of the unfiltered genius of my favorite childhood movies preserving the cultural context they portray. Like the excellent and always rewatchable “Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail”.

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