'Marketing the English Premier League in India'

The Global Studies Seminar presents “Marketing the English Premier League in India” by Denison University’s Assistant Professor of Communication & Media Studies Kathryn Hartzell.

Hartzell received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin in 2026 and her Master of Arts from Georgetown University. Her research focuses on transnational sports distribution, streaming, and globalization. 

The English Premier League (EPL), the U.K.’s top division football league and the wealthiest domestic football league in the world, has increasingly invested in growing its audience in India by building out its marketing infrastructure. Before 2017, the EPL relied on their media rights holder—India’s leading sports television company Star—to promote the EPL’s televisual and streaming product. Starting in 1996 and continuing to the present day, Star (across many corporate transformations) telecast the EPL in India. Although the EPL continued to license their media to Star, the amount of money Star was willing to pay for EPL rights began to fall between 2016 and 2025. In order to try to stem this devaluation, the EPL began looking for new partners to Indianize the EPL’s brand and attract a new generation of middle-class Indian viewers in one of the largest media markets in the world. Through critical readings of promotional media and interviews with marketers, Kathryn Hartzell argues that distribution is itself production, and that it produces new branded content and new audience constructions.