Football in Parliament

Stefan Couperus and Martijn Schoonvelde, both at the University of Groningen, and I investigate how and why politicians talk about football clubs in parliament. Football in Parliament (opens in new tab) kicks off with a dashboard covering 175 football clubs from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland discussed in the House of Commons since 1920.

Identifying genuine club mentions proved trickier than it sounds, not least because of clubs such as Reading, Celtic, Rangers, and Arsenal, whose names double as ordinary English words. We first compiled a list of 292 senior men’s football clubs that took part in the professional or national senior league systems of England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland from 1919 onward. Each potential match against this dictionary was then scored by an open-weight LLM and checked by hand to reliably identify club mentions.

The dashboard lets users see which clubs dominate parliamentary discourse, track how attention shifts over time, and check which politicians and parties refer to particular clubs most often, with the full text of each speech a single click away. We are now expanding Football in Parliament into a full research paper.